So you're proposing that because women given 18% less in wages that we should take advantage of that fact, underpay them, and contribute more to gender inequality in the workplace?
I'd love to see what your female coworkers think of this post.
He is proposing that it could be done, and thus anyone who doesn't care about the ethical implications and wants to get rich would be doing it. That nobody is doing it, despite no shortage of unethical people who want to get rich, suggests that it is not true.
I doubt this. See the HN post from a few days ago ("I put Mr. on my CV and got a job"). It would seem that employers not only pay their females employees less, but have little faith in them to get the job done, thus they wouldn't hire them in the first place.
There's no room for doubt, really. It does suggest that. It does not prove, so you can certainly doubt the conclusion, of course.
There really doesn't seem to be any alternative besides these three:
- Women are not underpaid or more efficient.
- There is not a noticeable number of unethical people seeking to get rich.
- People are getting rich by hiring lots of women and outcompeting everybody else who prefers men.
The last two don't look true to me, which suggests that the first one is true. I certainly could be wrong about the assumptions or conclusion, but it does suggest that.
You missed an option:
There are "unethical people" that would discriminate for women to get rich, but for whom other prejudices against women are too strong, so they don't...
I'm not saying that this is the case, just pointing out that you missed options that would allow the hypothesised discrimination to exist.
You are oversimplifying by assuming that the supply of applicants for a given job is gender-neutral. I think it's generally accepted that one of the causes of the wage gap is that women are pushed toward stereotypically "female" careers, and those usually pay less.
These "unethical people seeking to get rich" could also outsource all jobs to third world countries and get their work done pennies on the dollar -- yet a lot of them don't. It doesn't look good for your company when you take advantage of people in plain sight.
The "third-world countries" equivalent would be: if third-world labor were cost effective, then people would be hiring labor in third-world countries and crushing the competition with their greater productivity per dollar, and getting rich in the process.
Which is exactly what happened over the past 30 or so years.
The problem is that if the performance gap is imaginary while the pay gap is real, then someone could take advantage of the situation for enormous profit. If other employers falsely believe that some much more expensive hammers will be better at driving nails, that's great news for anyone who recognizes that the cheap hammers perform just as well--when 99% of my competitors are wildly deluded, there is the potential for profit.
Thus, we have two possibilities: either nobody in the world is both aware of the potential for arbitrage and unethical enough to exploit the situation, or the wage gap is smaller than these estimates suggest.
You're assuming that public image of said employers is unimportant, and that all employers are okay with being immoral. There's something to be said about companies with happy employees that don't feel like their employers are taking advantage of them.
There's nothing stopping employers from making the practical decision to employ underpriced women yet couch it in the rhetoric of feminism and diversity ("Diversity is important to us, and that's why we want to employ as many qualified women as possible.") This gets them a PR and economic benefit.
In fact, many new-economy juggernauts like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook do precisely this. Their employee marketing aggressively recruits women. Are they doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they see an economic opportunity? Ultimately it doesn't really matter - the effect is that more women get employed in positions of power. But it's quite possible that the economic arbitrage that people are pointing out is happening in practice, right now, you just don't hear about it because most arbitragers are not dumb enough to let you know what they're doing. And the effect, over a long time scale, is that businesses run by bigots are replaced by businesses with a more accurate perception of personal productivity, which leads to a more equitable world for everyone.
> “[Alan] Greenspan explains his gender bias with the free market pragmatism that has become has hallmark. “I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economist where cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: it gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women.”
You don't understand economics if you think that's what would happen. If women actually make 18% less purely because they're women, companies who realize this will be able to hire well by paying women only 15% less. More people will catch on and see they can hire qualified women for only 12% less. And so on until the prevailing price represents something other than "just because they're women".
That's a circular argument. "If wage discrimination existed, then the magic market would have corrected it. Ergo wage discrimination cannot exist." All reports about employers exploiting immigrant labour is false too.
The lower price of (presumably illegal) immigrant labor has a structural difference - the idea is that both worker and employer are taking a risk by doing a transaction off the books.
However, the employer has greater leverage because he can report the illegal to USCIS, whereas the illegal worker presumably has a precarious financial and social situation in the country and has to "take what he can get". Hence, there's a downward pressure on wages.
Whether they are legal or illegal immigrants is irrelevant to the argument presented. The market should identify a "business opportunity" and push salaries upwards to an equilibrium.
There's no pure, efficient, "labor market" but instead lots of small, loosely connected "labor markets" with a variety of inefficiencies - lock-in, friction, imperfect information.
An employer can exploit illegal immigrant labor because it tends to be concentrated in lower-skilled, relatively interchangeable jobs, and because illegal immigrants are in a difficult spot.
This is basic rational behaviour, and would disincentivize companies from discrimination once a few began exploiting the inefficiency. Nothing would destroy the wage gap quicker than widespread exploitation of said inefficiency.
No, the question is, why wouldn't anybody do it if it were possible? Are all investors (even female ones) so against women that they'd rather leave billions of dollars on the table than employ women? That seems extremely unlikely. So it seems more likely that other forces than discrimination are at play, for example female job preferences (type of profession, flexibility, part time, location...).
eeky is suggesting that, if there is a gap between male worker output/male worker pay and female worker output/female worker pay (which I'm unqualified to make a comment on), someone would arbitrage this gap to make an enormously profitable company until the gap closes. There is no way to "hire all the females" without salaries rising.
I'd love to see what your female coworkers think of this post.