So you're proposing that because women given 18% less in wages that we should take advantage of that fact, underpay them, and contribute more to gender inequality in the workplace?
I'd love to see what your female coworkers think of this post.
I'd love to see what your female coworkers think of this post.
However, the employer has greater leverage because he can report the illegal to USCIS, whereas the illegal worker presumably has a precarious financial and social situation in the country and has to "take what he can get". Hence, there's a downward pressure on wages.
There's no pure, efficient, "labor market" but instead lots of small, loosely connected "labor markets" with a variety of inefficiencies - lock-in, friction, imperfect information.
An employer can exploit illegal immigrant labor because it tends to be concentrated in lower-skilled, relatively interchangeable jobs, and because illegal immigrants are in a difficult spot.
I doubt this. See the HN post from a few days ago ("I put Mr. on my CV and got a job"). It would seem that employers not only pay their females employees less, but have little faith in them to get the job done, thus they wouldn't hire them in the first place.
Thus, we have two possibilities: either nobody in the world is both aware of the potential for arbitrage and unethical enough to exploit the situation, or the wage gap is smaller than these estimates suggest.
In fact, many new-economy juggernauts like Microsoft, Google, and Facebook do precisely this. Their employee marketing aggressively recruits women. Are they doing this out of the goodness of their hearts, or because they see an economic opportunity? Ultimately it doesn't really matter - the effect is that more women get employed in positions of power. But it's quite possible that the economic arbitrage that people are pointing out is happening in practice, right now, you just don't hear about it because most arbitragers are not dumb enough to let you know what they're doing. And the effect, over a long time scale, is that businesses run by bigots are replaced by businesses with a more accurate perception of personal productivity, which leads to a more equitable world for everyone.
There really doesn't seem to be any alternative besides these three:
- Women are not underpaid or more efficient.
- There is not a noticeable number of unethical people seeking to get rich.
- People are getting rich by hiring lots of women and outcompeting everybody else who prefers men.
The last two don't look true to me, which suggests that the first one is true. I certainly could be wrong about the assumptions or conclusion, but it does suggest that.
I'm not saying that this is the case, just pointing out that you missed options that would allow the hypothesised discrimination to exist.
But many of them did...
Which is exactly what happened over the past 30 or so years.
> “[Alan] Greenspan explains his gender bias with the free market pragmatism that has become has hallmark. “I always valued men and women equally, and I found that because others did not, good women economist where cheaper than men. Hiring women does two things: it gives us better quality work for less money, and it raises the market value of women.”