Actually, it is how the world works. If there was really a gender pay gap for women who are doing the exact same work as men with the exact same experience as men, then it would be trivial for employers to reduce their costs by only hiring women. Yet, nobody ever does this.
Your argument hinges on the assumption that (a) employers can easily determine the relative "value" of an employee and (b) that employers then make rational decisions based on that data.
They care about one thing, dollars. If you are making them money, they will keep you no matter what. If you are not making them money, they will get rid of you. Pretty rational I think.
No. Rationality has very little to do with it. How rational the participants are doesn't itself change the fact that there is a competitive labor market and that salary offers thus must be competitive.
If women choose to forgo higher salaries in favor of something else, that's a different issue and it doesn't immediately mean that they are being "irrational", it just means they favor different things than men do.
The rationality of the players is central to any argument you make in the line of "there is a competitive labor market and that salary offers thus must be competitive".
If the hiring managers (of any gender) have an irrational bias towards thinking that women are not as effective as their male counterparts, this will affect the respective pay scales even within a competitive market.
Note that I'm not providing evidence or making a claim about the gender pay gap. I'm just saying that the claims you've made have many possible consistent explanations, including irrational bias against women.
This is a nice argument that I actually believe myself, but you could counter it by saying that, due to sexism, even when women and men do exactly the same work, the males' result are valued more. Hiring managers don't have to be perfectly rational, they could be (unconsciously) sexist.
You could counter with that, but you'd be redefining what we're talking about away from whether or not similar men and women are paid the same to something far more nebulous and difficult to measure.
And rationality of any one particular hiring manager isn't going to make a big difference; they still need to compete with every other hiring manager in the labor market and must offer something competitive accordingly.
We were discussing salary differences between men and women who do the same work and have made the same choices. Salaries exist in "the real world," so you're going to have to try harder to change the topic to whatever it is you want to talk about instead.
Wait, you just said, "women are paid less because they are valued less". Sounds logical.
But the grandparent's point is a sticky one: "it would be trivial for employers to reduce their costs by only hiring women." And yet ... no employer ever does this. They hire men and women. Also logical.
Either you're not telling me everything you know, or you're wrong. Without radical argument surgery, to make what you said square with GP, we have to consider changing the parameters in some pretty distasteful ways:
* It's actually the women themselves who value their time less, and let themselves get taken advantage of in salary negotiations.
* Men are more skilled than women for some jobs and those skills are in short supply. They get hired alongside women, but command higher salaries.
I tend to think there is no gender pay gap, but only if we adjust for people's choices to take breaks from their careers in order to raise families, pursue hobbies, mental health, etc.
Which part was false, and does the false part invalidate the whole?
I think the point being made was, if women are paid less, and thus cheaper to employ, they'd dominate new hires - presumably because salary is the largest cost for most businesses. So, as as an employer you'd want to minimize salaries.
Men are still getting hired, and that's the logical fly in the ointment that one needs to overcome - unless we allow for other distasteful variables to float, as I pointed out above. Or, we can consider there is no pay gap.
Single, childless women make 8% more than single, childless men across the country, and as much as 20% more in some cities. This only changes when they have children or when they work fewer hours.
But don't let facts stop you from repeating the same tired lies that have been debunked for years
Individual companies having a gender pay gap doesn't mean the market has a gender pay gap. And if you work at one of those companies and are told that you can't be given a raise because of the internal, secret gender pay gap, you should quit that company and find a new job.
I mean, even if it's true that particular company is paying its women worse than its men, and even if legislation means they can't quickly fix it (I don't know how onerous this legislation is in the U.K.), the proper response on the part of any employee who is given these excuses ought to be "Look, that sounds like you have a difficult problem, but that isn't my problem. My problem is that my salary is $X when it should be $X+Y." Because at the end of the day their excuses aren't going to change the fact that they can either fix your problem or not, and if they don't fix your problem somebody else in the labor market can.
FWIW in the UK the pay gap favours young women I gather; it changes over somewhere around the time a lot of women take a career break (32 IIRC, will try and trace the source).
It's interesting because younger women hear the USA stats and complain about how they're being hard done by.
The same dynamics happen in USA. The statistics people report in the USA in the media are aggregates between all men and all women, which is why they're misleading.
In both cases, it's because women choose to leave the labor force for a while, which makes them no longer like the men who made similar choices as them up until that point.
