The point is though, that I never knew that they were spreading conservative rhetoric, like being anti-government regulation of certain industries like banks, oil and healthcare, discouraging any kind of taxes in markets or on goods and denying the gender-pay gap for example, in a way that's hard to dispute for the average student; through cleverly manipulated economic data.
So I felt inclined to look into the subject when I saw this video. It's trying to prove that the gender pay gap no longer exists in any way at all, on the grounds that because women make different choices, we find this outcome of women making less than men. Be warned, the "Institute for Humane Studies" is associated with the Koch Foundation Organization.
Let's look at each piece of reasoning Prof. Steven Horowitz uses to present his argument.
Prof. Horowitz argues that women and men invest differently in their educations, their job experience, and differ in their expectations of work. He truthfully states the fact that women tend to major in social sciences to pursue careers in Psychology and Nursing. He also truthfully states the fact that most men enter fields of engineering. He then examines the data formed by taking all men in all fields of work, and all women in all fields of work, and comparatively proves that based on a woman's likelihood to enter a career path that pays less, and a woman being more likely to work part-time or take time off to raise children, those factors cause her to make lower pay in relation to a man who is working in a different field that pays more. This much is accurate from the standpoint of comparing all working men and women in general. So according to Prof. Horowitz we should be able to fairly compare the gender wage gap by considering the factors of education, job experience, and expectation of work. The professor goes on to say "Studies that have tried to control for these factors have shown that if you take a man and a woman same experience, same education, same job, and compare their salaries, what you find is that women make about 98% of what men do. That gender wage gap pretty much disappears." Unfortunately this is only true for certain fields, because as the New York Times pointed out based on information provided by PayScale, "In jobs that pay more than $100,000, women earn just 87 percent of what men receive, even after adjusting for outside factors...For jobs paying below $100,000, the gap narrows further." It goes on to say that "After controlling for outside factors, some of the biggest gender pay gaps are in jobs like chief executive (in which, after PayScale adjusted the data, women earn 71 percent of what men earn), hospital administrator (women earn 77 percent of what equally qualified men earn) and chief operating officer (women earn 80 percent of what equally qualified men earn)." This brings out a very important point, what these jobs particularly have in common is "in each of these jobs, performance quality is a relatively subjective measure" and when you "compare those jobs to positions like engineers, actuaries or electricians, where the criteria for a job well done might be relatively more concrete or measurable" you can see the "salaries earned by men and women are roughly equal". So it's not exactly just a difference in choosing to gain knowledge, job experience, or education, it's a difference in pay based on how subjective the criteria for a pay raise would be in any given field. This tells you that the more one's job performance is left up to an employer's personal opinion, the more likely a women is to be paid less than a man in the same position. This video played down the issue of the gender wage gap to seem as though it doesn't exist, even though when looking at the facts the issue does exist, it's just that you have to be more specific to point it out.
No comments:
Post a Comment