A Scientific Decoding of The End of Men (Finally)
I’ve been writing about The End of Men since before it came out. This idea of male demise is so shortsighted, so zero sum, so demoralizing for both genders that I have long ago stop even thinking about it in those terms. Here at the Good Men Project we even had more than one of the primary men profiled in the book reach out to us to let us know how they felt personally betrayed by what she had done and the way they were written about. “Enough,” has been my attitude. There is so much more important things to write and think about.
But someone sent me today’s NYT Economix column, written by economist Nancy Folbre. Ms. Folbre spends the first part of the column ripping apart the crap statistical methodology upon which Ms. Rosin builds her sandcastle fantasy of gender in modern America. She then points out the sacrifice economically made by either gender if they choose to stay home as a caregiver since resources are still scarce and the loss in advancement severe. While many, many more men stay home than they used to, there are still more stay-at-home moms than dads and, as a result, data that looks at late career comparisons are colored by family commitment patterns.
One valuable way to try to identify how men and women are doing economically, Ms. Folbre points out, is to compare salaries one year after college before anyone is staying home with the kids. To make the comparison fair you have to correct for the choice of field (more women than men go into non-profit industries that pay less by definition). Ms. Folbre concludes:
In this context, the new American Association of University Women study, “Graduating to a Pay Gap,” stands out as an example of state-of-the art statistical analysis. It focuses on young men and women with college degrees, working full time, one year after graduation, taking into account differences in college majors, grade point average, hours of work, occupations and tendency to work in the nonprofit sector. The results reveal a male pay advantage of about seven percentage points that can’t be explained away. That is, the men earn $100 for every $93 the young women earn.
Even for a guy who has fought hard against the perception that men don’t on many occasions get screwed, this result actually makes a lot of sense to me. There is still discrimination in the workplace. Not nearly as much as there was in prior generations but it is still there. Women making 7% less squares with what I have witnessed in my own work life. As a man I absolutely and unequivocally believe women should be paid the same as men for the same work. What Ms. Folbre’s column suggests is that we have made progress but have a distance yet to go in terms of gender-based economic equality.
Of course, as a guy who works at home to be with my kids, I would say we have just as far to go in terms of respecting the role of men as parents. But I’ve written on that extensively so will, for the moment, give that a rest too.
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About Tom Matlack
Sorry to rain on your parade, Tom., but this is not a credible report. Why not? Because it doesn’t account for the fact that ~60% of those college gradates are female vs. ~ 40% for males. She would need to calculate the income of those men who didn’t get college degrees (although nobody seems to care about them) in those same jobs and see how THOSE numbers shake out. THAT would be the accurate and honest approach to studying this issue.
A study done that doesn’t account for that and done by an organization that is known to be biased against men isn’t credible. Anyone that really takes this study as gospel done been had, took, , hoodwinked, bamboozled, led astray, and run amok.
Eric are you saying that college acceptance is somehow gender biased against men?
Are you saying that men are stupider than women?
Huh? There’s nothing in my comment about college acceptance. If a study is going to truly examine pay parity, it can’t not consider inequality in education, which has an impact on compensation. So, men without college educations must be included for the study to have valid results.
But, since you ask about education, it’s sad that so few consider gender inequality in education to be a problem, including here, of all places. There is little to no concern about, and certainly no public funds dedicated to achieving gender equality in even high school education, let alone college. For some reason, including on this site, whenever men are on the short end of inequality, it’s THEIR fault and nobody cares to spend 5 cents to help, whereas when women are, it’s some great conspiracy to discriminate against them, requiring Congressional action and billions of dollars of funding to fight it.
Indeed, there is a problem even with 55:45, that is a lot of people missing out.
Does this report account for exact job position, and not industry? You could see men earning more in certain industries if the women are doing more office-type work and the men are doing dangerous work in underground mines for instance.
Are we as a people ready for the major increase in on the job deaths for women to get to true equality between the genders? We’d need women to takeup dangerous jobs alongside men since it’s probably unfair to just bring pay equality without trying to get an even spread of genders in all jobs. I fully agree people in the same position should be paid the same, but isn’t it already illegal to pay differently in the same position? How are women being paid less for the same role? Salary negotiations? Choosing different roles in the same industry?
Up to 93 cents on the dollar now? That’s quite a bit of progress, considering the figure “73 cents” has become something of statistical orthodoxy for the past decade at least. There’s probably enough margin of error that the real figure could be almost parity.
I have no figures on this, but I suspect that when women start their own businesses they often charge clients or customers less than men who start comparable businesses. Women may earn less in some small part because they sell themselves short more than men do. They may be more reluctant to increase prices to increase profit. When women hire women, are they as generous in their compensation as men are when men hire men? I suspect not. Again, just a theory.
My point is that maybe on some level women in positions to make decisions about their income may be making choices that result in lower incomes relative to men in the same position. In those cases, it’s not “society pays women less” but rather women accepting less.
I’m also wondering if there is a marked gender difference when measuring other forms of compensation besides salary, for example medical benefits. Do men and women have equal levels of medical coverage through their jobs, or does one gender tend to have better coverage than the other? I honestly don’t know, but let’s bear in mind that not every compensation counts as “salary.”
Well said, and may I also add that men are known to oversell thier capabilities where the inverse is ture for women. While I’m sure countless laws and political movements will spring up to find where exactly that precious $7 disappeared to, I hope one day the government could show some semblance of concern for the higher unemployment rate affecting men.
…that $7 dollars is biiiiiig money though..
Did they account for things like willingness to work overtime, how about danger in the job and how much each person was willing to take those risks. How about “did some people leave early”. Also, HOW did they take factors into account that are subjective , iow, did they over or under estimate how much impact those factors have. Also 7% is getting very close statistically insignificant isn’t it.
To me, having gone through this before with women, the thing that stands out greatly is negotiating salary. 7% is VERY small if you start to account for the potential that young women seem (testosterone? societal factors?) less likely to place a higher tag on themselves at a negotiation table. I don’t have a study off hand on female vs. male assertiveness in recent college grads, but having been through this with people, that seems like a HUGE variable to leave uncontrolled.
Male grad asks for $52k for Jr. Financial Analyst position at company.
Female grade asks for $48k (maybe simply wanting to avoid conflict) at same company.
There’s your difference.
I agree that’s probably a factor, but also suspect that employers (male and female) may unconsciously offer female candidates less money because they know the woman will agree to it whereas a man wouldn’t. Also, there may sometimes be an unconscious perception that the female candidate has less value so they get offered less money. There is also theproblem that women can be punished for being more assertive (they quickly get labelled pushy or bitchy) in situations where men are rewarded for behaving exactly the same way, like negotiating salaries. On the other side of it, some women also have trouble exerting authority in a way that is effective and not off-putting to others — women are socialized differently than boys growing up, and many women feel anxious about being in authority, so they may inadvertently come across in ineffective ways, such as appearing too controlling or angry (at one extreme) or too tentative and unsure (at the other extreme). These are my observations from 20 years in a male dominated profession (law). In interpersonal relationships, women tend to seek emotional connections first whereas men seek to establish status first (I know that’s a generalization, but it is largely true if you observe carefully). This gives women an advantage in some situations but puts them at a disadvantage in others. Women will downplay their strengths in work situations in order to make others feel comfortable while a man will promote himself in order to develop his place in the hierarchy. Most of this is totally unconscious behavior which no one is even aware of.
I’ll tell you what they told me in Boot camp, “leadership is knowing who’s ass you gonna have to kick and who’s ass you’re gonna have to kiss” I don’t see how a person’s gender will ever change that dynamic especially in competitive fields like business and law.
Which, by the way, doesn’t mean there aren’t gender-specific dynamics that still go against women in work, but I just don’t think it’s some master-societal prejudice at work anymore. Heck, there are dynamics that work against shorter men as well…
Yeah Ben my point was pretty much to say that on average there is probably a small bias against women in terms of pay. The cause is not something I can begin to get at. But this whole idea that men are going down the tubes fast is crap.
Hmmm…I haven’t heard that they are going down the tubes, although I think many struggle with finding masculinity (most of my young clients come to me for this). But this does make the title a little misleading, no?
Not trying to pick nits, I just think you’re framing something that’s been a large societal issue as “still a problem” when it’s seemingly been reduced to the “standard judgement biases” all people have about…everything. I don’t think that’s what we mean when we refer to workplace “discrimination.” FWIW, my experience is that in *science* — something ostensibly “intelligent”-based — women face actual discrimination, unlike say finance or sports, which is where a lot of the financial statistics come from. (I have a study somewhere on this…)
And that’s my way of saying we’ll never see true equal in judgements smarter and better at handling our cognitive biases.
Ben:
I suppose you could be right about the title but honestly having been on the receiving end of numerous nasty threats from cyber feminists it was my way to try to make some concession here that away from all the noise there is actually something logical going on economically.
As to male identity of course that is the whole point of GMP. That’s why I founded it. Because every guy I knew then and know now is struggling with figuring out what it means to be a man, be a good man, father, husband, et al.
When I said “going down the tubes” I was referring to the end of men tripe which I find offensive to the real men I know who are doing their very best, each in his own way.
Couple of quick points:
This exact data has been around for at least ten years. This is not new information. What is new is that the AAUW is finally catching up…
It is an error to assume the remainder of the gap is due to discrimination. The report itself refers that the gap as “unexplained”. The study controls for variables “known” to affect earnings.
In 2007 the AAUW published the initial report (this one is an update) that showed a .80 cent equivalent at the 1 year mark out of school. Similarly, buried at the end of the report was the qualifying phrase: “….after controlling for various factors, the gap shrinks to 5%”
http://www.aauw.org/learn/research/behindPayGap.cfm
Thanks Elissa for the link.
Here is a quote from the PDF link that Elissa provided and IMHO, gives a 100% clear picture of the absolute bias this organization has
“The only way to discover discrimination
is to eliminate the other possible explanations. In this
analysis the portion of the pay gap that remains unexplained
after all other factors are taken into account is 5 percent one
year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation.
These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which
remains a serious problem for women in the work force”
UNEXPLAINED GAPS , iow, something we can’t explain and that is evidence of discrimination. Talk about grasping at straws. Plus the gap at 5 years is only 5%, which folks is statistically insignificant, especially since they never explain which factors they look at. They talk about field, work, industry etc. BUT did they account for danger , willingness to work overtime, willingness to commute etc.
Has anyone seen how they account for hours worked.
If someone who works 40 hours is compared to someone who works 50 hours per week, first though would be to divide 50/40 and get 1.25 OR iow a 25% difference. First look logic would dictate that the person working 50 hours should earn 25% more BUT, that is not how it works for anyone. There is a premimum when you work more than 40 hours per week and the studies I have seen indicate that men work an average of 42 hours per week while women work 37 hours per. Taking into account this premium means men should earn more than the simple difference between the 5 hours difference.
Another problem is that some jobs pay by the hour, some pay by the week, some pay by the month while other pay by commision. These are difference benchmarks, HOW did they get them to the same benchmark to make the comparison and where there comparisons correct. After all this is an org that has an agenda to show discrimination to further their cause, this logically would lead them to assume the worst in all situations.
Some jobs have a shift differential also. At a friends job, the difference is 5% for each less desirable shift. Second shift is paid more than first and third shift more than second. It’s always the guys who seek the overnight shifts so they’ll get paid on average about 7.5% more than the women. The job itself isn’t anymore dangerous at night, but women feel that the commute is more dangerous and don’t like coming home or leaving for work at night.
Even if there is discrimination, how do they know it’s gender discrimination? Isn’t the education gap highest among minorities? That means that minority women will be over represented in this study.