Re: the Consad report:
1) Typically, neither Robert or Ballgame mentioned that CONSAD used a radically different sample of workers than virtually all other wage gap studies. I don’t think either of them were being deliberately dishonest; rather, I suspect they both lack basic knowledge of what they’re talking about.
The standard wage gap figure
only includes full-time, year-round workers,[SUP]
2[/SUP] but CONSAD included part-time (and, I suspect, short-term) workers, which means it’s looking at a significantly different population. So Ballgame’s comparison of CONSAD’s results to a standard figure from
Newsweek is apples and oranges — or, as Ballgame puts it, “misusing statistics.”
2) The single largest factor that CONSAD found “explained” the wage gap is the difference in hours worked. Since women are more likely to work part-time, and since CONSAD (unlike standard wage gap studies) included part-time workers in their sample, in effect CONSAD is comparing mostly female part-time workers to mostly male full-time workers. Then — what a surprise! — they determined that the difference in hours worked accounts for a huge portion of the wage gap they measured.
3) Ballgame’s argument is that CONSAD study shows that the wage gap is not caused by sexism — or at least, that no more than 5-7% of the wage gap is caused by sexism. But that’s not a reasonable interpretation of CONSAD’s results.
First of all, there are important kinds of direct employer discrimination which CONSAD’s methods cannot measure or disprove. For example, some employers are more likely to hire women to lower-paid positions and men to higher-paid positions. (Empirical testing – by sending male and female testers to apply for the same jobs — has proven that this sort of sexist occupational sorting sometimes happens.)
This sort of occupational segregation leads to women’s average work experience not being as good as men’s — which CONSAD’s methodology would classify as an “explained” difference in wage gap that has nothing to do with discrimination. It would be more accurate to conclude that the differences in women’s and men’s resumes may be partly caused by employer discrimination, and CONSAD’s methods cannot account for this.
Similarly, if employers are less likely to promote women (all else held equal), that would contribute to women being paid less overall — but would CONSAD’s study would, again, consider that explained and therefore not discrimination.
4)[SUP]
3[/SUP] For me, probably the most important kind of sexism going into the wage gap is the sexism of unquestioned assumptions; unquestioned assumptions about who does the housework, unquestioned assumptions about who does the child-rearing, unquestioned assumptions about innate ability, and most of all, unquestioned assumptions about how jobs are designed for people with wives at home.
I call this last factor the “Father Knows Best” economy; most jobs implicitly assume that workers have wives at home who are taking care of the kids and house, so that these responsibilities never need to be accommodated by employers. Maybe that assumption made sense half a century ago, but it doesn’t make sense now; and by continuing to implicitly make this assumption, our economy is making it unfairly difficult for caretakers (who are usually women) to have careers.
Ballgame’s big mistake is assuming that sexism in the wage gap (if it exists at all, which he denies) is entirely a matter of women being paid less than men for identical jobs. But most economists who study the wage gap believe that it’s caused, to a significant extent, by
occupational segregation, which means women and men are sorted by the market into
different jobs – and the women’s jobs, on average, pay less.
(Continued)
http://amptoons.com/blog/2010/11/26...age-gap-masks-sexism-instead-of-measuring-it/
) you jest! Sign him up for what? He's on unemployment and he doesn't support the unemployment extension. It's demoralizing him, he wants the government to make the pain of taking a big government handout to stop. That's how dedicated he is. He won't be signing up for anything except the rich people's campaign to end taxation as we know it!
