The old 75-80 cents on the dollar wage gap that some people still cite (including this article) drops drastically once correcting for occupation and experience, but women still earn less then men even when doing the same job at the same company. You can click through the link in the article to get that data. [1]
The reported pay difference is 4% more to men than women for identical roles at identical companies. The pay difference grows to 7% for women in their mid 30s.
Wealth compounds, and the increase in the gap over time is a double whammy. Women wind up significantly less wealthy than their male peers by the time they hit 35, for the same jobs.
I don't know what's up with all the conspiratorial rejection of these basic stats. We all know very smart women, and we all know they're paid worse than their male colleagues. Surely, if it's right in front of your goddamned eyes, there's a problem!
That's an easy one. There is a massive political movement for solving the wage gap; and that political movement is overwhelming dominated by people who insist highly misleading statistics, and call out anyone who questions those statistics as sexist.
This is why you don't want to lie in politics. Once people catch on, they won't believe the kernel of truth you were basing the lie on; they'll just assume your still lieing (which is objectivly closer to the truth than believing the original claims being made).
Do they take years of experience, days & hours worked, overtime and salary negotiation into account?
The claim is, if controlling for industry/company/position brings down the gap to 4%, then adding more variables will likely bring it down to 0%.
It should of course be noted that e.g. controlling for level is not justifiable if women get unfairly denied promotions.
I am not sure what corrections should be made to data comparing people with the same job at the same company. If your job has nothing to do with negotiating then your ability and/or willingness to negotiate shouldn't be the deciding factor in what compensation you receive.
I didn't say that. I explicitly pointed out that e.g. bias in promotions would result in overcorrecting if one controls for leveling.
> I am not sure what corrections should be made to data comparing people with the same job at the same company.
There are things like tenure, experience level, work hours, etc. that aren't captured by just job/company (e.g. "software engineer at x" can capture a wide range of employees that shouldn't be and aren't compensated the same). However, most of these studies don't even look at the same company, and usually only control for things like industry, experience, and degree. The Carta study doesn't even control for anything.
> If your job has nothing to do with negotiating then your ability and/or willingness to negotiate shouldn't be the deciding factor in what compensation you receive.
I agree in principle, but have come to realize that in practice it doesn't work out that way. The problem is that negotiation-willingness tends to be a proxy for how much an employee cares about compensation. Thus, employers have reason to provide higher comp to the employees who negotiate for it (since they will value the higher comp), but not to provide higher comp to employees who don't negotiate (since they are much less likely to value the extra compensation spent on them).
In practice, you end up with two sorts of companies. One kind refuses to negotiate or match counter-offers, and tends to have relatively low compensation across the board; these companies typically have mission-driven employees who don't prioritize compensation. You have the other kind that does negotiate, and often offers relatively high compensation to everyone, but particularly those who negotiate for it; this kind of company typically has a mix of mission-driven and compensation-driven employees.
In my experience, the distribution of mission-driven vs. compensation-driven people is not equal across the genders. This may very well be due to socialization.
a more readable source: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/the-true-story-of-the-gender...