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Hi Nate! Thank you for taking the time to put your response together. I wanted to respect your perspective, so I read through the sources you provided, but ultimately decided that the evidence provided was poorly substantiated.
While the investigation with Google makes for an interesting case study, I would never generalize their findings to women across the workforce because, in order to do so, the sample population (women at Google) would need to accurately model the population you are generalizing out towards (women in the U.S. workforce). So, individually, this was an interesting source that I enjoyed reading, but statistically irrelevant to our conversation.
Your other two sources, an article on FEE Stories and The Suffolk Journal had some issues as well. The FEE article cited stated that there are occupations that have a disproportionately high concentration of one gender as opposed to the other (94% of child daycare service workers were female, and 2.9% of workers in logging were women). While this is totally true, in order for this comparison to substantiate the author's claim in a statistically valid way, they would need to perform a multivariate statistical analysis that takes into account the covariates being introduced.
For The Suffolk Journal, they used an article by the National Review to support the claim that, “When the choice or major, hours worked, and career choices are taken into account, the wage gap shrinks to 6.6 percent.” This article provides no source to any peer-reviewed research that supports this claim. They did provide a link to a book titled "Why Men Earn More" by Dr. Warren Farrell, but that just redirects to an article about Amazon's taxes. Unfortunately, I cannot accept this as a valid source of statistical data.
My last points of contention are unrelated to statistical discrepancies I found, but are closely related to journalistic integrity. The author of the FEE Stories article is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment, a politically conservative think tank, and the author of The Suffolk Journal article was a student journalist quoting an editorial political magazine.
These are not inherently negative qualities, but political bias is something to be aware of when researching evidence to back up your claims.
On page 4, you'll see that the median weekly earnings of women who are full-time wage and salary workers are consistently much lower than for men.
On page 7, you'll see that even in fields where women are hired in a much higher proportion than men, those women, working full-time, still earned significantly less than men in that same occupation.
On page 8, you'll see that a majority of both male and female full-time workers had a 40-hour workweek (73% and 76% respectively). Among those workers, women earned 87% as much as men (percentages were calculated to exclude people who usually work 35 or more hours per week, with variable hours). I agree with you that women often do the majority of unpaid child-rearing, and I'd like you to take that into consideration here.
Now, this percentage differs from the one cited in my article (82%), because that percentage applies specifically to white women. So, I've updated the article to correct that typo. Thank you!
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Hi Nate! Thank you for taking the time to put your response together. I wanted to respect your perspective, so I read through the sources you provided, but ultimately decided that the evidence provided was poorly substantiated.
While the investigation with Google makes for an interesting case study, I would never generalize their findings to women across the workforce because, in order to do so, the sample population (women at Google) would need to accurately model the population you are generalizing out towards (women in the U.S. workforce). So, individually, this was an interesting source that I enjoyed reading, but statistically irrelevant to our conversation.
Your other two sources, an article on FEE Stories and The Suffolk Journal had some issues as well. The FEE article cited stated that there are occupations that have a disproportionately high concentration of one gender as opposed to the other (94% of child daycare service workers were female, and 2.9% of workers in logging were women). While this is totally true, in order for this comparison to substantiate the author's claim in a statistically valid way, they would need to perform a multivariate statistical analysis that takes into account the covariates being introduced.
For The Suffolk Journal, they used an article by the National Review to support the claim that, “When the choice or major, hours worked, and career choices are taken into account, the wage gap shrinks to 6.6 percent.” This article provides no source to any peer-reviewed research that supports this claim. They did provide a link to a book titled "Why Men Earn More" by Dr. Warren Farrell, but that just redirects to an article about Amazon's taxes. Unfortunately, I cannot accept this as a valid source of statistical data.
My last points of contention are unrelated to statistical discrepancies I found, but are closely related to journalistic integrity. The author of the FEE Stories article is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment, a politically conservative think tank, and the author of The Suffolk Journal article was a student journalist quoting an editorial political magazine.
These are not inherently negative qualities, but political bias is something to be aware of when researching evidence to back up your claims.
I would like to direct you to this report released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics that covers women's earnings in 2020 (data), which, I hope will meet your standards as a reliable and accurate source of information.
On page 4, you'll see that the median weekly earnings of women who are full-time wage and salary workers are consistently much lower than for men.
On page 7, you'll see that even in fields where women are hired in a much higher proportion than men, those women, working full-time, still earned significantly less than men in that same occupation.
On page 8, you'll see that a majority of both male and female full-time workers had a 40-hour workweek (73% and 76% respectively). Among those workers, women earned 87% as much as men (percentages were calculated to exclude people who usually work 35 or more hours per week, with variable hours). I agree with you that women often do the majority of unpaid child-rearing, and I'd like you to take that into consideration here.
Now, this percentage differs from the one cited in my article (82%), because that percentage applies specifically to white women. So, I've updated the article to correct that typo. Thank you!