Dr. Warren Farrell on the gender pay gap

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In the woods there was a huge amount of company mergers. When two companies merge, they/it doesn’t need the same number of middle managers, and they are the men usually in their 50s and up. Get rid of those in that age bracket, and if it turns out you need someone in that position you can generally get a younver person for less.

This continued into the 2000s and then of course we had the wreckage of the 2008 meltdown.

So at least take a longer range from which to view your hypothesis.
 
I guess it would be wise to refrain from marrying someone who overspends, is demanding and unsupportive. Marriage by its nature requires spouses who are supportive and loving. After all, it’s a lifetime commitment.
 
Annie said:
In the woods there was a huge amount of company mergers. When two companies merge, they/it doesn’t need the same number of middle managers, and they are the men usually in their 50s and up. Get rid of those in that age bracket, and if it turns out you need someone in that position you can generally get a younver person for less.

This continued into the 2000s and then of course we had the wreckage of the 2008 meltdown.

So at least take a longer range from which to view your hypothesis.
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Good point, that this is relevant to the wages of men over 50. Agreed.

However, it also reminds us that there is no systemic advantage to men over women, or to married men over single men. We are all subject to market forces and have to work our way to whatever we get. Moreover, we all need some lucky breaks, have to overcome adversity, and we can all lose our careers and livelihood.
 
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Edmundus1581 said:
These days I’d expect that the married man is being harangued by a demanding wife and being driven to earn more and more to meet her expensive demands, for herself and the children, while she is both not supporting him and also demanding equal contribution to the housework and child raising. If she’s in the workforce then it only adds to the load on him because she’s spending more than she’s earning while imagining that she’s “contributing” and it’s she who needs his support. He has trouble working overtime because she’s complaining about being left at home by herself, and he’s even worrying about her seeing another man. He is also likely to, at some point, be either driven to submission by her, or abandoned - both of which will crush him psychologically and render him nearly useless at work and a basket case for the employer.
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What kind of married folks are you spending time with???
 
Why the heck would any employer ever hire a man if he could get a women to do the same work for 25% less?

If you want equal pay ladies, go for it! There is plenty of sewage that needs to be treated, lots of coal that needs to be mined, back breaking construction work to be done, and lots of other dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs.
 
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“Secret practice with information asymmetry,” that is a bunch of words full of sound and fury but signify nothing . Everyone wants to cut costs and a 25% cut on the single greatest cost would be way too tempting for any rational employer to pass up.
 
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starshiptrooper said:
There is plenty of sewage that needs to be treated, lots of coal that needs to be mined, back breaking construction work to be done, and lots of other dirty, difficult, and dangerous jobs.
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Eh–you realize that a lot of classic female work is very, very, very dirty? I don’t even have a large family, but I have had 12 years of children in diapers (summer 2002-summer 2009 and then early fall 2012-late fall 2017, plus a number of years of babysitting an occasional extra kid for pay. That’s easily 25,000 diapers (!!!), quite a number of them rather horribly soiled. And lots of CAFers have done more years than that AND done it with cloth diapers (which is again very dirty work).

You’d also be surprised how dangerous it can be to handle small children. With our youngest, I’ve narrowly avoided getting a black eye on several occasions from leaning down to help her and then having her bob up unexpectedly and strike me in the face with her head. I once babysat a 4-year-old who was speech delayed and probably autistic who had the most amazing right hook for a child his age and size, and one of our own autism spectrum kids used to tantrum for literally hours, often violently (thank goodness the kid stopped tantrumming when only about 70 pounds–but it’s not uncommon for severely autistic children to keep on tantrumming as adults). An old friend of ours (a guy) once wound up in the hospital with an eye injury caused by being struck by his toddler son.

With regard to danger and difficulty–1/3 of the babies in the US are born via c-section. In other words, they are cut out of their mothers’ bellies via major surgery. And it’s not uncommon to do this repeatedly–you’ll find quite a number of CAF women who have had 3+ c-sections.

Also, nursing (an overwhelmingly female occupation) is surprisingly dangerous.

https://www.beckershospitalreview.c...4-statistics-on-nurse-workplace-injuries.html

“Nursing has the highest rate of nonfatal occupational injuries, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.”

“Nurses face injuries from manually lifting and moving patients — according to an American Nurses Association Health Risk Appraisal, 42 percent of surveyed nurses said their responsibilities include lifting or repositioning heavy objects, and that doing so is a work environment safety risk.”

“3. Assault is also an issue, as 1 in 4 nurses have been physically assaulted, Dr. Cipriano wrote.”

There also seems to be a fair amount of assault committed against teachers at work (and again, teaching is a largely female occupation).


Hence, I’m not really impressed by MRA talk about men having all the “dirty, difficult, dangerous” jobs. If you look around, you’ll realize it isn’t so.

Edited to add: If you click on the first link, it does work.
 
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starshiptrooper said:
Everyone wants to cut costs and a 25% cut on the single greatest cost would be way too tempting for any rational employer to pass up.
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And they don’t–there are a lot of low-paid jobs like retail that are overwhelmingly staffed with women.

Edited to add: My parents have a store, and I don’t think they’ve had a male employee in the last 15 years.
 
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Edmundus1581 said:
I’ll propose an important caveat. The rosy picture which may be assumed, of the married man with a sense of purpose, a supportive wife and happy home life, may be quite different from the reality - which is that he’s being driven to overwork by an overspending, demanding and unsupportive wife.
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Which is why married men live longer, right?


“A major survey of 127,545 American adults found that married men are healthier than men who were never married or whose marriages ended in divorce or widowhood. Men who have marital partners also live longer than men without spouses; men who marry after age 25 get more protection than those who tie the knot at a younger age, and the longer a man stays married, the greater his survival advantage over his unmarried peers.”

“Some have argued that self-selection would skew the results if healthy men are more likely to marry than men with health problems. But research shows the reverse is true: unhealthy men actually marry earlier, are less likely to divorce, and are more likely to remarry following divorce or bereavement than healthy men.”

It’s a typical MRA idea that married men are entirely driven by their greedy wives–as if a family of 4+ could live happily on the same income as a single man.

Also, your theory doesn’t explain the vast gap in net worth between single people and married couples:


"The wealth differences can be significant. Zagorsky’s research has shown that people who got and stayed married each had about double the wealth of single people who never married. Together, the couple’s wealth was four times that of a single person’s.

“Other data also shows that married people see stronger financial advantages than just a doubling of wealth. According to the Census Bureau, in 2010 the median net worth for a married couple between the ages of 55 and 64 was $261,405. That compares to $71,428 for a man heading a household, and $39,043 for a woman heading a household.”

(Add in caveat about how many of these poor singles are divorced people.)
Edmundus1581 said:
I’ve heard of an epidemic of unemployed men in their 50’s, and the high suicide rate is well known.
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How much does that have to do with marriage and divorce, and how much does it have to do with age discrimination and the struggles of the marketplace?
Edmundus1581 said:
Note that the difference between 28-30 year olds and 44-46 year olds is only 15%, while salaries have probably doubled in that period - so it’s starting to level off by 44-46. After that, nothing! They don’t show the data for the remaining 25 years of men’s working lives! My hypothesis looking good.
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Are 44-46 year olds more than 15% more productive than 28-30 year olds? That must be true in certain industries, but in many industries, the 28-30 year old can outwork his older peers, which partly explains the uptick in unemployment for 50-something men.
 
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The greedy wife thing puzzles me, because it doesn’t reflect the realities of middle class parenthood, which are that the big kids consume disproportionate amounts of family resources. We have a 15-year-old, a 13-year-old and a 5-year-old in private school that is more expensive than our mortgage payment, and while we cheap out on the youngest as much as decently possible, we find ourselves constantly spending $10, $20, $40 or $80 for a variety of school or sports expenses–races or athletic competitions, contributions to class parties, school overnight trips, kid per diem for academic contests, materials for science fair, etc.

The kids school is a wonderful school and the kids are very happy there, but we’re tapped out.

After going to a recent school meeting, I was breaking it to my husband that senior year is going to be even more expensive. Big Girl is going to be taking 3 or 4 AP tests (that’s a national exam in the US where you can get college credit for a high school class) and they’re each around $94 (!). She’ll need to take the SAT once or twice senior year. Each time is $46 minimum, plus $12 per report. I was looking up college application fees, and it looks like you can count on $70 per college application. Apply to 3 colleges at that rate, and we’re looking at nearly $700 just for application fees senior year (and lots of people apply to more colleges than that).


And we’re not even talking about prom or yearbooks or (gulp!) college.

I’m not making this be more expensive–raising middle class children just is a very expensive process.
 
Yeah, that is totally the result of a sexist conspiracy not just a reflection of the fact that most retail work is unskilled.
 
Married men live longer because they have someone around to call 911. You can get the same result with a roommate.
 
I’m a social worker, (currently a SAHM), and we get exposed to a number of volatile and even violent populations. Thank you for bringing this up.
 
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A cash register does not take that much skill to operate. We have machines that can do that job just fine.

Reading a label is not difficult in a country with a 99% literacy rate.

Heck they even run around with these handheld devices that read the barcodes and tell you everything you need to know.

There is definitely real skill involved in the higher levels but not at the ground level, the required skills are quite commonly found and therefore easily replaced.
 
phil19034 said:
The reason why, as a group (not individually), women make less is because many women still take time off to raise kids.
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So then you’re basically admitting that there is a real pay gap and giving a reason for it. The obvious way to remedy the injustice would be to instigate a system of paid parental leave.

But outside of your anecdotal experience, the argument is flawed, anyway. The primary reason that women leave jobs isn’t to have families but because they aren’t getting paid enough to begin with. Why So Many Thirtysomething Women Are Leaving Your Company In other words, institutionalized sexism in the form of a pay gap is there well before women start having babies.
 
That is not injustice, it is an opportunity cost. In other words, you cannot have your cake and eat it too.
 
blackforest said:
So then you’re basically admitting that there is a real pay gap and giving a reason for it. The obvious way to remedy the injustice would be to instigate a system of paid parental leave.
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There is a real pay gap just not one because of gender discrimination. Women aren’t in retail and service jobs because they just really have a passion for frozen yogurt. Likewise, men aren’t in construction and engineering because they crave action and risk. Women in general sacrifice high pay for stability and schedule so that they can spend time with their families. Men in general sacrifice their safety so that they provide for the material needs of their families. They are working together as a team here. The result is that women are in safer but lower paying jobs while men are in riskier and higher paying careers.
 
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