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Why do women still earn less than men?

May 2, 2019 Leave a comment Go to comments

from Lars Syll

Spending the morning going through Francine Blau’s and Lawrence Kahn’s JEL survey of modern research on the gender wage gap, yours truly was struck almost immediately how little that research really has accomplished in terms of explaining gender wage discrimination. With all the heavy regression and econometric alchemy used, wage discrimination is somehow more or less conjured away …

Trying to reduce the risk of having established only ‘spurious relations’ when dealing with observational data, statisticians and econometricians standardly add control variables. The hope is that one thereby will be able to make more reliable causal inferences. But — as Keynes showed already back in the 1930s when criticizing statistical-econometric applications of regression analysis — if you do not manage to get hold of all potential confounding factors, the model risks producing estimates of the variable of interest that are even worse than models without any control variables at all. Conclusion: think twice before you simply include ‘control variables’ in your models!

That women are working in different areas than men, and have other educations than men, etc., etc., are not only the result of ‘free choices’ causing a gender wage gap, but actually to a large degree itself the consequence of discrimination.

The gender pay gap is a fact that, sad to say, to a non-negligible extent is the result of discrimination. And even though many women are not deliberately discriminated against, but rather ‘self-select’ (sic!) into lower-wage jobs, this in no way magically explains away the discrimination gap. As decades of socialization research has shown, women may be ‘structural’ victims of impersonal social mechanisms that in different ways aggrieve them.

You see it all the time in studies. “We controlled for…” paperAn example is research around the gender wage gap, which tries to control for so many things that it ends up controlling for the thing it’s trying to measure. As my colleague Matt Yglesias wrote:

“Take hours worked, which is a standard control in some of the more sophisticated wage gap studies. Women tend to work fewer hours than men. If you control for hours worked, then some of the gender wage gap vanishes. As Yglesias wrote, it’s “silly to act like this is just some crazy coincidence. Women work shorter hours because as a society we hold women to a higher standard of housekeeping, and because they tend to be assigned the bulk of childcare responsibilities.”

Controlling for hours worked, in other words, is at least partly controlling for how gender works in our society. It’s controlling for the thing that you’re trying to isolate.

Ezra Klein

  1. Helen Sakho
    May 3, 2019 at 8:52 pm
    Reply

    On May Day (International Workers’ Day) The Social Mobility Commission reports that in the UK, inequality is “entrenched from birth to work”. In its sixth state of the nation report, the Commission calls on the Government to take urgent action to try and close the “privilege gap” between the rich and the poor, giving a damning indictment of Theresa May’s time in power after her declaration in 2016 to tackle “ burning injustice” of social inequality. After a general account of rising inequality and the working poor, even if entering professional jobs, earned 17 per cent less than their more privileged counterparts. “For women, the position was even worse, with working class women in professional jobs paid 35 per cent less than men from more affluent backgrounds”

    The separation of Class, Gender, not to mention Race remains a somewhat artificial one, for inequality is multifaceted. The study of each particular factor is, without a doubt, extremely useful, but without a contextual reference to the intertwined nature of economic injustice, it continues to provide analyses which are segmented. On women though, this is nothing new. It has been going on for centuries. They are utilised and rejected depending on the needs of the economy and the state of the nation, depending on whether there is peace or war in a particular geography. The UK stands out, but it is a global picture.

  2. Ken Zimmerman
    May 6, 2019 at 2:08 pm
    Reply

    An interesting history informs on why women are generally considered inferior to men, less capable, less intelligent, and generally not able to “get the job done.” It is the history of “likability.” Prior to the 20th century one can argue as Harari points out, “One hierarchy, however, has been of supreme importance in all known human societies: the hierarchy of gender. People everywhere have divided themselves into men and women. And almost everywhere men have got the better deal, at least since the Agricultural Revolution.” Anthropologists cite dozens of reasons for this status situation. Ranging from biology to the organization of early human agriculture to the use of physical force. No one really knows which combination is correct. It appears likability in modern western societies emerged as an important personality trait in the late 19th century, when it became closely associated with male business success. Before this, people liked or disliked one another, of course, but it wasn’t until after the American Civil War, when middle-class men began to see virtue and character as essential to personal advancement, that success in business required projecting likability. Invented by men for men, likability is a tricky fit for women, or often no fit at all. In the 20th century, advertising and public relations professionals of Madison Avenue focused on making products likable too, mostly by associating them with likable public figures. Americans were taught that being likable was a quality that could be cultivated to get ahead. Then Madison Avenue was put in charge of political campaigns and it became important that political candidates be likable. In “The Selling of the President 1968,” Joe McGinniss reported how Richard Nixon, suffering from a likability deficit, hired a young media consultant named Roger Ailes, who created televised “conversations” with ordinary voters as visual proof that Nixon liked them, and they liked him. Some politicians successfully spun themselves as likable. Others failed wretchedly to do so. Likability rests on an emotional connection between candidate and voter that makes a politician worthy of trust. Forged almost exclusively through mass media, that connection is only voter imaginings about a candidate the voter can never know. The voters (even women) already have imaginings about women from 5,000 years of gender stratification. So, in the likability fantasy race women always lose out. However, the history of likability teaches us there is nothing immutable about a concept that was created and refined by men from Horatio Alger to Dale Carnegie to Roger Ailes. Recognizing that likability is an invention by and for men from which women have benefited little inspires reinvention of likability. What if women no longer tried to fit a standard that was never meant for them and instead, we all focused on redefining likability: not someone you want to get a beer with, but, say, someone you can trust to do the work? This may already be happening. A new kind of “member of Congress” emerged in the 2018 midterm elections. “Female, of color,” who could be trusted to do the work of Congress in the face of a sociopathic President and an un-American Republican Party. This trust may spread to Presidential leadership, and eventually to likability.

    ~ from the work of historian Claire Bond Potter

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