<p>GladGradDad - my experience has been similar. All the women at the companies where I worked were paid the same as males for the same position. There was a max 2.5% pay difference upon starting that was directly related to school attended rather than gender. So some females made more than males irregardless of gpa. If you looked at the company as a whole and ignored position then males on average earned more than females BECAUSE there were more males at high level positions than females. Many years later there are more females than males at the company and if we did the same macro calculation the average female pay would be higher than male because there are now more females than males at the high level positions.</p>
<p>
I know of several faculty hiring decisions at a women’s college where a less-impressive female applicant was chosen over the male candidates. </p>
<p>The idea was to give the female students more female role models, but the result was that the female professors (as a group) paled in comparison to their male colleagues. The lesson I took away as a young college student was that women make worse lecturers and less successful researchers than men, and that I should be grateful for affirmative action programs or else I’d never get a job…</p>
<p>Some on here obviously don’t believe the aauw report. I could post a bunch of links to various academic articles from the last decade that claim to prove there is pay inequality between men and women. Why do you think this research is being published if it isn’t true? Do you tend to be skeptical of all academic research? Do you need first hand experience to believe any published report, regardless of source? How many first hand examples would change your mind?
…</p>
<p>dadx: great post! What do you think about:
<a href=“Why Women Still Can’t Have It All - The Atlantic”>Why Women Still Can’t Have It All - The Atlantic;
<a href=“1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible - The Atlantic”>1% Wives Are Helping Kill Feminism and Make the War on Women Possible - The Atlantic;
<p>
Examples are unlikely to change my mind. Good statistics will. If you show me a well-done study that controls for
- education (not just the degree, but where the degree is from and what it’s in)
- job (not just occupation, but the actual position as well as the employer)
- work history
- performance on the job</p>
<p>then I’ll listen. Anything less than that is comparing apples to oranges. </p>
<p>Look, I don’t doubt that women earn on average less than men. Most of that is arguably due to women choosing different occupations than men. There’s a question of whether society should value the services typically provided by women (e.g. childcare) as much as services typically provided by men (e.g. in the trades). But that’s not what this discussion is about. What I have not seen evidence for is that women get paid “unfairly” less even if they choose to do the same work with the same level of performance. How many examples can you give me of colleagues that are compensated differently for the same work, and the difference in wage cannot be attributed to factors other than gender?</p>
<p>
As far as I am concerned, academic publications are no more trustworthy than political campaign promises. And I work in academia.</p>
<p>
Why would someone ever publish a paper with a stunning conclusion based on poor methodology? Hmm, no incentives there…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>LOL ^^ okay, but do you expect some people to believe your publications? or not? What field are you in?</p>
<p>
But the women spend much more on shoes. ;)</p>
<p>I was never any good at asking for raises, or now, raising my rates.</p>
<p>alh “Why do you think this research is being published if it isn’t true?”</p>
<p>Much research is published because the organization wants to promote an agenda. Statistical information can be prepared and presented in many ways to give many different truths. So what really is truth? I don’t think one should disregard any study but all should be viewed with some professional skepticism.</p>
<p>^^So when an organization, or university professors, publish research that says men earn more than women what agenda are they trying to promote?</p>
<p>
This sort of falls within the ‘physical attributes’ exception somewhat that I mentioned in that they purposely wanted females because they were…females, due to the unique characteristic of an all female student body. There’s no way one can have that without gender bias being involved by definition. That’s an interesting observation you had of the profs. This is one of the reasons why gender (or race) shouldn’t be included in the selection but rather, the individual. OTOH I’m not sure they could attract the students to an ‘all female’ college if the profs were, for example, mostly male. </p>
<p>
Simply publishing something doesn’t anoint it as being truthful. Anyone can publish anything. Even the ‘truth’ can vary - something may appear to support certain conclusions based on the data points provided but when more data points are provided the conclusions may no longer be supported. The methodology is key to the validity of the conclusions.</p>
<p>This is somewhat what I mean in these apples/oranges comparisons and the more general the data point the less valid some of the conclusions often are. For example, I’ll make some wild generalizations (which may or may not be true) - there’s a much higher percentage of males in engineering, there’s a much higher percentage of females in social work and grade school teaching, engineering has a much higher starting salary than either social work or a beginning grade school teacher. If you used those stats for the analysis then one might conclude ‘males earn more than females’, but if one normalized and accounted for the disparity in numbers and employment fields and got more specific, then they’d compare female engineers against male engineers (or f vs m social workers or f vs m teachers) who have similar initial qualifications and experience. The further a study steps away from specifics and the more it uses sweeping generalizations the more inaccurate the conclusions are likely to be.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[Science</a> faculty?s subtle gender biases favor male students](<a href=“http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.full.pdf+html?with-ds=yes]Science”>http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2012/09/14/1211286109.full.pdf+html?with-ds=yes)</p>
<p>Two identical resumes, one headed John and one headed Jennifer. Jennifer was offered, on average, 87 cents on the dollar.</p>
<p>See also writeup here: [Study</a> shows gender bias in science is real. Here?s why it matters. | Unofficial Prognosis, Scientific American Blog Network](<a href=“http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/unofficial-prognosis/2012/09/23/study-shows-gender-bias-in-science-is-real-heres-why-it-matters/]Study”>Study shows gender bias in science is real. Here's why it matters. - Scientific American Blog Network) , particularly this:
</p>
<p>mathmom “I was never any good at asking for raises, or now, raising my rates.”</p>
<p>I’d hazard the guess that many men are equally reluctant to ask for raises or raise rates. If a minority of men (say 20%) are good at getting raises then those 20% would skew the average pay for males upwards. The distribution of salaries within the mean for males makes the issue of pay parity even more complex. Let’s say, just for kicks, that 80% of males make exactly the same as females but the average male pay is 105% of female pay. 20% of males are making 125% of the average for the 80% of males and the average for 100% of females. What is the solution? If you give a 5% bonus to the females then 80% of males are being discriminated against. The only winners in this hypothetical situation are males that get 125% of average pay. You could fire them all but what if some of those good negotiators are actually your star producers?</p>
<h1>111 allyphoe - applause!! sums it all up - :)</h1>
<p>allyphoe - phew, too much too read while I’m supposed to be working. First interesting comment was that the study found bias by both male and female faculty toward the female applicant resume.</p>
<p>
I disagree. Hiring mostly female faculty is not a universal practice among women’s colleges. Quite to the contrary, it seems to be rather rare. At my alma mater, I can count the departments who went out of their way to hire female faculty on one hand.</p>
<p>For anyone else who found the study to be TL;DR, below is my quickie summary of the study itself:</p>
<p>Basically, the researchers picked a representative sample of biology, chemistry, and physics tenure-track faculty members from prestigious research universities, and asked them to give brutally honest feedback about an actual applicant for a lab manager job, as part of a study on what factors go into hiring a lab manager. In reality, every person surveyed got the exact same application, for the kind of candidate who could really go either way, with the name at the top either John or Jennifer.</p>
<p>On a scale of 1-7, Jennifer was liked 0.4 points more. But she was 0.6 points less competent, 0.8 points less hireable, and 0.7 points less likely to be mentored. Oh, and she got paid 87 cents for every dollar John got paid.</p>
<p>Female faculty members treated Jennifer just as badly as the men did. Young faculty were just as bad as old. Untenured faculty just as bad as tenured. Biologists (in a field that has a high proportion of women) just as bad as physicists (still mostly men).</p>
<p>The thing that made a difference was faculty members’ scores on something called the Modern Sexism Scale [Modern</a> Sexism Scale](<a href=“http://www.psychbytes.com/Quizzes/Modern%20Sexism%20Scale/Modern%20Sexism%20Scale.htm]Modern”>http://www.psychbytes.com/Quizzes/Modern%20Sexism%20Scale/Modern%20Sexism%20Scale.htm). People who believe that “society has reached the point where women and men have equal opportunities for achievement” keep women from having equal opportunities for achievement. “Results revealed that the more preexisting subtle bias participants exhibited against women, the less composite competence and hireability they perceived in the female student, and the less mentoring they were willing to offer her. In contrast, faculty participants levels of preexisting subtle bias against women were unrelated to the perceptions of the male students composite competence and hireability, and the amount of mentoring they were willing to offer him.”</p>
<p>The AAUW study covered FAR more real people in far more real hiring places. I’d give it far more weight than one experiment that did not even have interviews.</p>
<p>
Two identical resumes from young scientists would actually indicate that the female is less accomplished. Why? Because female graduate students in the sciences are handed a lot of things on a silver platter: I got accepted to more prestigious PhD programs than my male classmates with the same qualifications, I am offered more fellowships and awards for the same accomplishments, and I even got to pass my qualifying exams with lower scores than my male classmates because the department doesn’t want to lose its female students.</p>
<p>There seems to be a similar trend towards affirmative action programs for post-doc positions. It’s not until we apply for permanent positions that females and males are treated equally. That also means that female “accomplishments” pre-permanent job can and even should be judged more critically.</p>
<p>alh “^^So when an organization, or university professors, publish research that says men earn more than women what agenda are they trying to promote?”</p>
<p>There can be any of a number of ideas that an organization seeks to promote. Let’s say that you are for a policy that guarantees women the right to return to a company within 5 years after giving birth to a child (at a new position that includes expected career progression during the off period). This policy would negate the income stagnation that may occur during child bearing/rearing years for many professional women.</p>
<p>B@r!um “At my alma mater, I can count the departments who went out of their way to hire female faculty on one hand.”</p>
<p>My mother worked as a Dept head at a private and very prestigious all girls school. I remember her complaining that the head of the school refused to hire men for teaching positions even when they were arguably more qualified. Of course based upon this other quoted study perhaps my mother was inadvertently biased against the female applicants. Kind of hard to believe since she’s definitely feminist.</p>
<p>
Well, that’s good that it’s not universal but it’s still selection based on gender for some cases according what you posted (and you know more about all female schools than I do for certain) and according to what you said it may not have always been the best decision (given your observation of your male vs female prof experiences). If nothing else, it’s more fodder for anecdotes as opposed to a widespread issue.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that there’ll be some people who’ll exert their own biases in hiring which can affect some of these studies on remuneration. This isn’t limited to male vs female but also perhaps race, religion, weight, height, political affiliation, and all kinds of other attributes. One can find anecdotes for any of these and in both directions for most of them. But these studies need to be as apples/apples as they can get. Sometimes it’s not so easy since for the reasons ‘Barium’ indicated in how not all candidates are always so equal in stats.</p>
<p>allyphoe: :)</p>