Hacker News Reader

Comment by notahacker | Hacker News Reader

It's not necessarily good news for women. They've talked a lot about the benefits to higher education levels amongst young women, but how much of it is down to a simple selection effect: women that are intelligent, ambitious and career-minded are more likely [quite possibly through choice] to be single and childless in their twenties? Men that are intelligent, ambitious and career-minded don't necessarily need to make the same sacrifices, hence a male cohort of single, childless twentysomethings being quite possibly less valuable to employers than the male one. It's even conceivable that young, single childless women might be both earning more than their male counterparts and still being underpaid relative to their capabilities.

View on HN

You seem to have a preconceived notion on the way the world works: Woman get paid less than men. But when encountering data that would imply the contrary, instead of simply correcting your premise, you rework the analysis of the data in a convoluted way, in order that you keep your preconceived notion about how the world works: "Woman should really be earning even more, but because of prejudices they are only earning x more than men."

All the parent comment is really saying is that "young, childless women" aren't an equivalent demographic to "young, childless men." In addition to the arguments already stated, I imagine that more men than women in the relevant age group are childless in the first place (since men are typically older than their wives). This alone means that a young woman's childlessness says more about her than a young man's does about him.

Nowhere does the comment say that women should be earning more than men. It says that if having children wasn't as much of a liability to working women as it currently is, then childlessness in women would be less associated with career-mindedness, which would cause this particular statistic to equalize somewhat.

"How much of it is down to a simple selection effect: women that are intelligent, ambitious and career-minded are more likely to be single and childless in their twenties?"

I don't remember the percentages offhand, but a lot of the reason unmarried women do better is because marriage creates a monopsony for women. Basically employers have to pay less to hire women because their BATNAs are only local instead of national or global.

I imagine this affects men married to career-minded women just as much (though they probably are the minority).

Reply on news.ycombinator.com