Warren Farrell on the Pay Gap: ‘If It’s About Discrimination, Why Are Young Urban Women Earning More?’

2007-08-05
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Background: The best recent work on the alleged wage gap was done by Warren Farrell in his book Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap And What Women Can Do About It. Below Warren discusses a recent New York Times article on the subject. To learn more about Warren’s analysis of the wage gap, see Warren Farrell on the ’Wage Gap’.

The Pay Gap: ‘If It’s About Discrimination, Why Are Young Urban Women Earning More?’

The New York Times front page headline recently tells us that “For Young Earners in Big City, Gap Shifts in Women’s Favor.” The big surprise? New York City women between 21 and 30 working full-time made 117% of men’s wages. Everyone is wondering why. Here’s why, for starters…

When I did the research for Why Men Earn More in 2005, I discovered that nationwide never-married women who had never had children earned 117% of the wages of never married men who had never had children. Manhattan women in their twenties are less likely to have married or had children than women in their twenties who live in suburban and rural areas. The overall pay gap with men earning more is not about discrimination; it is mostly about the division of labor once children arrive.

The usual men-earn-more pay gap is also about trade-offs. The road to high pay is a toll road. On average, men are more willing to pay the tolls of the more hazardous jobs (accounting for 94% of workplace deaths), to work on commissions, relocate overseas, travel overnight and travel weekends (approximately 90% of the most frequent flyers are men), work late nights and night shifts, work weekends, intensify their work commitment during child-raising years, work in engineering, computer sciences, technology and the hard sciences where the supply doesn’t match the demand, and do all of the twenty-five most important trade-offs that on average lead to men earning more.

The good news is that any woman can learn to out earn men should she be willing to make more of the twenty-five trade-offs than the average man makes.

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  • http://fightredfemis.blogspot.com/ sorenlerby

    Where is the outrage on this?? Of course there will be no such thing as long as it favors women; instead they will ponder how this women’s advantage could be poured into other areas of society so that women could establish general superiority over men.

    It’s a faulty research, as are all researches done on this topic. When feminists want to stress their victim status, they will use data on AVERAGE wages of all men and women, and disregard any factors that are very relevant to determining one’s wags, such as experience, number of hours worked, etc. When they want to boost their self-confidence, they will use the data on MEDIAN wages of all men and women, again regardless of educational background, etc. (Age will be by definition considered, I guess).

    Why?

    Because if you use AVERAGE wages, the figure will factor in the wages of ALL men, including those men who are corporate CEOs, high-flying lawyers, who are “outliers” in statistic terms since their extremely high salaries will skew the average salary figures. Since most CEOs and top layers are men, it will inevitably raise the average in men’s favor, and then you have it; data that “proves” pervasive societal discrimination against women.

    On the other hand, if you use MEDIAN wage, you can exclude all these statistical outliers from the calculation, and the salary of a man who happens to be in the exact median (if there are 10,001 men, the man with the 5,001st highest/lowest salary) will be used as a figure. Because of a large number of less-educated men in urban areas who do mostly physical labor and for a less pay, the data will look suddenly in women’s favor, thus boosting the self-image of feminists.

    Reading the article, many femi-Nazi readers loudly proclaimed that “at last the merit-based, fair pay is achieved..”…What? Why is it that if things turn in women’s favor it is fair and pay is strictly merit-based and when the data was in men’s favor, it was undeniable evidence of sexism in patriarchal society?

    It is the exact opposite. Okay, just think a little bit more carefully; young women today are given all kinds of gender-based, exclusive protection and preference, from hiring to promotion to all other career advancement goodies, and corporations bending over backwards to change their corporate culture and evaluation criteria for hiring/promotion to fit feminists’ theories and women’s needs, rather than those required to compete in free, dynamic market – while young men are facing the exact opposite situation in every aspect; their resumes tossed out because of their male first names, their promotion denied because of informal gender quota imposed by management, etc.

    If young women’s median pay is higher under this condition, is it a merit based or result of social engineering by feminists? You tell me.






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