Forsher wrote:Jello Biafra wrote:Why would employers realize this? This would require that they evaluate the abilities of female employees fairly. Sexism makes this unlikely.
I think you make a serious mistake in assuming active discrimination. That is, to my knowledge, illegal. Unconscious biases and the like are much more likely to play a substantial role in employment dynamics.
I also think the idea you're trying to dispute is completely moronic. It doesn't work like this (but not, to my mind, Chestaan's).Forsher wrote:
There are several reasons why this analysis falls flat.
1) You assume an ability to systematically pay female staff less. This is not true because it is obvious and therefore able to take it to court. (Which also, in fact, is true for systematically not hiring staff who can perform the position they've applied for.)
2) Pay peanuts, get monkeys. If you are systematically hiring only staff that want to work for less money, you are generally going to be hiring the worse staff. It is actually more profitable to have more productive staff. (This is why slavery is bad from an economic perspective.)
3) Outsourcing avoids this principle because it is exploiting the relative difference in what counts as "peanuts" and the immobility of labour (which means that you can shift to a new location and find productive employees).
What generally (haha, where's your research Forsher? er...) happens is that when you hire people they are either offer a salary or they are informed of what they'll be paid as the first step in negotiation. The thinking is that women, during pay negotiations, are penalised for "female" behaviour rather than being women, i.e. offering lower amounts. In this sense, once you fall behind, you stay behind.
Chestaan's analysis is an interesting point of view. I've never heard of Gary Becker and it's 1am so I am not going to any time soon (on a related note, I will read any responses to this post, but don't expect a reply), but I'm sceptical. You do not, after all, consider "no-monopoly" as an assumption of perfect competition (i.e. a situation where the market works completely) and I do not see why some, I don't know, duopsony wouldn't lead to the same sort of situation. Furthermore, labour isn't necessarily going to be able to do anything. So, yeah, that other firm across the road is offering higher wages (or, at least, I think/have heard tell it does) but I have a job now, and there's no guarantee that I am going to be able to get that job (I've read Grapes of Wrath, I know how it is)... people are probably, generally, risk averse (which may, in fact, underlie the "female behaviour" I noted above). I would assume that Chestaan's firms are close together and, therefore, the mobility of labour is not an issue here. Maybe the perceived capacity to apply for a job whilst still maintain the current job is the critical thing, but risk averse people are probably going to have a low perception of this capacity.
Equally, Chestaan assumes that we have a firm, within its industry, that faces competitive pressures. We must question this notion, because the some roles exist across industries and, therefore, they draw from the same labour pools but don't face any competitive pressure of the sort Chestaan focussed on. Basically, if I am hiring a secretary at $25/hr and I'm an accountant, that a golf club is paying its secretaries $20hr is only an issue to me if there is a scarcity of labour... I'm not compromising my position in the market by having this particular cost profile. When we're dealing with more knowledge-limited roles, we're obviously talking about a different dynamic (and one where having an exact grasp of what premises we're using is important). In any case, more knowledge probably implies a typically older kind of employee, thence a situation where we're dealing with the legacies of the ability to systematically discriminate. (We might also talk about non-profits and what we might call an "ethical-penalty".)
The question of evaluating employee performance is also of interest. I don't know if you've ever met anyone who's racist, but they tend to be able to say "such and such are lazy" and equally say "but so and so are all good". This is an important point to bear in mind: that Jane is a productive employee is probably not going to displace one's preconceived notions about the distribution of productive women. There may also not be any substantive link between the people responsible for wages, hiring and on-going evaluation... and while in SMEs this seems very unlikely, it is also the case that SMEs are more likely to have part-time staff (which are generally less productive, paid less and disproportionately female).
There are a bunch of reasons why the pay gap exists. I've considered two here (part-time work, "female" negotiating behaviour) and dismissed a ridiculously common "refutation" of it (i.e. the why would you employ expensive men theory), as well as another rebuttal of that theory. The pay gap is over-stated, but this is because it is easier to do this than run regressions that most people don't understand. The pay gap is also dismissed out of hand because it is easier to gather data than it is to create information and knowledge from that data. This is an immensely complex issue that seems poorly explained by anything in particular. It follows that any specific framework, whether feminism, anti-feminism or anti-capitalism, is unlikely to generate an entirely convincing explanation. Indeed, it seems to me that labour market reform and attitudes to work (and work in life, maybe even life) lie at the centre of doing anything... and by reform I really mean paternity lead. Bye.
Ok, there's a lot here so bear with me while I respond.
Firstly:
2) Pay peanuts, get monkeys. If you are systematically hiring only staff that want to work for less money, you are generally going to be hiring the worse staff. It is actually more profitable to have more productive staff. (This is why slavery is bad from an economic perspective.)
This doesn't make sense in this context because we are assuming both that women and just as productive as well as being paid less. Think of it this way, you have a position available and two candidates for the job. Both candidates are identical in ability but one is a man and the other is a woman. For whatever reason, women are paid less. meaning that it is possible to hire the woman at a lower wage than the man. If the employer doesn't have some dislike for women then he can get the same productivity for less money and so will hire the woman. Now if we bring this to the larger world and assume that there is a proportion of employers who do not have a dislike for hiring women then this situation will be replicated across the board. More women will be hired because they are no less productive and cost less. This additional hiring of women will drive up demand for female labour and thus increase the wage rate for women.
Gary Becker is the man who essentially invented the field of labour economics. He studied topics traditionally considered outside the realm of economics such as drug abuse and discrimination and he won the Nobel Prize for his work. The above is essentially the argument put forward by Becker but made more specific to the topic of the thread. The idea is that employers who do dislike women and thus won't hire them will earn lower profits than firms who do hire women. The firms which hire women will then drive the sexist firms out of the market.
And the good thing about this framework is that it doesn't require perfect competition to hold true. Even if we have two firms and one of them is non-sexist then there will be a penalty for not penalty employing women. Now obviously the more firms there are the less likely there will be any discrimination. And seeing as how the wage gap is said to exist literally in every industry in every part of the world it cannot be the case that purely discriminatory views on women account for the gap.
that Jane is a productive employee is probably not going to displace one's preconceived notions about the distribution of productive women
This I have to disagree on. If firms are profit maximisers, and by and large they are, and also, crucially that their discrimination is based on a mistaken belief that women are less productive than men, then they will definitely be evaluating the performance of employees and decide on their worth solely on how well they do their job. If it appears that women are on average no less productive than men then they will take this information into account. Now if they just don't like women, Becker's argument applies. Firms, especially larger ones, dedicate a huge amount of resources to performance reviews and the vast swathe of information they gather could be used to determine whether women are more or less productive than men.
And about negotiating and paterntiy leave (a partial solution that I have mentioned in threads related to this topic before and I fully support) I am in complete agreement with you. Jello Biafra believes that the reason women get paid less is because because employers are just downright sexist. That's the point I was refuting. Negotiations skills and paternity leave almost certainly play a role in the wage gap, but that has nothing to do with sexist employers. It does have plenty to do with the capitalist system which our society operates under.
