Tim Worstall

Pesky Reality and the Gender Pay Gap

Further notes on the gender pay gap:

The real trouble with women is that they have a visible characteristic
(their gender) that is negatively correlated with life-time
productivity. It’s not that there aren’t many women that are as career
oriented as the most driven of men. On average, however, women tend to
not be as good an investment for an employer as men are – and it’s
impossible to tell who the ‘committed’ ones will turn out to be. By the
time it all becomes clear, most female high-flyers will have lost
valuable time in second-rate jobs, without the experience and contacts
that will secure them a job running the world and a fat pay package to
go with it.

In

4 responses

  1. jameshigham Avatar
    jameshigham

    Don’t know when you’re tongue in cheek or not but for what it’s worth, I agree with these sentiments.

    Reply
  2. Bruce G Charlton Avatar
    Bruce G Charlton

    Well, it’s an interesting thought experiment, but in fact men and women get paid pretty-much exactly the same, if you control confounders.
    This probably means that women have some advantages as employees to offset and balance the disadvantages noted in this piece.
    And I think this probably is indeed the case. When they are at work (which is not so much on average), probably women are more reliable than men – or at least the variance of productivity is probably narrower (ie. men are better and worse).
    But this is just a guess, I don’t know.

    Reply
  3. dearieme Avatar
    dearieme

    Bruce, are you saying that women are just more interchangeable than men? I think we used to phrase that more robustly in student days.

    Reply
  4. Imli Avatar
    Imli

    Have you considered that most people only stay in a job for 2-5 years nowadays at the most and that for the majority of people, promotion only happens when they change jobs to something better? I think that breaks your idea somewhat, there is not too much future value in employees for employers nowadays.
    What I think holds women back is having a family — and why not, it takes time to look after kids and/or the husband, especially if he is very busy and only has 1-2 hours per day for the family and himself. Even in our metrosexual age, men do less housework than women by a large margin, and quite often are useless at it too as they just don’t have the same nest building instincts as women have — in the end someone has to do it, and it is the women who pick up the slack, and who are stressed at work because they actually are doing 2 jobs.

    Reply

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