https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/ft_20...
In other words, this is a predictable consequence of the growing female-male gap in college enrollment and graduation rates:
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/11/08/whats-behin...
Pay gap for men and women only starts mid career. But this isn't the 80c on the dollar pay gap (that's median male earnings vs female). It's usually in the 90c range (iirc 93c is the median and even Uber found a pay gap in this range). There's also the glass ceiling. But neither of these things have a smoking gun to them. They are hard to solve and going to require a lot of us to start talking about them. So I'm not sure why we only discuss median gender earnings, which isn't a great way to discuss fairness. It's especially bad when we discuss median gender wages as if they are controlling for variables (like the 90c+ gap does, which you see in part of this data). But don't let the bad discussion of median earnings prevent a discussion over the actual phenomena that exist.
Edit: there's a lot I didn't say here, I'm glad others are adding more. But let's also try to be nuanced because it is a complicated topic. I also wanted to plug a podcast "The Pay Check" which goes in depth into these issues, including attempts to solve them. It's from the perspective of economics (by Bloomberg) and discusses all the common misconceptions like child rearing.
There's a conundrum where you either have to respect women's choices and see the mid career pay gap as inevitable, or see women's desire to be prioritize child rearing over career as internalized misogyny.
is different from
> affects both equally
Perhaps the first should have been "women having and raising children should result in no interruptions of their career growth or earnings greater than those experienced by men".
Greater than men in general, or men who make the the same choices as the impacted women?
It’s possible this doesn’t create a 100% balance, but it’s also not 100% balanced that one partner was able to spend far more time with the children (and usually both parents want to despite what some debate participants will say), and other non financial costs and benefits.
One way to solve this would be to require all marriages to have a pre negotiated divorce agreement with experienced advisors on both sides to discuss what would be fair compensation in case of divorce.
That can easily be balanced via legislation. What cannot be balanced is one partner having to take on all the health risks and lifelong consequences of childbirth and breastfeeding, etc.
The net result of this is that men are more likely to die any given year during their careers and have a life span shorter by several years than women do.
Sure, but let’s be careful not to cherry pick the statistics. It’s still true that the average life expectancy for men is about 5 years shorter than women.
I notice that there are attempts in our society to balance some areas of risk but not others. Breast cancer funding is much greater than prostate cancer funding despite the latter killing more people, etc.
Good thing it's opt-in. Why would you want to legislate opt-in behaviour?
If you are talking about overall career impact post birth, you would only expect equal outcomes if men and women are making the same choices and have the same preferences.
If the "problem" is simply different numeric outcomes between men and women, it ignores any differences between the wants of men and women.
There are a lot of career obligations that aren't fundamental to productivity. For example, people are largely expected to go to an office and be physically present for eight consecutive hours. This makes certain kinds of childcare activities impossible. But if instead flexible hours or work-from-home were the norm, this choice would no longer be necessary and it no longer becomes a "one or the other" situation.
Consider something like the idea that pumping at work is unprofessional. This is a 100% cultural thing. Pumping does not make somebody less productive. But if we don't consider this cultural influence we might just say "well women just choose to stay at home when they have infants and there is nothing we can do about that."
This honestly sounds pretty fishy-- like they wanted to goose their diversity stats for free while not actually changing any part of their org chart.
I do know someone who was promoted while on maternity leave (@FANG). She absolutely deserved the promotion and has done a great job leading her (analytics, engineering adjacent) team. She subsequently went on leave for a second child (no second promotion that I’m aware of).
In my country during maternity leave the work contract is legally frozen, no change is allowed of any kind (due to a history of frauds with salaries, the government pays a big part of it so there were cases where they increased the salary 10 times for the duration of the leave). Still, nobody said anything because that target beats the law. The only thing they did not touch was the salary because this is the only thing the government is checking.
People may have different commitments to work after having kids, and compensation can and should be adjusted based on that.
I definitely work much less than I did pre-kids, but my compensation has gone up significantly. I think this is typical for men. My wife also works less for more money post kids (but she had kids while doing postdoctoral work, and then moved to private industry).
In my opinion general "years of experience" is not a large contributing factor in regards to pay anyways. Relevant experience on specific projects using certain technologies and expertise in specific domains matters a lot more. It's supply and demand.
Someone else is the same age, graduated the same year, from the same school, but took two years off of work and therefore has 8 years of experience. They make $80k, which is less than their colleague.
See the difference?
Except that 1 year off has put them 1 year behind their peers who now have 11 years experience. Their skills have also decayed by a year, and they missed 1 year of developments in the industry.
People shouldn’t be penalised for having kids, but likewise it should be recognised that having children does impact career trajectory in a non-discriminatory way.
Sorry, the market pays based on experience, not on age! You're asking for a subsidy.
* raising children would require zero time and overhead
* or people who don’t have children should be barred from working more hours than a working mother can reasonably work.
Of course this entire discussion is mostly classist to such a degree many people literally don’t see it. For a mother to work full time with young children requires a lower paid (usually a woman) person to take on the child rearing role. So it’s sexist for a woman to take a few years prioritizing her children, but it’s equality for another woman to raise those children?
This is a common misconception. The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this. It does affect the glass ceiling though, even if the women don't choose to have kids. I really do mean there's no smoking gun. You can even account for worse negotiations, prioritization of work life balance, work flexibility, family, and you don't fully explain a gap (albeit it does get smaller, but remember that even a 1% difference is significant here).
I really suggest listening to Rebecca Greenfield's The Paycheck. The first season goes into all this. I think it's a lot more convoluted and surprising to many. It's also not focused on median earnings and so I think is really good if you want to understand fairness (glass ceiling is also discussed). And I don't think anyone disagrees with your second paragraphs. Women should have choice. But there's still gaps that aren't explained and we shouldn't just easily dismiss them. I should also mention that this gap is in no way a phenomena strictly in America. It's global.
A lot of economists have put in a lot of work trying to understand this and there really is no agreement on what does cause it. So don't dismiss things so easily. Most problems in our modern and complex world have many casual factors and large casual graphs.
> My understanding is most of the mid career pay gap is due to women prioritizing child rearing over career.
>The gap I'm talking about can't fully be explained by this
Articles like this are where I get my understanding. https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
And I want to quote something from this article that you may also find from my above comment
> As Goldin put it recently to Freakonomics, "It's hard to find smoking guns."
It's standard to consider the null hypothesis as the answer if it lies within the margin of error of what you're measuring. Last I knew comparing exact jobs (not merely professions), actual hours worked (no "full time" category) and years of experience (not age) explained more than 90% of the gap. Are all these other causes you mention measured accurately enough to ensure the null isn't within the error range?
However, people take “explained” to mean “it’s fine, we don’t have to do anything” when instead it’s actually the stuff we know we should be targeting.
* Men on average work higher paying jobs, male dominated fields are on average higher paying.
* Men on average hold higher titled positions in a given field, the glass ceiling is a thing, and women have a harder time becoming managers and directors.
* Women have fewer years of of experience on average because of childcare.
This is all stuff we need to work on because “controlling” for all this stuff and then forgetting about it makes it seem like it’s totally fine that 99 men and 1 woman are senior SWEs as long as the 1 woman makes the same pay.
Sometimes you can find the explanation and it is "totally fine", if your goal is to eliminate gender discrimination. This is only a problem if your goal is equality of outcome, independent of preference.
>Women have fewer years of of experience on average because of childcare.
It has been long shown that women desire to raise children more than men. Fixing this difference would require making both men and women do something other than what they want. For what purpose, so that the numbers are symmetrical?
>Men on average work higher paying jobs, male dominated fields are on average higher paying.
As long as these fields are open and non-discriminatory to women, there is no problem! Some fields do have discrimination issues, and we should focus on that, not try to fight the market demand for occupations.
>all this stuff and then forgetting about it makes it seem like it’s totally fine that 99 men and 1 woman are senior SWEs as long as the 1 woman makes the same pay.
If women don't want to be SWEs, this isn't a problem. Last I checked, there was a massive imbalance in computer science application and graduation rates. Last I checked, SW firms were tripping over themselves to hire and promote women.
At some point, you have to question the premise that numbers would be equal if you removed unequal barriers and discrimination. At some point, if your sole metric is equal numbers, you have to force men and women to do jobs that they don't want to.
> At some point, you have to question the premise that numbers would be equal if you removed unequal barriers and discrimination. At some point, if your sole metric is equal numbers, you have to force men and women to do jobs that they don't want to.
I feel like we're 99% in agreement, the difference is that I see a 20-30% difference among groups that have more variance within them than between them as evidence of those barriers and discrimination and a system that continuously reinforces the same outcomes. And it goes both ways, the barriers that push men out nursing, child care, and art are just as important, the difference is what data you use to demonstrate it.
#First, the simple numeric argument: Small innate differences in mean preference can have large effects at the margin for normal distributions. If you take two identical distributions, and move the mean of one 20-30%, the number that falls above or below a threshold changes a lot more than 20-30%.
For example, decrease the mean of one curve a single standard deviation (~35%), and the tail drops a lot more. A value that is in the top 2% of the first curve is now the top 0.1% of the second curve. That is a 2000% difference in samples above the value.
#The second is the feedback-loop argument: People have preferences, and lets assume the innate preferences between genders is small. Over time, positive feedback loops can amplify these differences. This doesn't have to be sinister, but can be as simple as becoming interested in what are exposed to via same gendered friends and what your social network does.
You see it often in certain communities or families that specialize in a given trade (eg, my uncle was a carpenter, or my aunt was a nurse). The only way to stop these influences is to raise people in a bubble or gender randomize their friends and role models. What we DO want to avoid negative feedback loops where people are actively pushed away from a trade. (e.g. inhospitable workplaces for male nurses or female carpenters)
This is a false, when you actually ask people of their desires rather than repeat sexist tropes more men want children than women. This actually makes sense when you think about it since the expectation is the woman will be doing the majority of the childrearing and they're the ones expected to make sacrifices.
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/actually-men-have-al...
>The Statistics Canada General Social Survey of the family has been asking Canadian men and women about their fertility intentions for decades with this question, "How many children do you plan to have, including the ones that have already been born or you are expecting at this time?"
>When this question was first asked in 1990, more women than men expressed a disinterest in having children. Among childless men and women between the ages of 15 and 44, 15 per cent of women said they had no desire to have children in the future compared to only 10 per cent of men. Additionally, more men than women expressed a desire to have children in every age group and regardless of whether they were married, single, cohabitating, or divorced.
Just to be clear, the above discussion is not about median wages between genders, it is about median wages between genders for similar job experience and job titles. The former is a 17% difference in wages and is related to men and women choosing different types of jobs that have differences in pays while the latter is a discussion about differences in pay for similar work. There are different decisions that women make in a job, but that doesn't explain everything. Hence the "no smoking gun" argument that keeps being said.
Which is why it is unexplained. i.e. We don't have strong confidence in the causal structure. No one is really disagreeing with this. But to create causal graphs you have to have... causes. If you can't measure something well then you can't form that graph well.
I would strongly recommend this podcast to anyone that enjoys leftwing propaganda, strong rebuttals of strawman arguments, and misinterpreted statistics.
In particular interesting was their implicit praise of slave-labour-supported childcare in Singapore and their analysis of the problem of falling birth rate by studying China.
I feel the whole women empowerment has gone so far that it's like soccer goal keeper complaining they can't go out on the field and score a goal, and when they start doing that the opposing team scores goals on you and then your team loses.
Sigh. No.
IMO the reason men are drafted is men are disposable. Much less valuable than women.
Because... they can have babies, right? If you send women to war then your population dies. This just reinforces what I'm trying to say that there are "roles" which are crucial to a civilization (or society?). I'm not saying they can't change or evolve.
I think there is underlying requirement (not necessarily just biological, but they are requirements of some kind) that allows you to be "valuable" to society, vs. "disposable".
Can women fight in modern combat competently? Yes. This was true even 80 years ago during WW2 (see the Soviets, Chinese, French resistance, etc.).
The problem is that people seem to view women casualties as too high of a cost, so if you send women into front line positions and they get seriously hurt or killed it lowers morale and becomes a homefront PR disaster. So countries with the luxury to not pay that price like the United States choose not to send women to frontline positions to avoid the PR problem, while countries like Israel are willing to take the PR hit knowing that they're a small country surrounded by adversaries.
Would anyone know who Jessica Lynch is if she had been a man?
We all are, after all, governed by our evolutionary journey; we're just simple animals at our core.
I agree, and there's an easy test: I know from experience that there's a non-negligible slice of the population that look down on men who make this choice.
Individuals of whatever gender exist within incentive landscapes, and they act within those landscapes to result in the best life for them. Many men and women wish they had different incentive landscapes to navigate through. My argument would be that creating a world where men and women can choose their paths according to their individual dispositions without penalty would result in one where more men and women are happy, which is why I'd like to nudge our existing world in that direction.
Adding incentives, nudging, and valorizing specific actions puts equality of outcome over equality of choice.
We shouldn't push a trend to respect and valorize men who stay home more than those who work. We should push a trend to respect them equally
We are in violent agreement.
Where I thought we differed is providing preferential incentives to men who stay home over those who work.
I'll buy the part about adding incentives.
Nudging and valorizing, however, are inevitable aspects of human life. Abolishing heroism is not realistic (and, honestly, it's a pretty mild incentive anyway).
About half the men I know with kids would prefer to be primary care taker.
If we somehow convince more men to want to be the primary caretaker, and feel more strongly about does that necessarily make the world a better place? It means both more men and more women don't get what they want.
Couples with compatible desires in line with the status quo would be unaffected. Couples with compatible desires opposite the status quo would purely benefit. Couples with discordant desires would negotiate the allocation of responsibilities more freely without social expectations biasing the outcome, which would lead to one partner benefiting and the other losing, but in a way that's either neutral or leads to a net benefit across the two individuals.
There is also the hypothetical idea that stay at home dads get a called pussies, but I've never seen it come up.
Hell, until recently it was only women who had access to maternity leave, paternity leave in most countries seems to be quite a new concept.
wow
This phrasing is bizarre and reflects a cramped notion of gender equality. Child rearing is something that has to happen. We will already face economic challenges due to our increasing ratio of retirees to workers, and bad things will happen economically if our population begins to contract.
Now, Americans can allow the fertility rate to drop below 2, and bring in immigrants, but that’s not a sustainable equilibrium. You’re just outsourcing the burden to immigrant families from cultures that don’t have the same notions of gender equality.
At the end of the day, women (as a group, not necessarily individually) have an indispensable role as mothers. They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do. We should approach discussions of how to keep women in the workforce long term recognizing those facts.
Do I think American society needs to incentivize having children through government intervention because of our falling birth rate? Yes
Do I think those women are making the right choice for both themselves and society by choosing to at the margin spend more time with their kids than working? Yes
>They’re not “prioritizing child rearing over career” they’re attending to the essential work of society that only they can do.
From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
> From a society stand point that's true. But when a couple is deciding how they are going to balance work and parenting they aren't thinking about society they are thinking about their kid and themselves and what is important to them. And together they are more commonly choosing the mother to be the primary care giver over their husband and this choice has consequences which is a part of the pay gap.
This isn’t a “choice” like deciding what car to buy. Fully 56% of women with kids under 18 would prefer to not work at all and stay home instead: https://news.gallup.com/poll/186050/children-key-factor-wome.... Only 39% would prefer to work outside the home. Meanwhile only 26% of men would prefer to stay home.
When society has two groups, and one group is biologically capable of reproducing the species, and expresses strong preferences for caregiver roles, and the other isn’t and doesn’t, it’s not just about individual choices. It’s about accommodating reality—just like we design airplane seats around real humans and require buildings to have bathrooms for men and women.
There’s concrete things we could do. For example, right now, it’s extremely difficult for women who take time off to raise young kids to return to the workforce. We could, for example, make it illegal for employers to consider childcare-related resume gaps in hiring decisions. There’s a whole universe of system-level things we could retool if we went in with the assumption that women would want to take a few years off work at some point to attend to child rearing without permanently downshifting their careers.
There's also the conundrum where you either have to have 2.1 children on average to continue your species or see your population crash generation after generation until there's not enough people to maintain the aggregate level of complexity your society relies on to keep functioning and then the bottom falls out of it completely. It seems our WEIRD way of life is fundamentally at odds with the continuation of our species, but this particular facet of the culture war seems to have been won so long ago these days you'd have a hard time publicly taking any position that would maybe bring us back in line with a birth rate not below replacement level. I was raised on the values of the current narrative, so I've always been in support of all these things, and now I see the writing is basically on the wall and it makes me kind of sad to know that at some point when we or our children get sent back to the stone age that women will basically wind up barefoot and pregnant again :(
And to head one common criticism off: That's not an argument for eugenics. People freely choosing to use contraceptives & consensual sterilization is a totally different animal from people being targeted for extermination. Lack of that technology presents another evil, where people are forced to have kids they don't want or can't care for.
So, I actually agree with you here. I'm also not advocating for eugenics, but I'm approaching the "problem" from a slightly different angle. Re: "As a species, we are going to have to make some hard decisions about the quality of life we want to have" - this is where I disagree. I think we're fundamentally uncapable of doing that at the scale necessary to get back to a sustainable world as such a decision essentially equates to eugenics which no one will go for.
Most people simply aren't intellectually honest about sustainability problems. My mental model of it all is "it isn't sustainable and hence it will not be sustained" which leads me to the conclusion that "at some point this ends". The question is when / how? You mentioned the lowered birth rates being a good thing and I said I agreed in part because it's the only way you can get to a lower population in a gentle manner without die offs from mass starvation or worse genocide.
Where I'm very, very bearish about all of this is that I don't see a gentle transition to a more sustainable world taking place. Your take was we're going to have to make some hard choices, my take is we're going to continue to make the unsustainable choices for long enough that our hand will likely be forced.
I just can't help but think that there is a critical mass of people required to maintain the infrastructure of our society below which the behavior of the system becomes non-linear and essentially the whole thing crashes. The scale of infrastructure and the complexity that underpins it was build and based on the assumptions of society as large as we have now. Now, we may be able to scale some of that back and reduce the complexity to match, and that's probably a best case scenario, but I think our need for optimism leads us to don the rose-colored glasses here and adopt hope as a strategy. I don't have a crystal ball and can't tell which particular way it's going to go, but I'm at least prepared for it to go the way of the worst case scenario in which things end up like the end of the bronze age.
TL;DR - hope for the best, plan for the worst.
1% of $60k is $600, which after tax is probably $400. Not exactly life changing money.
And we can’t measure the quality of the focus per day, obviously. (But we can measure the toilet time. It’s mean but results always go the same way).
The article in OP says the gap starts below 30 in 91% of metro areas.
[1] https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php...
As it stands, this focus on women exclusively is only reproducing the divide from generation to generation, male managers being reluctant to hire women after the 2016 #metoo movement.
I don't have much proof, but it is almost certainly caused by the lost experience/networking/politicking of maternity leave. There are some very rough studies and pieces like this [1]. To me, it is obvious that if an athlete took a season off in their 20's that they would experience a gap and ceiling in their lifetime earnings compared to those that didn't. Having a baby in your 30's can be this transformational as many future CEOs would be starting their upper management careers around this time. If this is indeed the case, there is no clear solution as forcing paternity leave just doubly hurts the family but would equalize the aggregate statistic.
[1] - https://www.forbes.com/sites/elanagross/2019/05/14/how-paid-...
The best study I could find at a moment's notice is [1]; didn't read the full study in depth, just the write-up, but it seems to be a large factor.
[1]: https://www.vox.com/2018/2/19/17018380/gender-wage-gap-child...
Thanks! I updated my comment
Is a big red flag for me.
You can't control for age. This subject is generational. The underpaid 40 year old women in 2010, are the same underpaid 50 year old women now. We didn't get a new group to sample.
We can talk about 'the average 30 year old' within one generation. We can talk about 'the average 30 year old' across time. But they are easily mixed up and mean very different things.
'mid career' is not a useful phrase.
---
In the same vein, the middle is steadily shifting as our pension age shifts from one generation to the next.
I worked at a union shop where everyone was paid on a tenure based scale, and you qualified for advances as long as you had 500 hours of paid (working or not) time in a calendar year. There was literally no way to have a pay gap.
But… a group of women complained, and the company agreed to open a few female only promotions to buy them off.
There is enormous quantities of analysis.
This anecdote you tell does not counter that
Medians without context are dangerous. If you’re trying to assert discrimination, something like adjusted hourly wage makes more sense.
Another stat will be total compensation male v. female; this is the statistic used to make this point in union shops with pay scales. Then the argument shifts to assert bad promotion practices.
The article states that in ~10% of USA cities young women earn the same or more than men.
If my arithmetic is working that implies that in ~90% of cities young women earn less than men.
But, if we would assume that people keep on getting more and more productive due to corporations optimizing for productivity wouldn't we see a drop off of both women and men at the same time? I don't think we would legitimately seem the existing of displacement but actually mutual decreasing.
Numbers vary, but even as of today there are low-single-digit millions of stay at home fathers (under the liberal definition of "18+ male with children in the home who does not work") vs. about ~1m total in the late 80's. Seems like it may account for a point or two on the graphs, but not much more.
For a high-earning couple in a high-tax state, this could be ~50%.
In generations past, that was done by women who were counted as not having a job (despite working longer hours than their husbands, 7 days a week). That doesn't need to be the case -- and in fact, dual-income households can create jobs: cleaners, cooks (delivery drivers etc), and childcare. In my grandma's generation, a woman's household duties also included gardening and preserving foods, and making/repairing clothes -- but those jobs have been outsourced so completely that they're now seen as quirky hobbies.
- Loss of manufacturing jobs since 1950, primarily held by men
- Women's increasing participation in the labor force
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-labor-f...
Some other people think it's women entering the workforce, but that not a 1 for 1 affect here and it seems women have possibly hit a similar downward point.:
https://fredblog.stlouisfed.org/2021/03/women-in-the-labor-f...
We have significantly decreased the cost of chores. They are still extremely painful, but 1/10 the burden they used to be.
Young men (used to) bring assertiveness and a created an atmosphere of competition.
Maybe these roles aren't so clearly divided any more. For the vast number of job positions, it doesn't matter much in terms of competence who gets the job. It matters so much more that the coworkers are comfortable and enjoy the workplace.
Men had obvious advantage in physically demanding jobs, but fewer and fewer of these remain.
I as a man, prefer to work with women. I've met some remarkable women and learned a lot from them and not only in tech.
Stereotype is just another word for "expectations based on experiences". It's not claimed to be finite absolute truth.
You should look at the prime age employment participation rate https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/LNS11300060
The issue is at the margin there are a lot of kids going to college who are wasting their time. But still most of the kids in college are making a good financial decision even if all of the aren't.
Not likely. The data continues to show that incomes are stagnant. If there was a financial benefit, not just filtering, incomes should be rising alongside the rise of college attainment.
The filtering effect is real. Colleges put a lot of effort into rejecting people who aren't "born successful" to maintain an aura of prestige. Colleges pumping out graduates with severe mental disabilities that hinder learning, for example, would not serve the brand well. The model only works if you limit the possibility of graduation to those considered the "best of the best". The same people who are more likely to do well in their careers. There being an income spectrum, with some making a lot of money, and some making very little, predates the existence of college.
The decline in college attainment among males no doubt comes on the back of colleges recognizing that males are now less valuable in society (i.e. they are less likely to be among the best of the best) and apply the appropriate filters in response, not the other way around.
No? Back in my day community colleges still had relatively stringent entrance requirements and would not see you graduate if you did not meet a certain level of academic excellence during the course of being there, not to mention the imposition of a financial barrier to have the economically disadvantaged think twice. The expectations weren't as high as college. They certainly were not gunning for the same calibre of people as Harvard. But they weren't fawning over people with Down syndrome either.
Maybe things have changed drastically in the intervening years, but in my day community college was seen as the place to go for those around the middle of the pack. Those who did reasonably well at things, but were not the stars, with admissions expectations to match. What you tell us about income mirrors the social expectations. Those who can make it through college are higher on the "born to do well" spectrum than those who could only make it through high school.
Let's face it, a lot of people out there could never make it through college, or even community college, even if they wanted nothing more in life. It can be hard, and when things are hard, some will fail. They just weren't born with the "right stuff". And it turns out that "right stuff" can also impact one's career in significant ways. The aforementioned people with Down syndrome aren't CEOs at a Fortune 500s just because they didn't go to college.
I think things have indeed changed. The role you describe is filled by state schools now. These days the biggest admissions barrier to community college is the residency requirement. Fulfill that and you’re pretty much guaranteed a spot. (Source: attended community college for some time)
Last time I saw the numbers only ~40% of Americans had reached some kind of post-secondary achievement, so even semi-recently it has still be fairly abnormal to graduate from college, including community college.
Incomes are stagnant, so as more and a wider set of the population attain such scholastic achievement in community college the averages on this level will mathematically have to show a decline, which will narrow the gap spoken of before relative to today's high school.
This is a good argument college isn't making workers more valuable. But that doesn't mean college won't increase your personal income. Just imagine a world where all the jobs stay the same but employers preferentially pick college grabs because they believe they're smarter and harder working.
This value the degree holder gets is called signalling theory. And it'll make the degree holder richer without making the economy richer.
If that hypothetical world existed the smarter and harder working people would be the only ones capable of graduating from college, and so the economic order would remain unchanged, leaving no economic benefit for anyone.
Furthermore, the smart and hard working people going to college would realize a net loss in their economic potential as, given that employee value did not rise, their income would not increase to offset the larger expense of going to college. Smart people aren't going to accept lesser economic potential without anything else in return. They are smart enough to know what they bring to the workplace.
And, so, if that hypothetical world existed the smart and hard working people would quickly stop going to college, pushing colleges to crush academic standards so that anyone could pass in order to maintain some kind of student base. But soon employers would catch on that college graduates are actually the dumb and lazy and any signal potential that existed for a brief moment in time would be lost.
When I was a kid, many decades ago, there were always rumours of what you describe being the reality at some point in history, but it hasn't been a thing since I've been an adult. If it was ever the reality it quickly succumbed to the unstable nature of such an arrangement. I strongly suspect it never happened, though. The whole idea has the markings of it being an advertising campaign.
Indeed, the data does show that the smart and hard working are more likely to have a higher income within the same cohort over those who aren't as smart or hard working. Colleges also try to attract the same kind of person. This develops an undeniable correlation. But the smart and hard working would still have the higher incomes even if college magically disappeared, just as they did before college was a thing. It is not a causal relationship.
Where did you come up with this idea that a degree is a medical cure?
But it sounds like we can agree the degree makes the individual better off in this world. Even if it doesn't compared to another world.
Not at all...? I think you've misinterpreted my comments.
> But it sounds like we can agree the degree makes the individual better off in this world
When the degree is used as 'quota', to use a Canadianism, into a supply managed profession (doctors, lawyers, etc.), then yes, we can agree. The data is clear that supply management has proven that it can artificially inflate incomes, making those inside the inner circle better of than they would have been in a rational market, at the cost of denying entry to those outside of the special group. In Canada, dairy and poultry farmers simply buy quota to achieve the same outcome. No schooling necessary. You will find that how you get into the inner circle is just an implementation detail.
But when you exclude those with 'quota', the numbers get interesting. Those with only a bachelors degree are less likely to be found among high income earners than those with no degree. That may seem surprising at first, but actually isn't. Those who are economically desirable are compelled away from their studies before they finish. It's just the failures who nobody wanted to hire, so to speak, who reach graduation.
So, there's a whole lot of depends. If you have a professional degree, the numbers show it helps. Not because of the degree, but because of the distorted market associated with having a degree that brings economic value to those who jumped through the right hoops. If you have only a bachelors degree, however, it seems to hinders. At best it has no effect. However, since there is a cost to attaining a bachelors degree (even if just the cost of your time, but certainly most will also see a monetary cost), we know it always hinders in the net. Unless, again, it is the stepping stone towards a professional degree.
Median income of a plumber is $59,880 [2].
The big gaps you'll find rely on either average income (where an uncapped high + hard capped low = inflated numbers) or household income. There are numerous biases that deserve mentioning, but the simple component of college debt vs earn while you lean means plumbers are probably already better off on "average".
But I think my argument that >50% of college grads are better off having gone to college than plumbing school is true.
If you broke it into quartiles i bet the top quartile college graduate does much better than the top quartile plumber. The second quartile grad does moderately better than plumbers. The 3rd quartile about the same and the 4th significantly worse.
I see the quartile data for plumbers trying to find it for bachelor grads.
Yes, as long as college here means that one has a professional degree (MD, JD, etc.), where access is granted to a career with an artificially constrained labour supply, thereby producing artificially high incomes. Of course, it's the supply management that boosts incomes, not some mystical power of the degree itself.
Interestingly, having only a bachelor degree seems to put you in a worse position than without, based on what we see in the makeup of high income earners. Which probably isn't too surprising. Graduating from college, save striving for a professional degree to gain access to an artificial market, is where you end up if you weren't already found to be useful in the economy. It's a sign of someone failing economically.
They had to spend 14,000+ hours in order to earn those wages. Also depends on what their expenses are and if they are saving anything.
The purported wage gap was always a manifestation of other facts like aggregate job choice, as shown in the death gap — that men die 10x as often in the workplace, according to BLS statistics.
Here's a detailed article that goes into these things: https://www.vox.com/2017/9/8/16268362/gender-wage-gap-explai...
It makes sense that young women would earn more, but the gender-wage gap appears once you get into middle age as by that point childrearing expectations have destroyed women's careers.
Most people hate their jobs[1] and not everyone wants to work a 9-5. Raising a child can actually be more fulfilling than working for a tax filing company for example.
[1] https://www.staffsquared.com/blog/why-85-of-people-hate-thei...
My Wife Won't Get A Job While I Work Myself To Death: Why This Is Unfair
https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/antonia-865/my-wife-wont-ge...
We had to decide all by ourselves how our family would handle it.
This could possibly influence you if you have no idea and no desires yourself.
Very few have no ideas and no desires about having and raising/taking care of kids. Particularly once the kids are there.
The wage gap is largely a function of how men are expected to work more at worse jobs to provide for women and children.
They're two sides of the same coin, of course. But the relentless focus on how gender roles victimize women serves to distract from the fact that gender roles are a two way street that women are co-equal enforcers of.
Not just expected but also want to.
Money for men is like makeup for women - it makes the person (appear) more attractive.
Better stated, they choose to, in response to social expectations. People would make different choices given different incentives. It's reasonable to work to eliminate social expectations that are conditioned on the gender of the individual.
Men want young sexy women. Women want strong successful men.
But if the larger pay gap we fight over is explained, that explanation is dismissed because it doesn’t fit the narrative.
The facts don’t matter. What story the facts tell, and what story is heard and believed, does.
While these traits can be advantageous in some situations, modern education often requires sitting still and focusing for hours.
Is that a modern phenomenon? At what point in history didn't college level and higher education require sitting still and focusing?
Sure, modern education can be seen somewhat as a proxy for modern jobs. But it also is used as gatekeeping for jobs that have no business requiring prior education and which did not just a few decades prior.
Even when jobs don't "technically" require a degree these days - those holding them raises the bar on everyone else. If you can hire all college educated baristas for your coffee shop, you likely don't get down to the 18 year old kid who just wants to work hard on something meaningful and directly in front of him - even if they would make better employees in the end. No reason to take any chances if you can get pre-vetted mediocracy.
I'd argue the gates are being raised now in tech as well - many entry level positions in IT that you once could talk your way into and learn on the job are now credentialed.
Interesting times.
Which is been rather strongly been debunked in the last 20-30 years of modern research. Testosterone does not cause aggression, nor does it causes poor concentration. One of the few surviving theories on what testosterone actually do is that it amplify cultural defined behavior associated with social status and sex, primarily during encounters where status might be lost.
Abnormal levels of either low or high testosterone is associated with irritability, mood swings, poor concentration, and even delusions. Those findings are quite similar to studies on estrogen and progestogen.
I know this is just one example, but I remember the pretty fascinating study linked below quite well, where mens' testosterone levels were the determining factor in seeing how they reacted to their dogs' loss in an agility competition: men with high levels of testosterone punished their dogs by yelling and hitting them, men with lower levels of testosterone supported, petted and praised their animals. I don't think it's that much of a stretch to see how the "high testosterone response" would have been a status benefit to the man in question in the not-too-distant past, but now is much more likely to be a liability.
https://news.utexas.edu/2006/09/19/research-reveals-connecti...
The first is a meta study done on testosterone by Robert Sapolsky. An other (which is referenced in that one) is a theory called the challenge hypothesis as it applies to humans, which makes predictions that testosterone rise along social status (as it apply to sexual reproduction), and it boost protective behavior in the case that status is challenged.
One famous experiment was a version of the game theory experiment called the ultimatum game. If the experiment is carefully constructed in a way where social status is maintained by cooperation, and status is lost by aggression that rewards personal gain, people injected with testosterone behave more cooperative and less aggressive. A noticeable finding was that if participants was told they got injected by testosterone, but it was in reality a placebo, the participant then acted more aggressively and less cooperative, displaying contrast between the effect and the cultural perception.
Testosterone has a few other effects, among those is that they disrupt receptors for female hormones that promote maternal behavior and bonding. Dog-human interaction promotes excretion of that female hormone in both humans (men and women) and dogs, a finding that itself has made some news.
In modern time, social status still play a huge role. High status for men is highly correlated with successful reproductive success, better health and longer life. The benefit of having testosterone rise after gains in social status is a biological balance act, boosting protective behavior at a time where the potential risk from a loss in social status is at their peak. It also illustrate why testosterone levels goes down after a partner has given birth, as at that time the cost of lower social status is significant less and the benefit of improved bonding capabilities is a reproductive advantage.
There is absolutely a correlation between education being focused on female success (a combination of predominantly female teaching staff and optimising for traits generally held by women such as agreeableness) and the trends we've been seeing for 30 years now.
Unfortunately this is not the popular narrative, but it does need to be discussed.
EDIT: I, unlike the parent, am not trolling, so if you're going to downvote I would prefer a rebuttal.
Citation 1 (agreeableness as a direct consequence of academic success): https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S104160802...
Citation 2 (women on average are more agreeable than men): https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00178
Citation 3 (Gender distribution of academic success over the last few decades): https://w3.unece.org/PXWeb2015/pxweb/en/STAT/STAT__30-GE__04...
Citation 4 (Gender distribution of teachers in the USA): https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/clr
Citation 5 (Gender of teacher affecting academic performance of same gender): https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/10.1086/696203
So we have direct correlation with a personality trait, it being attributed to a sex and a seeming consequence.
I could be wrong, but while correlation does not equal causation: this does seem to be a very strong correlation.
As defined: “Systematic discrimination, also called institutionalized discrimination, refers to a method of discrimination which occurs regularly in the workplace as an inherent part of the company through interactions and processes creating a disadvantage for people with common set characteristics such as race, gender and disability over a long period of time. Systematic discrimination is not apparent at first sight but is actually systematic in its application of policies and practices.”
Similar evidence is presented commonly to explain why the executives are predominantly male, I'm not sure why the circumstances must be different here.
The University which had the programme I liked the most didn't offer for scholarships for men that I could apply for, only for women or trans-women.
So if they want to make it/continue their careers after having children, they need to take themselves much more seriously in their 20s.