I noticed guys in S&T are also generally better looking than those in other areas.
@Eskimo - you pretty much hit the nail on the head with your earlier post.
Sowell (one of my favorite authors–when I get a chance to read these days) posits than men make more than women for a variety of reasons. Some examples that I can remember include:
Women tend to pick “soft” majors, like HR and marketing, while men tend to dominate finance and accounting. These “soft” majors obviously make less money, simply because they are soft. He asks, “Who makes more–math PhD’s or English PhD’s?” Obviously the answer is Math PhD’s. 99% of all Math PhD’s are male while 40% of English PhD’s are male.
Majors aside, women also tend to pick lower-paying jobs than men. Even today, they are more likely to pick jobs like secretary or teacher, and less likely to pick jobs like logger or miner or driller, which command a price premium because of the inherent danger and sucky work conditions.
It’s no secret that women leave the workforce for maternal reasons. Many stay gone for five years or more. Of course, the longer you stay gone, the more “obsolete” you become, because technology/law/business continues to progress, but you aren’t up to speed with the new changes. Ergo, these women get punished in their paychecks.
On a similar vein, women tend to pick 8-5 type of jobs, while men are more likely to work longer hours. Again, it’s not hard to understand why. And it’s not hard to understand who makes more money.
Moreover, family money is “pooled” money. If I work 80 hours a week and make $200,000 per year, and my wife stays home with the kids, then our family makes $200,000 per yer. If my wife and I both make $100,000 per year, then we make $200,000 per year. Most women (and men) prefer to work their “traditional” roles, because men are more naturally suited to working long, hard hours, and women are more suited to traditional “mommy” roles.
Of course, Sowell makes these points with data, and more accurate facts and logic than I have made here. But this is the gist of that chapter. It’s a good read.
EDIT–Just FYI, BChad posted while I was typing.
To BChad’s point–I read an article in th local paper about the Petroleum Engineering major. It is currently the highest-paying major in the US. A 22 year-old kid with a hacksaw PE major can expect a $90k salary from day one.
I asked a higher-up in an oil company recently, “Why are there no female PE’s here?” He said, “None have EVER applied.” He said that he would hire one immediately, if for no other reason that to combat the “sexism” card before it’s played. But he has never had a woman with a PE major apply at his company. In fact, he can count the number of female PE’s that he personally knows on one hand.
I didn’t realize it’s 1950s again!
Any respectable analysis of gender differences and pay needs to control for things like educational differences, years of experience, and sector. The pro-feminist arguments often glide over that fact. The anti-feminist arguments don’t as much, but in my opinion that’s mostly because the raw data doesn’t initially appear to support their conclusions so they need to go the extra step to make their case.
If we find that male CEOs make more than female HR professionals, that doesn’t actually tell us very much about gender and pay. If we find that male HR professionals make more than female HR professionals with the same number of years of experience and comparable educational credentials, then that tells us a lot about gender discrepancies, although without some kind of process tracing, it still doesn’t explain why discrepancies exist. If there are no gender differences, then it suggests that it’s somehow the education and experience (or whatever control variables are in the analysis) that are creating these differences. There may still be causally prior mechanisms that are affecting these variables (girls being told they can’t hack math because they are girls, for example), but it still suggests different intervention points.
There are women in finance that are not bad.
But all the women taking the cfa were horrendous.
I suppose the only industry that pays women more than it pays men, for comparable jobs, must be the p0rn industry.
Not in NYC
The final point in Dr. Sowell’s chapter basically states that when you control for those differences (education, experience, leaving workforce, etc.) then women actually make just as much, if not more than men.
Not entirely true.
All the women taking the Level 2 and Level 3 exams were horrendous. Every year, there were plenty of hotties sitting for Level 1.
Thought I’d throw this into the discussion.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-24059902
Greenman might be stuck in 1950s USA, but that’s still a whole lot better than 2010’s Pakistan!
Greenie legit post brah.
usually girls don’t wear high heels and pencile skirts and makeups to write a Cfa exam.
agree. For a lot of women, spending time to take care of her apperance would help to improve the attractiveness. After all, very few would look fantastic when wandering around on the street without makeups, nice cloth, hair style, etc (including men).
To those who say “Greenie’s stuck in the 1950’s”
Look around you. Do you not see women who work lower-paying but lower-demanding jobs so their husbands can work long hours at his much higher-paying job? That’s certainly the case with me and my wife. And most of the married women (sub-30’s) that I work with. And most of the female teachers that I know. (My wife is a teacher.) And most of the men and women that I know.
Do you really not have the same opinion? It might not be true for the 25 year-olds girls, because they usually not married with children yet. But look at the women who are 35. Surely you see less 35 year-old professional women than 25 year-old ones. Why do you think that is?
I’m not saying this is good or bad. (Personally I think it’s a good thing.) But I do believe that this is a lot more pervasive than you think. We are not in a society where men and women are equal. They don’t work equal jobs, and they don’t get equal pay. And sexism has almost nothing to do with it.
You don’t live in the same country as the rest of us man. . . you have to keep that in mind.
"We are not in a society where men and women are equal. They don’t work equal jobs, and they don’t get equal pay. And sexism has almost nothing to do with it. "
How does your third sentence above not contradict the other two?
sex·ism [sek-siz-uhm] noun 1. attitudes or behavior based on traditional stereotypes of sexual roles. 2. discrimination or devaluation based on a person’s sex, as in restricted job opportunities; especially, such discrimination directed against women.
Is the reason you think it’s a good thing because you had the good fortune to be born a man? Would you not find it frustrating if your job prospects were greatly diminished due to a factor entirely out of your control?
Edit: I copied and pasted the dictionary definition there. Didn’t come out very well!
I don’t have much professional experience yet. But what other ppl told me (internet, close-fds) is similar to what Greeman said. In the western world, women must work harder (dunno how much harder) to get the same level of achievement as men do.
So to get a corner office, a woman has to work the ass off when opportunity comes AND looking smart and cute/nice/attractive at the same time. Cuz gender discremination exits AND ppl judge you by your appearance.
Apperance plays a role in one’s career path. I think a lot of male CEOs in big organizations are tall.
It’s pretty simple folks, women give birth and men do not. Fair or not, when looking to hire a woman under the age of 25, the person making the hiring decision (even another woman) is going to factor in the high likelihood that the female candidate will take maternity leave 2x before she’s 30.
^Word.
Thank God we don’t live in a country that mandates that the employer keep her on salary for a year while she sits at home doing nothing on maternity leave.
If I’m an employer in Sweden, and I see ANY sub-35 female walk into my office for a job, my immediate response would be, “We don’t have any open positions. Thanks for coming in, though.”