It's only surprising because people just repeat pay gap statistics and don't learn about them (I believe there are non good faith actors promoting this).
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.
Are you sure? College education is dropping as a predictor of income, especially in the degrees with the highest female:male ratios. Increasing numbers of women graduating with degrees in journalism and poetry would probably not explain an increase in income for women.
Doesn't that go counter to what is usually posted, about how college is a financially poor decision, whereas trades are particularly lucrative now? As far as I know, trades are still almost mostly men, so if this were true, we'd see the opposite trend.
If it's not that surprising, then we should ready to accept that the whole gender wage gap thing is a myth, rather than to keep trumping it up as a reality.
Except if you look where the gap is the widest, it’s places that have high paying blue collar jobs in heavy industry that are the big employers and male dominated (e.g Odessa, TX = oilfield, Beaumont, TX = Refining and petrochemical, Houma, LA = offshore oil and gas, etc,), so at least at the local level I think it’s driven more by what are the pervasive high paying industries and are they tilted largely to one gender…
In the middle class where women graduate college at twice the rate as men, move to big cities for a lucrative career, and delay childbirth until their 30s, women are easily outpacing men in earnings.
That’s not what the data shows. Let’s call “easily outpacing” as earning at least 110% between medians. The metros where this happens are: Wenatchee, WA, Morgantown, WV, Barnstable Town, MA, and Gainesville, FL. In every single other one, it’s either pretty close or below 100%.
Which is pretty heavily at odds with the “easily outpacing” statement.
> In fact, in 22 of 250 U.S. metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts ...
In other words, in 228 of 250 US metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn less than their male counterparts. Why is everybody reacting so weirdly?
What exactly makes you comment as if woman gaining equality means men have lost something? Surely, in an even society, this is a good headline, unless you're pining for more patriarchal days.
Why is this comment on this story? The news here is that the overall trend (median women under 30 make 93% of median men under 30 nationwide) has 16 counterexamples out of 250 cities?
Is masculinity being shunned here? Are men not prospering? That's not what the data says. The headline is about outliers.
No apparent controls for occupation or education, as is typical for comparing gender incomes.
Young women are also having children later in life, and the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
> Young women are also having children later in life, and the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
I think you’re actually re-explaining the outcome of the report, not pointing out a flaw in their methodology.
It does make sense to not control for that, mind you, since you're trying to compare a broad set of societal factors. You can imagine a society in which people with the same occupation+education receive exactly equal pay, and yet one gender (or race, or whatever else) is widely discouraged from entering certain lucrative occupations or receiving certain levels of education in certain fields, for instance.
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the gender pay gap still exists even if you do control for these things, albeit it becomes smaller.
> the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
Including in higher paying first job degrees, professions, or however you want to make that adjustment?
Not disagreeing, just curious. Many on HN probably studied CS or EE with a very male cohort, for example. Is that balanced by a programme(s) (with well-paid graduates) that skews heavily female? Maybe medicine (not as much as EE/CS though surely)?
If the same study previously showed that women were paid less than men, but now show they get paid more, does that not show that things have changed? Are you more inclined to believe it when it showed women earned less and more inclined to not believe when it shows they earned more?
The Boston globe has an article out about all the single women in their 30s who never found a partner. The hypothesis being there are fewer and fewer men who match them in professional/career success, which stops them from settling down.
"Several" is doing some very heavy lifting here. According to the paper cited, it's 22 out of 250 metro areas (or 9%).
Another way to put this is that in the vast majority of metro areas, young women DO NOT earn more than young men. Even when you look at the areas where young women do outearn young men, it is not by a lot. For example, in the NYC area, young women earn 102% of what young men do. To my ear, that's parity.
I feel like this one is a problem on both ends. Quite many women are not ok with dating men earning less than them, and quite many men are not comfortable dating women earning more than them.
From my personal perspective, it is sheer silliness, especially on the part of (a good number of) men. While I don’t agree with it, I can see why someone would be hesitant to date someone earning less than them. But I am struggling to see that many tangible downsides of dating someone earning more than you do.
There are, of course, some potential downsides in every situation. But given that men (in general) seem to have no personal qualms about dating women earning less than them, i fail to see why a good number of them would be so vocally opposed to the inverse of it.
Well, supposedly the current pattern is the successful women are conditioned to seek more successful men. This is a big courtship problem if women are more successful than men.
Age preference could shift- e.g. even if 25 year old men are less successful than 25 year old women, 30 year old men might still be doing better. This affords men extra time to take high risk high reward financial strategies & mature.
Continuing on the theme of risk, it could drive men further down the path of risk & split outcomes (men are over represented in boardrooms and in prisons). That could be socially destabilizing, with an increase in men on the bottom.
Or, preferences could transition to prioritize other things. Who cares if he is broke, look at those muscles!
The second order impacts are the crazy part to think about. If responsibility, providing, and stability become feminine traits, then do men culturally assume current feminine traits, like “free spirit” and “experimental”?
It made sense, in the past, that women with less social status would desire men with more social status.
But once women gain social status, I don't see why they would still desire men with higher status.
If most women still do desire men with higher status, it means most women have integrated patriarchal values, which is something feminists should really talk about.
Interesting to see Wenatchee, WA at the top of the list. That is (or was) the epicenter of Bitcoin mining in the United States due to some of the cheapest hydro power in the nation.
Presumably, there was an influx of young male unskilled labor to set up all those mines, and this statistic was the result.
I'd be similarly curious what happened to the local dating scene.
No we'll move on to another "problem". We talked about the college gap while women were the minority. Now that they are more than 60% of enrollees no one cares.
I’d urge people to read the article before jumping into the comments on this one. So many comments are just plain counter to the data, arguing over questions that are literally this one click away. It’s a short and to the point data article.
For example, the headline is referring to 22 out of 250 metro areas.
How do we know that young men today don't lack the interest in monetary success that may have been possessed by their elders? I know I'm not the only guy who's made it to "senior" level in their career and realized that money doesn't make up for time spent with people and fulfilling activities.
This isn't to say there aren't other factors at play, or disadvantages specifically towards men, but earning more money isn't the end-all-be-all of success. Many wealthy people are actually miserable, and the suicide rate for women has also been increasing (yes, along that of men, but still). How do we know that women are proportionally reaching more life satisfaction, or that men aren't?
Something I want HN's thoughts on: Does a 7% pay gap matter more or less between low incomes and high incomes?
I'm looking at the bar chart with median annual earnings and a earnings gap percentage. The first gap is 7% (misleadingly labeled as 93%...), which does seem somewhat high.
But then it's for $33,598 vs $31,288. A difference of $2310, an amount that your average Bay Area FAANG SWE earns in two workdays or less (when counting amortized RSU vesting and bonuses).
You could argue that every single dollar matters for someone in that bracket. But what about when the 7% difference hits someone who is making over $500k a year in the Bay Area? Then it's a $40,000 swing. Most of that will get eaten up by taxes anyways.
Which one is worse? I would say the $2310 difference, since the $40,000 is really closer to $20,000 after taxes, and having $220,000 a year after taxes vs. $200,000 doesn't make a huge difference when you're competing for homes that cost $2 million dollars or more.
It would sound way worse with the title "x outearn y by $40,000 a year in the Bay Area", but only to people who don't realize how bonkers the financial scales are here in comparison to developing parts of the country.
More women getting more university degrees is why this is so.
This is one reason why it is a bad idea to locate a business that depends on intellectual capital in a state that denies women bodily autonomy, and that is generally hostile to anything other than "traditional" gender roles. Doing so further disadvantages recruitment.
This is a point-in-time update on a much larger trend. The predominance of dual-earner households is being supplanted by female breadwinner households[1]. Predicting the future is always challenging, but the changes here appear to be accelerating, not declining. Looking back on the disintegration of corporate family economics, and male breadwinner family economies, imagine the seismic shift involved in the establishment of female breadwinner family economies. The opportunities to capitalize on the second-order effects here are astronomical.
I’m surprised to see that the San Francisco and San Jose metros are so different on this stat (median women’s earnings as percent of median men’s earnings for workers younger than thirty).
[+] [-] cs702|4 years ago|reply
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...
[+] [-] godelski|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] zitterbewegung|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ip26|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] whathappenedto|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lordnacho|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] knighthack|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cascom|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] option|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mostertoaster|4 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] Siira|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] DantesKite|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GoodJokes|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] ipnon|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
Which is pretty heavily at odds with the “easily outpacing” statement.
[+] [-] sprash|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dalbasal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] yongjik|4 years ago|reply
In other words, in 228 of 250 US metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn less than their male counterparts. Why is everybody reacting so weirdly?
[+] [-] enw|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] swalls|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] klyrs|4 years ago|reply
Is masculinity being shunned here? Are men not prospering? That's not what the data says. The headline is about outliers.
[+] [-] zdragnar|4 years ago|reply
Young women are also having children later in life, and the disparity between women and men enrolling in college and completing degrees (more women than men) has been increasing.
[+] [-] chrisseaton|4 years ago|reply
I think you’re actually re-explaining the outcome of the report, not pointing out a flaw in their methodology.
[+] [-] kemayo|4 years ago|reply
For what it's worth, my understanding is that the gender pay gap still exists even if you do control for these things, albeit it becomes smaller.
[+] [-] oh_sigh|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] OJFord|4 years ago|reply
Including in higher paying first job degrees, professions, or however you want to make that adjustment?
Not disagreeing, just curious. Many on HN probably studied CS or EE with a very male cohort, for example. Is that balanced by a programme(s) (with well-paid graduates) that skews heavily female? Maybe medicine (not as much as EE/CS though surely)?
[+] [-] farmerstan|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] greatpostman|4 years ago|reply
The Boston globe has an article out about all the single women in their 30s who never found a partner. The hypothesis being there are fewer and fewer men who match them in professional/career success, which stops them from settling down.
[+] [-] johndfsgdgdfg|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] frob|4 years ago|reply
Another way to put this is that in the vast majority of metro areas, young women DO NOT earn more than young men. Even when you look at the areas where young women do outearn young men, it is not by a lot. For example, in the NYC area, young women earn 102% of what young men do. To my ear, that's parity.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] daenz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] filoleg|4 years ago|reply
From my personal perspective, it is sheer silliness, especially on the part of (a good number of) men. While I don’t agree with it, I can see why someone would be hesitant to date someone earning less than them. But I am struggling to see that many tangible downsides of dating someone earning more than you do.
There are, of course, some potential downsides in every situation. But given that men (in general) seem to have no personal qualms about dating women earning less than them, i fail to see why a good number of them would be so vocally opposed to the inverse of it.
[+] [-] ip26|4 years ago|reply
Age preference could shift- e.g. even if 25 year old men are less successful than 25 year old women, 30 year old men might still be doing better. This affords men extra time to take high risk high reward financial strategies & mature.
Continuing on the theme of risk, it could drive men further down the path of risk & split outcomes (men are over represented in boardrooms and in prisons). That could be socially destabilizing, with an increase in men on the bottom.
Or, preferences could transition to prioritize other things. Who cares if he is broke, look at those muscles!
The second order impacts are the crazy part to think about. If responsibility, providing, and stability become feminine traits, then do men culturally assume current feminine traits, like “free spirit” and “experimental”?
[+] [-] jokoon|4 years ago|reply
But once women gain social status, I don't see why they would still desire men with higher status.
If most women still do desire men with higher status, it means most women have integrated patriarchal values, which is something feminists should really talk about.
[+] [-] nwiswell|4 years ago|reply
Presumably, there was an influx of young male unskilled labor to set up all those mines, and this statistic was the result.
I'd be similarly curious what happened to the local dating scene.
[+] [-] ddayz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dudul|4 years ago|reply
It will be the same for wages.
[+] [-] paxys|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
For example, the headline is referring to 22 out of 250 metro areas.
[+] [-] ravenstine|4 years ago|reply
How do we know that young men today don't lack the interest in monetary success that may have been possessed by their elders? I know I'm not the only guy who's made it to "senior" level in their career and realized that money doesn't make up for time spent with people and fulfilling activities.
This isn't to say there aren't other factors at play, or disadvantages specifically towards men, but earning more money isn't the end-all-be-all of success. Many wealthy people are actually miserable, and the suicide rate for women has also been increasing (yes, along that of men, but still). How do we know that women are proportionally reaching more life satisfaction, or that men aren't?
[+] [-] xenihn|4 years ago|reply
I'm looking at the bar chart with median annual earnings and a earnings gap percentage. The first gap is 7% (misleadingly labeled as 93%...), which does seem somewhat high.
But then it's for $33,598 vs $31,288. A difference of $2310, an amount that your average Bay Area FAANG SWE earns in two workdays or less (when counting amortized RSU vesting and bonuses).
You could argue that every single dollar matters for someone in that bracket. But what about when the 7% difference hits someone who is making over $500k a year in the Bay Area? Then it's a $40,000 swing. Most of that will get eaten up by taxes anyways.
Which one is worse? I would say the $2310 difference, since the $40,000 is really closer to $20,000 after taxes, and having $220,000 a year after taxes vs. $200,000 doesn't make a huge difference when you're competing for homes that cost $2 million dollars or more.
It would sound way worse with the title "x outearn y by $40,000 a year in the Bay Area", but only to people who don't realize how bonkers the financial scales are here in comparison to developing parts of the country.
[+] [-] Zigurd|4 years ago|reply
This is one reason why it is a bad idea to locate a business that depends on intellectual capital in a state that denies women bodily autonomy, and that is generally hostile to anything other than "traditional" gender roles. Doing so further disadvantages recruitment.
[+] [-] kelseyfrog|4 years ago|reply
1. Fig 10. Marriage, Family Systems, and Economic Opportunity in the USA Since 1850 http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.738...
[+] [-] 6gvONxR4sf7o|4 years ago|reply
San Francisco-Oakland-Hayward, CA: 98%
San Jose-Sunnyvale-Santa Clara, CA: 88%
[+] [-] acchow|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ducttapecrown|4 years ago|reply
https://ibb.co/WWMQgQn
[+] [-] stasy|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] diebeforei485|4 years ago|reply