Examining the peculiar case of the gender pay gap
Nikola Man
As promised in the first article in the series which you check out here, we will tackle a number of hot button issues. The first one on the menu is the gender pay gap. We will take a look at the main claims and answer many important questions including but not limited to:
Are men and women paid differently for the same work?
Are men and women paid differently exclusively on the basis of gender?
Does gender play a role when determining someone’s pay?
Is the system rigged against women in the workplace?
Should we close the gender pay gap?
What can YOU do to help?
So what are the claims of those who believe the gender pay gap to be true? The Financial Times in the United Kingdom phrased it like this a couple of years ago: “The difference in men’s and women’s salaries means that women are effectively working for free from early November until January”. The claims are varied and here are some ways people have argued that the gender pay gap manifests itself. Some claim that men and women do the same work with the same skillsets and outputs but get paid differently due to systemic sexism. Some claim that there are certain systemic barriers that prevent women from attaining higher paying jobs. Some claim that most if not all industries should have an even split of men and women – meaning that 50% of the jobs would be occupied by women and 50% of the jobs would be occupied by men in nearly every profession.
All of these claims have one common thread – they want equal pay outcomes for men and women. Where do these claims come from? Statistics. Most notably, in the United States in 2020 the average woman earned 82 cents for every dollar the average man earned. This figure in the U.S. used to be 77 cents on the dollar and the term was popularized as “77 cents” which was meant to represent this discrepancy between male and female earnings. This is a worldwide phenomenon and it is usually presented in the following two forms:
Women earn X% less than their male counterparts
Women earn XX cents for every dollar/euro/pound a man earns
People take these statistics and then proceed to say that men and women get paid differently for the exact same work. To see if this is true we have to answer one crucial question – how is this number calculated?
Example time – we will invent a currency for this example and call it FF dollars. We will also have a small population sample just to make it easy to understand.
Women: Christina earns 1,500 FF dollars, Sara earns 500 FF dollars and Jessica earns 310 FF dollars.
Men: John earns 1,200 FF dollars, Nick earns 1,000 FF dollars, and Joe earns 800 FF dollars.
The average woman in our population earns = (1,500 + 500 + 310)/3 = 2310/3 = 770 FF dollars
The average man in our population earns = (1,200 + 1,000 + 800)/3 = 3000/3 = 1,000 FF dollars
We would then compare these two figures (by dividing them) and get that the average woman earns 77 cents for every FF dollar a man earns. Got it? Good.
Now a reasonable person may say – “aren’t these just averages? This doesn’t take into account what jobs these people have”. Exactly, my imaginary friend, exactly. You know nothing about Christina and Sara. You know nothing about John and Joe either. Let’s take a look at what factors determine someone’s pay:
Industry
Position
Education
Extra qualifications
Hours worked per week (yes this includes overtime in countries where this is paid)
Age
Specific company they work for
Job tenure (how long they’ve occupied the position)
Experience
Performance at work
Ability to create a CV
Ability to present oneself well in an interview
Ability (and willingness) to negotiate a starting salary
Ability (and willingness) to negotiate a raise
This list isn’t complete but these and many other factors influence someone’s pay. NONE of these factors are taken into account in the average statistic of 77 cents or 82 cents or 84 cents depending on the country and source. It is just a raw number.
Here is something to consider – wouldn’t businesses fire most men and hire women to occupy the same positions if they could pay them less for the exact same work? Of course they would. Most companies are notoriously known for their focus on profit, such is the nature of capitalism. Reducing salary costs by nearly a quarter would do wonders for a company’s bottom line wouldn’t it? The reason they don’t do it is simple – men and women aren’t paid differently for the same work. In fact, it is ILLEGAL to pay women and men differently for the same work. It has been illegal to discriminate on the basis of gender for more than half a century in most western countries.
Click here to see the U.S. act from 1963 and click here to see the UK act from 1970.
Normally, there wouldn’t be any need to go further, but I will go further because I haven’t presented much evidence yet, at least not by my own definition of high quality evidence from the last article. Let’s look at the scientific consensus. Where does most evidence point to?
Now for the sake of fairness, I will present the evidence often used by people who want the gender pay gap to be true. There was an academic article published by Maria Cabeza, Jennifer Barger Johnson and Lee Tyler that argued that the maternity leave and the glass ceiling explain the majority of the pay gap. There was an article by Vox a couple of years ago that suggested several systemic issues as the main culprits. The article is quite colorful with many interesting drawings of injustice but that is the only compliment you can give it. Moreover, Vox is a terrible source of information on any topic including this one as their arguments often push a certain agenda with intentional omissions of key facts and constant appeals to emotion instead of reason. There are other online publishing houses that have made attempts to explain the gap in a similar fashion as well, Vice and BuzzFeed most notably.
Let’s see what the other side has going for them. A study by the American Association of University Women (AAUW for short), a feminist organization with every reason to tinker with the numbers and present false narratives, showed that the wage gap shrinks to the point of invisibility when you factor in just some choice-based factors from the list above. More importantly though, in 2009, the U.S. Department of Labor released a paper that examined more than 50 peer-reviewed scientific studies on the topic. While the limitation of most of these studies is the fact that it is impossible to factor in and control everything that determines a person’s salary, the conclusion of this scientific literature review is that the difference in pay stems from different individual choices men and women make.
PayScale’s analysis showed that once you control for choice-based factors, the gap doesn’t exist
So let’s look at the weight and quality of the evidence before we go back to that highlighted word. On the one hand you have one interesting academic article worth exploring further and a bunch of online articles usually written by people with no background in statistics, economics, business, psychology or any other relevant field. On the other hand, you have a large literature review consisting of more than 50 high-quality, peer-reviewed scientific papers.
Choice is so crucial to understanding this issue. Georgetown University compiled a list of the five best and worst paying majors. They also highlighted the percentage of men and women entering those fields.
Best paying university majors:
Petroleum engineering – 87% male
Pharmaceutical sciences – 48% male
Mathematics and computer science – 67% male
Aerospace engineering – 88% male
Chemical engineering – 72% male
It is almost as if men are going into the highest paying fields and then graduating and getting the highest paying jobs. Weird. Also notice that women out-represent men in only one major – the pharmaceutical sciences and even there it’s by 2%.
Lowest paying university majors:
Counselling and psychology – 74% female
Early childhood education – 97% female
Theology and religious studies – 34% female
Human services and community organization – 81% female
Social work – 88% female
However, choosing a university major isn’t the only choice that impacts someone’s career prospects and their pay. Men are, on average, willing to work longer hours. Men are also willing to work in dangerous jobs with high fatal injury rates or those that require extremely taxing physical labor. Again these dangerous jobs carry a reward with the risk, and that reward is pay. Hell, according to a Harvard economist, Claudia Goldin, even if two lawyers have the same education, same specialization, and work the same number of hours – firms will pay more to the individual who is always available and willing to work at inconvenient hours instead of a regular 9-to-5 schedule. Notice, Ms. Goldin isn’t even talking about gender here. Individual choices generate differences.
When confronted with all of this, some people might claim that there are men with guns forcing women into these university programs worldwide, but I believe that someone in the world would have noticed the guns and reacted.
Obviously, that was a joke. However, there is a group of people that looks at these choices and asks a very fair and very reasonable question – are these choices biological or are they a result of social conditioning?
Let’s turn to psychology and psychiatry to find the answer to this question. The scientific consensus when it comes to psychological differences between the two sexes is pretty strong and it is strong because it is based on a model derived from statistics and not ideology. I am talking about The Big Five personality traits model developed in the 1980s and refined over the decades since. There were two premises:
Human traits exist
They are encapsulated in language and behavior
That’s it. Very neutral as far as bias and ideology goes, very reasonable. The next question is – are there differences between men and women according to this widely accepted model? It turns out that there are. The differences are not massive, but if you sum them up across all 5 traits (openness to experience, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism) the differences become visible to the point that you can tell whether someone is male or female in 75% of the cases based on how they land on each trait’s spectrum. Okay, so are these traits sociocultural or biological? Are they primarily one or the other? Well, what do you know? Some of the best papers ever produced in the field of psychology (and science in general) tested this. By best I mean with most citations and most scrutiny applied to them. These papers have stood the test of time. Anyway, they went around the world across multiple cultures, they ranked them in terms of gender equality of their policies and then tested to see if gender differences decrease in more egalitarian, gender equal societies? What do you think happened? The exact opposite. Countries like Sweden, Denmark, and Norway have been pushing for gender equality longer than anyone else on the planet. Their social and economic policies are extremely progressive. These countries also see MORE difference in terms of preference when it comes to university and career selection. They see an even greater difference between genders, especially when it comes to interest.
We can also turn to evolutionary biology and early childhood development sciences to see what do babies do? On average, male babies more often gravitate towards “things” (tools, objects) and female babies more often gravitate towards people (dolls). Here I don’t mean what is normally bought for each gender, but what a baby would crawl towards and choose in a scientific setting. This also extends into early childhood. Again, very well documented in scientific literature and recorded on video.
The final piece of evidence I will present on all of this is the following: expert opinion. I do not know a single highly accomplished, well-respected statistician who thinks that the wage gap is based on gender. I also haven’t heard of a single economist making these claims, no clinical psychologists either. Again, I might have missed some, but in the last 7 years of trying to find them I haven’t found one who claims that there is a sex-based injustice when it comes to pay. Not a single one in any relevant scientific field. In contrast, you can pick any relevant scientific field and I can give you a sizeable list of experts with unparalleled credentials who believe that this is a multifactorial issue with a nuanced, long explanation like the one I’ve presented here today.
So let us look at the totality of the evidence:
It is illegal to pay men and women differently for the same work
Most western countries have some laws or corporate practices that discriminate against men in order to help women get into the workplace (I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing by the way)
An overwhelming majority of studies points to the reason for the gender wage gap being interest, choice and individual freedom
Rational interpretation of the official, verifiable numbers shows that there are many factors that impact someone’s pay
Other scientific fields (like psychology and biology) suggest that the differences between the genders are mostly (but not completely) biological and that these differences explain why men and women make different choices
The experts almost (if not completely) unanimously agree on the matter
The counterarguments are few and very, very easily refuted
All of the evidence points to this being an EARNINGS gap not a gender gap. The word earn has something to do with it obviously. Earning something implies merit, and merit implies fairness. Even when presented with all of the arguments above, you could still argue that closing the wage gap is a good idea. I have to ask you one question though, what would be the cost of closing the wage gap? I don’t mean the monetary cost; I mean what would you have to do to close it? You would have to take away the most important aspect of human life – freedom. You would need to force women into jobs they either do not like or are not skilled enough to do and the same goes for men. You would have to sacrifice the freedom to pursue happiness and individual freedom to pursue interests in order to have a fair representation of men and women in most industries to close the gap between 77 cents and 1 dollar. More importantly though, if you take into account many of the choice-based factors as shown in the graphic above, the gap almost completely disappears and even the small gap that remains can be easily explained without sexism and systemic oppression.
We live in a system based on merit. You need to earn what you get. While I agree that the system is corrupt and there are many instances of people being treated unjustly or people getting way more than they deserve, for the most part we have a fair system. It is no surprise that most car mechanics are men as they tend to be the best for those jobs and the market almost always rewards the best. It is no surprise that most of the best, most competent, most wonderful social workers and educators are women. Does that mean that there are no great female car mechanics or male social workers? Heck no. The social work industry isn’t sexist towards men, it is just like any other industry, a meritocratic competition where the best earn the most and that just so happens to be women in fields like social work and education and it also just so happens to be men in STEM fields.
Okay, I have been avoiding the final blow for way too long now. This is the final nail in the coffin. If you think that I am sexist because I cited studies and made fairly sensible interpretations of numbers – I have one final question for you. What is your reaction to this fact – young women in the western world have been out-earning young men for the past 10 years. Does reading this arouse celebratory feelings? Did you say “FINALLY!”? Have you even heard this before? I know it’s a long shot, but do you, by any chance, now want to help men close the gap? Of course you don’t.
Do you want to know why are women out-earning men? It has nothing to do with sexism again. Women are massively outperforming men at universities. Turns out that getting more degrees leads to better prospects on the market which in turn leads to better pay. This has been the case almost everywhere in Europe and especially the United Kingdom as well as the United States for 10 years now.
Last but most certainly not least, what can we all do? Well, first we HAVE TO stop spreading this nonsensical myth that women and men are being paid differently for the same work. You wouldn’t believe the cailbre of people that spew these false narratives. How about one of the most powerful men in the world? In this video and this video, Barack Obama, the President of the United States at the time, talks about this nonsense, despite the fact that HIS White House staff had a “gender pay gap”. Obviously, his employees were paid fairly, but men occupied higher paying positions.
There are several reasons why spreading this myth is a terrible idea – but the most important one is that we are teaching young girls that they are victims of a sexist system. There is nothing more disheartening and dangerous than thinking that you’re a victim when you are not. The victim mentality eats away at personal responsibility which is the essence of a good society. Fortunately, women today enjoy the exact same legal rights as their male counterparts and more freedoms than ever in history. There are more female business owners, more female managers, more female millionaires, more female billionaires, and more female high ranking politicians than ever. This is a direct result of great feminist work of the 20th century. The raw gap will naturally close as more and more generations of women join the workforce. We need to empower our girls, not tell them they are weak and need help because they can’t make it on their own in the free market. They can make it in the free market and they do, with more success than men in recent years. Stop wasting valuable time, effort and money trying to change a fair system that rewards based on merit and focus on real issues women face every day.
How about we stop talking about the non-existent gender pay gap and start talking about the massively lacking sex education? How about we stop the nonsense and focus on horrendous maternity ward conditions (talking about the Balkans here) where our mothers give birth to our future? How about we focus on incredibly persistent negative stereotypes that surround women and especially their sexuality in our culture? How about we stop looking at everything through the lens of gender and stop looking for problems where none exist so that we can instead focus on very real, very damaging problems like inadequate punishment for sexual assault? And please, for the love of everything that’s beautiful in this universe, stop feeling through problems, start thinking through problems.