Vice & Vagary

You’re allowed to be tired, even if you haven’t “done” anything and you’re allowed to be tired even if you did less than someone else.

Things I Am Thinking About While I Walk To My Car At Night After Work, Heather Elise

I wrote this awhile ago but it seems relevant now.

Me too.

Okay so this is a bit more serious than my usual posts which are literally about memes and procrastination, but I thought it would be sorta nice to give each type a reason why they should stay alive. These sorts of things are important :)

INFP: there are so many books left for you to read

INFJ: you see things differently and the world needs people like that

INTP: live for that discovery you’ll make a decade from now

INTJ: you haven’t truly left your mark yet

ENFP: there are animals who need you

ENFJ: who will campaign for change without you?

ENTP: you’re gonna do something big, just wait

ENTJ: you are the one thing holding some groups/organisations together

ISTP: you haven’t visited every continent yet

ISTJ: the world needs your innovation

ISFP: there’s so many beautiful things you haven’t seen

ISFJ: trust me, your friends need you

ESFP: you brighten up the lives of everyone you meet

ESFJ: one day, you’ll be so in love that you’ll be glad you’re alive

ESTP: there are so many experiences left for you to feel

1. Explaining the wage gap doesn’t erase the wage gap

The argument is that if you control for the factors which cause the wage gap, the wage gap doesn’t exist. However, explaining the causes of a problem doesn’t mean the problem doesn’t exist. It’s such a strange phenomenon that so many people are fooled by such a simple fallacy. It’s as if everybody could be convinced that climate change doesn’t exist because someone once said, “It’s caused by cow flatulence.”

A relationship can’t be claimed to be spurious, or a “myth,” just because antecedent variables exist. In order to prove the wage gap a “myth”, you would have to show that those variables are confounding (obscuring) variables and not intervening (explanatory) variables. For example, rich people live longer, which is explained by rich people having more access to medical care, an intervening variable. But concluding that access to medical care explains why rich people live longer does not mean that rich people living longer than poor people is a “myth.”

Wage gap denialists ignore this, essentially arguing, “If you control for tobacco use, sun exposure, STI exposure, diet and physical activity, bacon consumption, exposure to pollution, and every other known carcinogen, then cancer doesn’t exist.” Or, “If you control for date of birth and time elapsed since date of birth, then we’re the same age.”

I begin with this point because it seems that every intrepid Internet user’s attempt to “debunk” the wage gap is actually admitting the wage gap does exist, then arguing why they just don’t like facing that fact.

2. Even when controlling for every known intervening variable, there is still a wage gap

Even after controlling for all variables known to affect earnings, there is still a wage gap of between 5% and 6.6%. Accounting for these variables explains only about 60% of the wage gap in the US. In Australia, these factors only account for about 40% of the gap.

Again, the 5-7 cent gap is not a gap in earnings: it’s a normalized gap that controls for differences in occupation, hours worked, etc. In fact, if you break it down even further and compare the normalized gap within each individual job field, women still face a disadvantage in every field of occupation.

Physicians are a good example. Among 800 physicians who received a highly competitive early career research grant, women earned an average of $12,194 less than men each year, when all other factors remained the same. The study even controlled for part time work and across subspecialities.

A study of Australian managers found that female managers made 25% less than male managers, and that 70-90% of the difference couldn’t be explained by any known wage-determining variable.

To add insult to injury, even in job fields where women dominate, men are paid more for the same roles. For instance, even after controlling for a large number of demographic and labor market variables, men in nursing outearned women by nearly $7,700 per year in outpatient settings and nearly $3,900 in hospitals in the US.

Men in female-dominated fields aren’t marginalized at all; they get special treatment, are fast-tracked to the top, and receive preferential hiring (often by other men who were also fast-tracked to the top).

3. Wage gap denialists use crap sources to support their claims

One of the primary sources wage gap denialists use to support their points, and the article that started the whole “wage gap is a myth” fad, is the 2007/2009 CONSAD report. They believe that since the report was issued by the US Department of Labor, it cannot be wrong. CONSAD is a conservative think tank that also pioneered “climate change is a myth,” using many of the same methods they used to claim “the wage gap is a myth.” It’s not surprising that the Bush administration chose this group to publish a report on the wage gap.

What’s disappointing-but-not-surprising is that the report makes the claim that the wage gap doesn’t exist despite its own data contradicting its claim. If you read the CONSAD report, it explicitly states that even when accounting for intervening variables, there is still a wage gap. The conclusion simply argues, “The gap is 60% smaller, so it’s like it doesn’t exist.”

The report also doesn’t prove why we shouldn’t count that 60%. It implies, like many denialists after it, that things like job position and hours worked are down to “women’s choices,” ignoring the fact that that these are the very methods by which gender discrimination causes the wage gap.

The conclusion to the CONSAD report claims that discrimination is not a major factor behind the wage gap, but its own data says otherwise. The person who wrote the conclusion weaseled their way out of accurately summarizing the study’s findings by saying that the residual pay differences “could be” caused by any number of factors. But they didn’t investigate what those other factors were. Thus, the conclusion that it can’t be discrimination is not supported by any evidence.

The CONSAD report also had other major flaws, such as including part-time workers when almost every other study looks at full-time work only. For these and other reasons, the CONSAD report is considered one of the most flawed and least reputable studies on the wage gap. But its deeply flawed conclusions have become extremely popular with people who love feminist-bashing and hate thinking.

In a twist, the Department of Labor published a document in 2012 called “Myth Busting The Wage Gap” that explains why there is still a wage gap and why the CONSAD report’s excuses are meaningless.

There’s a number of other crap sources wage gap denialists rely on. Christina Hoff Sommers, Cathy Young, and other “equity feminists” are common. These talking heads are usually employed by conservative think tanks that also oppose workers’ rights and raising the minimum wage. If you want to keep all wages down, it’s not surprising that you’d also want to keep women’s wages down. These videos and opinion pieces usually rely on the fallacy we discussed in the first point: “If you explain for everything that causes the wage gap, then the wage gap doesn’t exist.”

The American Enterprise Institute, Breitbart, the Washington Times, the Washington Examiner, and “Praeger University” are also crap sources that will get you an F on a college paper. This popular video from the Institute for Humane Studies is literally Koch propaganda, but that doesn’t seem to matter to heels-dug-in denialists. Another popular article I’ve seen was written by a “Social Media Consultant” who probably has no experience in sociology or statistics and uses data compiled by a credit score website. No matter how shitty the article, if it agrees with their worldview, it must be true.

It’s almost as if this is a contentious political issue and you have a lot of conservatives with an invested interest in muddying the details.

Many other popular wage gap denialist sources wilfully misrepresent the studies they cite. Here is an article from Smithsonian Magazine titled “Female Computer Scientists Make the Same Salary as Their Male Counterparts.” Here is the study the author of the Smithsonian article cites/misrepresents. The study utilizes regression analysis on observable traits. It found women earn 6.6% less in the entire sample after controlling for occupation, qualifications, field, and other common wage-determining variables. It is statistically significant and unexplained. The tech job wage gap is non-significant only for those one year out of college, and does not control for qualifications.

There’s more (a LOT more) under the cut.

There are many other factors that come into play when talking about PAY GAPS: Women have less success in gaining promotions than their male counter parts (and other Glass Ceiling effects), women are dissuaded from higher paying fields (such as STEM fields) through institutional hostility, women are expected to take unpaid maternity leave for child care when men are not (regardless of whether or not they will), women are less successful at salary negotiations and are sometimes even penalized by employers for trying at MUCH higher rates than men, work that is traditionally female dominated being undervalued on a cultural level (women might be cooks, but not chefs; nurses, not doctors; etc.), when women begin to work in traditionally male fields in higher numbers the pay for those fields drop, and men in traditionally female fields tend to be promoted more quickly and get paid more, and a myriad of others.

We know, for example Women need an additional degree in order to make as much as men with a lower degree over the course of a lifetime.A woman would need a doctoral degree, for instance, to earn the same as a man with a bachelor’s degree, and a man with a high school education would earn approximately the same amount as a woman with a bachelor’s degree.

The fact is that women, on average, DO make less than men, and the issue isn’t always direct illegal wage imbalance. The issues are often far more wide reaching and speak to a cultural misogyny that has to be confronted beyond just legislation.

I mentioned maternity leave earlier. (Did you know that the US is one of the only “industrialized countries” in the world to NOT have guaranteed paid parental leave? yeah. That’s fucked up.) The entire notion that women, more so than men, are expected to take off time from work for family is one of those cultural aspects of inequality that I mentioned.

And all this discussion fails to take into account things like disability, trans people, sexuality, and race, which makes all of these issues even more extreme and complicated.

This is a really good article to read for more information:

fandomsandfeminism talked about several of the major contributors to the wage gap, including:

1. Discrimination in promotions

Women are typically overqualified compared to their male counterparts, are promoted less frequently, and are passed over for promotions when they have the same experiences and qualifications as men. For example, white male professors who do the least service and mentoring get promoted the fastest. Female managers are also held to stricter standards for promotion than men. Women with more than a high school education do not leave jobs more frequently than men, and female managers even have slightly lower turnover than male managers.

2. Dissuasion from higher paying fields

Millennial men are less open to accepting women engineers than older men are. Only 41% of millennial men are comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Women get burned out working in the tech industry because they are underpaid, undervalued, and underappreciated in their Millennial male-dominated fields.

3. Structural disadvantage

Paid family leave is not mandated in the US, but women are more likely to return to work after having a baby when they have paid family leave, and men who take paternity leave spend more time on child care later.

Investing in a universal, free childcare system, in which workers are paid a decent wage, would create 1.65 million jobs and reduce the gender pay gap. Most of the investment would be recouped through increased tax revenues and lower welfare spending. In Canada, women’s participation in the workforce increased substantially above trend levels when marginal taxes and the net costs of child care were reduced.

4. Penalties for negotiating

Both men and women are more likely to rate women as “less nice” and are less interested in working with them if they ask for more money. Women are aware of how they’ll be viewed if they ask for more money, and therefore don’t ask. Women ask for much more money if they’re negotiating for someone else because they don’t have to fear appearing selfish and greedy. Employers outright lie to women more often during negotiations. Furthermore, a recent study in Australia found women ask for pay raises at the same rate as men but receive them less. 19% of women vs. 33% of men got raises when they asked.

5. The devaluing of work associated with women

People view men’s and women’s work differently. There is a tipping point at which men flee an occupation, and in the absence of perfect information, workers take the percentage of female employees as a proxy for an occupation’s prestige. When teaching in the US became female-dominated, the pay decreased. When programming in the US became male-dominated, the pay increased. Doctors save lives and go to school for many years no matter where you are in the world. But in Russia, they are paid the same wages as secretaries, making about 12,000 US dollars a year. A study of Census data from 1950 to 2000 found that when women enter an occupation in large numbers, that job begins to pay less, even after controlling for a range of factors like skill, race, geography, and occupational crowding.

Men’s low-wage jobs demand far less in terms of skill, education, and certifications than women’s low-wage jobs, yet the male-dominated ones usually have higher hourly pay. Janitors, who are mostly men, make 22 percent more money than maids and housecleaners, who are mostly women, despite the jobs requiring identical skills.

6. Special treatment for men in female-dominated fields

Even in even in job fields where women dominate, men are paid more for the same roles. Men in nursing outearn women by nearly $7,700 per year in outpatient settings and nearly $3,900 in hospitals in the US after controlling for a large number of variables. Men in female-dominated fields aren’t marginalized at all; they get special treatment, are fast-tracked to the top, and receive preferential hiring (often by other men who were also fast-tracked to the top).

7. Disabled people, trans people, gay people, and people of color also see wage gaps with their more privileged counterparts

There are many other important reasons for the wage gap, including:

8. Pay secrecy

You can’t demand higher pay if you don’t know you’re being underpaid. In the 11 US states where pay secrecy is unlawful, the gender wage gap is smaller. In government jobs, where pay transparency is required, the gender pay gap has shrunk to just 11-13 percent. Unionized workers, who also require pay transparency, have a wage gap of 9 percent.

9. Women’s unpaid labor

Women tend to put in fewer hours of paid work than men, but when unpaid work is added to the equation, women all over the world tend to work slightly more hours per day, per week, and per year than men. Women in the US proportionately still perform much more housework and childcare, such as managing children’s schedules and activities, taking care of sick children, and doing chores, than men. Men still perform only half the housework and childcare that women do. This doesn’t look like it will change soon: Fewer than half of Millennial women believed they’ll handle most of the child care, but two-thirds of their male peers believe their wives will do so. When the time women spend on unpaid work shrinks to three hours a day from five hours, their labor force participation increases 20 percent.

10. Long hours != greater contribution to company

The worth of work should be evaluated by productivity rather than time. Long hours backfire for people and companies. Managers can’t tell the difference between those who worked an 80-hour week and those who pretend to. Pharmacists have one of the smallest wage gaps because the pay is measured by productivity rather than time.

Even in workplaces that offer flexibility, however, women have reported penalties for taking advantage of flexible work options, such as loss of responsibility or longer hours than promised. Flexible work hours will work only if that attitude changes.

The point that “men earn more because they put in more hours at the company” is untrue anyway. The wage gap between women and men remains steady whether we compare employees working 40 hours a week, 41-44 hours a week, 45-49 hours a week, or  50+ hours a week.

11. Motherhood penalty

Women earn 10% less for each child they have, while men earn 6% more for each child they have. Mothers face a lot of stereotypes at work: they get competency ratings 10% lower than other women, and they’re also called back half as often as fathers for jobs. To the contrary, studies have found that moms are more productive workers. The thought-leadership industrial complex has even called having kids a “productivity hack.”

12. Implicit bias

Even after controlling for all variables known to affect earnings, there is still a wage gap of about 6.6% in the US. Accounting for these variables explains only about 60% of the wage gap in the US. In Australia, these factors only account for about 40% of the gap.

There are almost innumerable examples demonstrating implicit gender bias. Resumes with women’s names are given 12% lower starting salaries than the exact same resumes with men’s names. Employers are more likely to hire a male job applicant than a female job applicant with an identical record. Employers reported that the male job applicant had done adequate teaching, research, and service experience compared to the female job applicant with an identical record. If there is only one woman in a pool of candidates, her chances of being hired are statistically zero. Mentoring does not provide the same career benefits to women as men and that women are “championed” less often by senior management for promotions and raises.

Luckily, people can overcome their unconscious biases. Employers for university STEM faculty were 6.3 times more likely to make an offer to a woman candidate when the employers had been presented with an intervention, including discussion of implicit bias. Sadly, women who bring up concerns about diversity in the workplace receive worse evaluations from their bosses than men who bring up the same concerns.

13. Just blatant sexism

Married men with stay-at-home wives are significantly more likely to view women in their workplace unfavorably, are much less likely to take jobs at companies with female board members, and pass over female co-workers for promotions.

Three-quarters of Millennial women anticipate that their careers will be at least as important as their partners, while half the men in their generation expect that their own careers will take priority.

Women are not as respected as men in leadership roles, especially by the men over whom they have a leadership role. Women in leadership positions receive less favorable evaluations because they are perceived to be violating gender norms. Male students systematically overestimate the knowledge of the men in their classes in comparison with the women despite clear evidence of women’s superior class performance.

Millennial men are less open to accepting women leaders than older men are. Only 41% of millennial men are comfortable with women engineers, compared to 65% of men 65 or older. Likewise, only 43% of millennial men are comfortable with women being U.S. senators, compared to 64% of Americans overall. The numbers were 39% versus 61% for women being CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, and 35% versus 57% for president of the United States.

There are many proven ways to reduce the gender wage gap, including:

Mandate paid family leave.

Invest in universal, free childcare, or at least invest in reducing marginal taxes and the net cost of childcare.

Confront implicit bias through training and intervention.

Raise the minimum wage.

Mandate pay transparency.

Prohibit employers from inquiring into prospective employees’ wage histories.

Create more flexibility for jobs by valuing productivity over contact hours.

Remind workers of their rights.

Perform your fair share of unpaid labor.

Change cultural norms so it is more acceptable for moms to work and dads to take care of children.

Support women’s ideas in your workplace. When a female colleague’s point is ignored, pile on and emphasize the point, making sure you acknowledge that it was her idea. When a qualified female colleague is consistently passed over for a promotion, ask your boss to promote her.

it’s not that i know how to cook. it’s that the biggest christmas present i got was a little plastic kitchenette i never used except to climb on. it’s that my brother used it more, his hands ghosting over pink buttons and yellow dials. it’s that when my work needs cake for a birthday, they turn to me. i get it from costco. i don’t even like cooking. a boy burns popcorn in the dorm microwave and laughs. a week later, i do the same thing, and he snorts at me, “just crossed you off my wife list.” it’s that i had heard something like this so many times before that i laughed, too.

it’s not that i don’t love being feminine. it’s that i came home with bruises from trying to be a trick rider on my bike and heard the word “tomboy,” felt my little mouth say, “but i’m not a boy, i’m a girl”. it’s that they laughed. it’s that until i was sitting in my pretty dress and smiling with a big pretty smile and blinking my big pretty eyes, i wasn’t given back the title “girl”. it’s that until i wore makeup and styled my hair i was bullied; it’s that when i don’t wear makeup i’m a slob, that my mental health diagnosis hangs on the hook of being dressed up. it’s that my therapist sees me returning to bright red lipstick and tells me i am looking happier and i have to explain that i am more sad than i have ever been. it’s that i dress myself in as many layers as i can every time i ride a train because it’s better to be laughed at than harassed. 

it’s not that i know how to clean, it’s that my brother’s chores were outside where i wanted to be, and mine were inside. it’s that i would have weeded the garden better than he did if they had just let me. it’s that i am put in charge of fixing other’s messes, expected to comply without complaint.

it’s not that i can’t open the jar. it’s that you ask my brother first every time. it’s that i am pushed into docile positions, trained to believe that my body when it’s strong and healthy is ugly, trained into being less, weaker. it’s that the jar is also science, is also engineering, is also every job, every opportunity. it’s that you laugh faster when he tells a joke, that you take him seriously but wave off me, that when he raises his voice he’s assertive but when i do i’m hysterical. the jar is getting into a car with a stranger as a driver and wondering if this is our last ride. the jar is knowing that if something happens to us, it’s our fault. 

it’s that i’m weak and i don’t know if it’s because i just am or i was trained to be. it’s that we need to sit pretty with our pretty smiles and our pretty words trapped pretty and silent in our throats, our hands restless but pretty when idle, our bodies vessels for nothing but a future white dress. it’s that we are taught someone else needs to open the jar for us.