About a month ago, I wrote that ‘most of the reporting on the relationship between happiness and income is pretty bad’. Compared to what has been written about the Gender Wage Gap, the reporting about happiness/income is Pulitzer-worthy. Discussions about the Gender Wage Gap (GWG) are
Not a subject I'm well informed about, but it occurs to me all those control variables that eat up the effect of gender on wages are good candidates to look at as mediators of an indirect effect of gender. Surely there must be a ton of researchers who have extended beyond regression to propose plausible causal models? (Love the blog!)
Right. Even if we don't understand all the causes, there still are polices being proposed, and we can potentially evaluate their effectiveness on theoretical grounds. It used to be the case that women and men were paid different amounts for the same job. Even marred men with the children and bachelors were paid differently. We've largely solved that problem yet ... many still think it exists and that we should outlaw or better enforce laws against that type of pay discrimination. That won't change anything. The goalpost has moved. We know that blind CVs/auditions seem to work, at least in some industries, so that can be further promoted. We also know that there are gender differences in college major enrollments, but I haven't heard of any policies proposed to rectify that, with the exception of projects to encourage girls to go into STEM. There also seems to be issues in promotion, with unclear prescriptions such as "lean-in" advice for more female assertiveness, support groups and mentoring, cross-training programs and other advancement track incentives. Corporate America is running its own set of experiments led by consultants with very little data to back up their proposals. It seems like we should be able to do broad studies of corporate interventions to at least generate weak evidence, and some of that work is being done, though we clearly haven't reached any meaningful body of conclusions.
Nicely sane breakdown
Btw this should say "than men" I believe :)
"if, for instance, women have lower wages than women partially because high-paying jobs are less likely to hire them"
Thanks, just fixed this. Better late than never!
Not a subject I'm well informed about, but it occurs to me all those control variables that eat up the effect of gender on wages are good candidates to look at as mediators of an indirect effect of gender. Surely there must be a ton of researchers who have extended beyond regression to propose plausible causal models? (Love the blog!)
Well articulated point that I haven't considered!
How do you feel about controlling for personality traits, like agreeableness? Would you say that's downstream from gender or not?
Right. Even if we don't understand all the causes, there still are polices being proposed, and we can potentially evaluate their effectiveness on theoretical grounds. It used to be the case that women and men were paid different amounts for the same job. Even marred men with the children and bachelors were paid differently. We've largely solved that problem yet ... many still think it exists and that we should outlaw or better enforce laws against that type of pay discrimination. That won't change anything. The goalpost has moved. We know that blind CVs/auditions seem to work, at least in some industries, so that can be further promoted. We also know that there are gender differences in college major enrollments, but I haven't heard of any policies proposed to rectify that, with the exception of projects to encourage girls to go into STEM. There also seems to be issues in promotion, with unclear prescriptions such as "lean-in" advice for more female assertiveness, support groups and mentoring, cross-training programs and other advancement track incentives. Corporate America is running its own set of experiments led by consultants with very little data to back up their proposals. It seems like we should be able to do broad studies of corporate interventions to at least generate weak evidence, and some of that work is being done, though we clearly haven't reached any meaningful body of conclusions.