Thursday, May 24, 2012

A nice breakdown of the wage gap by Forbes

Hat tip goes to Reddit for that one. I do not want to copy that much so to give you the data. It is a great article though, straight to the point so I suggest you read it:

81:100 Median Wage Gap - based on 2010 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics - compares median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers over 16

86.5:100 Weighted Median Wage Gap - based on BLS data - weighted according to the number of women in each occupation

84.8:100 Weighted Mean Wage Gap - see above

94.6:100 Weighted Median Wage Gap excluding non-discriminatory factors - based on 2010 U.S. Senate testimony from Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, who cites an analysis by labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn - about 60 percent of the gender pay gap can be attributed to factors other than gender discrimination, such as choice of industry, choice of occupation, years of work experience, and union status - this does not mean that the remaining 40 percent are discrimination, just that the remaining 40 percent can not be explained by the data

92.4:100 Weighted Mean Wage Gap excluding non-discriminatory factors - see above

This reminds me of the CONSAD report that I did cite several times before:

An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women - CONSAD - 2009

There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively
account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.

The difference we see with the above (4.8 vs 5.4 and 7.1 vs 7.6) might be the difference between 2010 and 2009 numbers. Anyhow, interesting analysis. It also included a critic of how this issue is handled in the msm:

The statistic you should not be using is the 81:100 claim, and if you do use that statistic (even though you should not be using it), you should not imply that the gap is entirely or even mostly attributable to gender discrimination. To do so is beyond purposefully misleading — it’s purposefully lying. [...] I say this as someone who shares the goal of eliminating unjust discrimination against women in the workplace … but who is concerned that the inaccuracies and unfounded inferences made by movements like Narrow the Gapp and the NWLC ultimately undermine the credibility of the cause.

3 comments:

  1. I haven't been able to find it again, but I remember seeing some statistics on the wage gap between women with children and women without children. It is also noted that men increase their wage when they get kids while women decreases their when they get kids. The intuitive reason why seem to be the traditional gender roles. Many mothers work less hours and halt their careers while many fathers (as breadwinners) increase their hours and focus more on promotions in order to provide more for their family. Some call that a privelege to focus on that, I suspect it in many cases are not a matte of a free choice, but rather about fullfilling expectations and obligations as breadwinner.

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  2. Funnily enough Statesman recently had an article on this: http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/economics/2012/05/surprising-truth-about-pay-gap

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  3. Ah I blogged about this before, too:

    http://feck-blog.blogspot.de/2009/09/mothers-gap.html and
    http://feck-blog.blogspot.de/2010/04/more-about-mothers-gap.html

    Besides that, jep gender roles seems to do the splainin here.

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