From the Men, Women, Different department, from Claudia Goldin: How to Win the Battle of the Sexes Over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple), NY Slimes, via Bradford-Delong [1]:
…Ms. King fought hard for equal rights and, on the tennis court, she won. By 1973, men and women received the same prizes at the Open…. That is not the reality in the overall labor market, however…. Fighting to eradicate discriminatory employment practices is absolutely needed, of course…. Unequal treatment in hiring and in the work setting is real…. Yet… the time demands of many jobs can explain much of the pay difference, a finding that has sobering implications. Eliminating the gender earnings gap will require changes in millions of households and thousands of individual workplaces….
The gap is a statistic that changes during the life of a worker. Typically, it’s small when formal education ends and employment begins, and it increases with age. More to the point, it increases when women marry and when they begin bearing children. Using the data that shows women earn 81 cents for each dollar earned by men, when the careers of recent college graduates start, the gap is much smaller: 92 cents for each male dollar. By the time college-educated women are 40 years old, they earn 73 cents…. Correcting for time off and hours of work reduces the difference in the earnings between men and women but doesn’t eliminate it….
Women disproportionately seek jobs—including full-time jobs—that are more likely to mesh with family responsibilities, which, for the most part, are still greater for women than for men. So, the research shows, women tend to prefer jobs that offer flexibility: the ability to shift hours of work and rearrange shifts to accommodate emergencies at home. Such jobs tend to be more predictable, with fewer on-call hours and less exposure to weekend and evening obligations. These advantages have a negative consequence: lower earnings per hour, even when the number of hours worked is the same….
Certain job characteristics have a big impact on the gender earnings gap… Subject to strict deadlines and time pressure… Expected to be in direct contact with other workers or clients… Instructed to develop cooperative working relationships… Assigned to work on highly specific projects… Unable to independently determine their tasks and goals Occupations with a lower level of these characteristics (like jobs in science and technology) show smaller gaps…. Men’s earnings tend to surge when there are fewer substitutes for a given worker, when the job must be done in teams and when clients demand specific lawyers, accountants, consultants and financial advisers. Such differences can account for about half the gender earnings gap. These findings provide more nuance in explaining why the gap widens with age and why it is greater for women with children…
Yes men and women as groups receive different compensation. Goldin deems this a problem, to be solved. I deem a fact of life to be lived with and accepted. Further, Goldin’s cure would be worse than the problem she purports to remedy. Different groups are different. Should the Slimes launch a crusade to insure that blood hounds are equally represented at dog tracks, and if not why not? How about replacing bull fights in Spain, with bovine bouts, with equal presentation of both bulls and cow?
Back to human, at birth women have circa a five year longer life expectancy than men(PDF) [2]. What does Goldin propose to do to remedy this gap.
Men die from work related injuries about twelve times the rate of women, from Bureau of Labor Statistics [3]:
Women suffered 2,506 (or 8 percent) of the 31,567 job-related fatalities reported from 1992 to 1996. During the same time period, women accounted for slightly less than 50 percent of the workforce.
[…]
Women may experience fewer job-related deaths and injuries because they typically are employed in less dangerous jobs such as teaching or other service occupations. Few women work in the construction trades or in other high-risk jobs where work is performed outdoors.
The difference between male and female occupational deaths is not a disparity. It is a statistic. Now if women were put down their steno graphs and take up say truck driving that alone would reduce the sex disparity in income, job related death and carpal tunnel injuries. Progress?