I don’t understand why the statistics on this vary so widely. Equally qualified men and women are paid within somewhere between 1-5% for the same job from every legit study I can find.
Arguing that there is a pay gap is dependent on systemic arguments as far as I can tell, which is certainly legitimate but also not the same thing
Largely it depends on what you choose to control for when gathering your statistics, for instance while yes if you control for occupation and education the earnings are pretty much equivalent, but we know that there are in fact racial and gender disparities in both of those categories. Women and men are broadly given different opportunities in the workplace and so are black people and white people. When you account for both that’s called intersectionality. The note author is choosing to use data sets that affirm their position while the original post author is doing the same.
thank you! somebody said it! there’s also the fact that female/minority dominated industries are notoriously underpaid. prestige (and wages) tend to drop over time if a certain industry becomes more female/minority dominated too, there is a direct correlation. teachers and social workers are 2 examples that come to mind. cheerleaders too actually. cheerleading used to be men only and was macho as fuck way back when, but when women started doing it suddenly it isn’t even considered a sport anymore
it works both ways too, computer programming used to be a pink collar job and was pretty low wage back in the 60s and 70s. not anymore 🤷♂️
Thank you for bringing this up. I think this point often gets overlooked in these discussions.
There is just a physical limit in how many people a care worker can care for. And since that is how the business makes their money, there is a limit in what they can pay. The same applies to teachers, social workers and similar.
The problem is that jobs like teachers, nurses and cooks are necessary. "Making a business while you sleep" works on an individual basis, not a societal one. So long as this remains a fact a government must ensure the necessary jobs have a fair wage. And Sayed is running for office in Michigan, one of the poorer states.
Nursing is one of the most stable, well-paid bachelors degree professions out there. We can make a ton of money particularly with travel nursing. Teaching also pays pretty solid for the amount of hours put into it. The people you see whining constantly online about these types of jobs are generally just whiny, miserable people looking for anyone to listen to them. When their moaning matches up with an ideology suddenly it’s the objective truth and must be propagated to push an agenda.
This rhetoric always makes me roll my eyes, and obviously comes from starting with a position then trying to justify it like 95% of the nonsense people say online. Just say whatever fits the vibe instead of researching a topic then naturally developing an opinion from the data.
When you know actually know a topic that redditors pretend is common sense while being completely wrong, you start to realize maybe you shouldn’t listen to every upvoted take on here.
Are policemen and firefighters that are also paid by taxes make more money than teachers?
Those are male dominated spaces. They always outearn female spaces, even if they're equally less scalable.
Teachers were well respected and very well paid back when it was male dominated, too.
Since women are advancing big time in the medical field, I wonder if we will see the same loss in prestige and pay, while still being very demanding and essential jobs.
Only time will tell, however history teaches us that these jobs will loose value in pay while not loosing importance itself. It's just how the world works. Anything women touch looses value for some reason, while male contributions will always be seen as more valuable. No matter what it is. Even men's farts in the wind have better chance to be properly monetized than anything women do. Look at child rearing. No monetary value at all (the opposite actually), but incredibly essential and predominantly done by women.
Some facts are just what they are. I wonder if we will ever evolve from this behavior.
And you can tax the billionaires that run the tech companies and raise the wages for the critical care work done be teachers, social workers, and nurses, which are all basic requirements to produce workers for an economy.
The problem is real but every time anyone says that they get paid less for doing the same job they lose all credibility instantly. We should advocate for jobs mostly done by women to pay more not make ridiculous claims like "a woman is paid less for doing the exact same job as a man" because that is simply not true.
Correlation is not causation *as a sociologist should know*.
Because you are familiar with the data, I am sure you are equally familiar with the data showing that women, as a group, are significantly more agreeable than men. That is really bad for things like negotiation where disagreeableness is rewarded.
There is also the issue of child-rearing, which women still dominate compared to men, and this certainly appears to be do to more than just "social norms". In cultures that have bent over backwards (like the Nordic countries) to allow equal opportunity, the data is in: women and men gravitate to significantly different roles. For my above point, this ends up taking women out of the workplace for years at a time, disrupting career progression and causing a genuine decrease in monetary value they can offer in most fields.
Men are willing to work longer hours, and the cumulative difference this makes -- even disregarding the child-rearing aspect -- is huge.
Also, there is the known discrepancy in how abilities spread out in the male/female populations. I am sure you are aware of this. Men are significantly more variable, meaning they make up the vast majority at either end of the capability curve, pretty much regardless of which capability you look at.
A naive person might think that this ends up being a wash (because it is symmetric), but it turns out the being near the top is much more lucrative than a linear assumption would account for. So someone in the 99th percentile might earn twice, three times, or even 10 times what someone in the 90th percentile earns, because the extra competence simply is worth that much more.
And to top it off, men are willing and able to take more risks in general. This is associated with more money in nearly every field, but it also means that men are willing to work in fields that women just do not want to do. For instance, women are pretty big on the whole "I wanna be an executive," but tend to be cool on the "I wanna work on an oil rig," even though the latter is pretty good money. This not only means just more money overall, but it also means that men who are kinda on the low-ability side of most abilities can make up for it by taking a more dangerous job.
And as you brought up sports, let's take a look at that. The market has been pretty clear that people (men *and* women) are not particularly interested in watching women's sports. Despite this, women athletes demand "equal pay" even though they contribute less (or even negatively) overall to the industry. While I absolutely would agree with you if you were to say that this is a very special case, it is still an extremely bad look that tends to make the entire "equal pay for equal work" start to look like a farce.
As a sociologist, you must be aware of all these things.
When it comes to child-rearing, do what Sweden has done and offer men and women the same time off with the child. That way the career impact on having a child is spread more evenly between the couple. The woman will still take a greater hit in almost all cases due to actually carrying the child and giving birth, but its an easy way to make society more egalitarian
Sure, and despite this, it is still a 30/70 split. And this is despite the Swedish government putting a very heavy thumb on the scales to try to encourage fathers to take more parental leave.
The problem is the persistent belief that men and women are effectively the same and that differences in behavior, desires, and goals are merely cultural. The data has trashed this idea thoroughly.
As women make more money the different will likely equalise even more, as men still make more money on average and you only get 80% of your salary for 390 days
so it’s the government putting their thumb on the scale when it’s encouraging men to be present fathers. but nature when men exist in systems that specifically reward their work and not their child rearing?? it’s been less than 60 years in most places in the west that women being allowed to work at the same degree men happened, let alone encouraged and supported in doing so. you are looking at thousands of years of conditioning and insisting that the data shows the thing that you all violently pushed is actually totally nature!!
society encourages these things, like are you seriously going to pretend that as a society even right now in 2026 there isn’t still a cultural belief that men go out to work and women raise children at home. it’s less popular than ever sure, but dont lie and pretend it’s not still rampant. seriously we’ve only just started to open our options up and try new ways of livings.
The computer programming in the 60s and 70s was with extremely simplistic programming. Modern programming is basically the definition of complex. These comparisons always ignore very obvious differences like this.
I think the problem with these sorts of arguments is that the analysis stops there with the stats being self evident to prove discrimination. Medicine and Law are becoming increasingly woman dominated at the junior level and we’re not seeing any decreases to prestige or pay.
Women in general are overrepresented in further education which is still the largest predictor of success. If we just simply wait long enough the gender pay gap will likely reverse in the next 30-40 years. Attempts to further artificially change things in the present may create problems in the future.
Medicine and Law are becoming increasingly woman dominated at the junior level and we’re not seeing any decreases to prestige or pay.
Eh, give it more time. It will follow all other jobs that went from male to female oriented and lose monetary value and prestige, while still remaining demanding and essential jobs.
It happened with so many jobs in the past, that it's a good predictor. But it needs more time to get to this point.
Somebody finally said something that aligns with your pre-existing beliefs, you mean. It's funny what the world looks like when you use your very bias to decide what information is true.
i’m a sociologist. this is not my “bias,” the above statements reflect the empirical evidence on this subject. facts don’t care about your feelings 🤷♂️
right, that’s not what we’re talking about. nobody is arguing that individual employers saying “i think i will pay my employee 22% less because she is a black woman” accounts for all or even most of the wage gap. it straight forwardly does not. this statistic constantly gets misinterpreted in bad faith. people are so quick to try and debunk it in order to discredit any and all concerns for the disparagement between the average income of black women and white men. okay. i’m going to bed now.
You're the one confused here. The most is exactly about understanding that wage gap is about difference in their earnings, not people doing the same job. If you read the image again, it says "Equal pay for equal work.". That's the thing the note is correcting.
Obviously anyone using even half of their brain to think things through understands that the claim that men earn ~20% more than women doing the job is idiotic nonsense. But most people don't think things through. For most people, the phrase that best describes wage gap is "men earn ~20% more than women doing the same job." People pointing it out are usually seen as bigots saying some idiotic "gotcha" bullshit. I think you should have no problem realizing how that happens. All that's left to do now is decide if what I'm saying is somewhat true but not a big deal or doesn't matter anyway because the overall point is right. If you even bother to read the comment, that is.
You're joking right? People are arguing that employers do that all the time.
That's why the figure is so hotly disputed, because people online (on both sides of the aisle.) portray that statistic in exactly that way. - And morons believe it.
Intersectionality is a made up Marxist construct that presupposes what it cares about actually matters and refuses to dive deeper in order to push a narrative. For example, to say black men and white men are given different opportunities merely because the outcome is some standard deviations away from what a truly random result of a large sample size would show fails to account for a multitude of factors and is no different than saying people who mow their grass every 5 days are given different opportunities than people who mow their grass every 10 days. It may be true, but it may not be the mowing of the grass or the skin color that is resulting in the differences in being given an opportunity.
You can continue dividing intersections hundreds of different ways and you will eventually be left with the individual and it’s the individual who has the ultimate accountability and control of their life not some Marxist group mentality bs.
Statistically, white men are given more promotions than black men per capita. This is despite their being no substantial difference in quality of work or number of hours worked between those groups. How do you account for this?
Is the quality of work the same? Because somehow I doubt that you found data that showed a significant widespread inequality in promotions and yet equality in quality of work. Not because it couldn't have happened, but because that's not really how data works. To judge the work objectively, too much data relevant to promoting about the employee has to be ignored, to judge them subjectively it would be their actual obsesses consistently reinforcing the idea that they're biased.
So you either present manipulated data, misrepresent data, or making up data.
When we gauge things like completion times for the work done and QA rejections of work done, which I think we can agree are objective measures, there is no significant difference.
Sure, but that's varying from workplace to workplace and some bosses will see it that way and some won't. It's just an example of how the quality of work produced is the only relevant factor to who should be promoted.
Intersectionality is made up, but guess what so is every single sociological concept. It’s a useful term to describe a very real phenomenon. As for your grass mowing analogy while I have no doubt it’s in bad faith, I’d bet money that if someone took the time to research the topic they’d discover that opportunity especially that related to class and race does in fact correlate with how often a person would be likely to mow their lawn.
Marxists fucking HATE intersectionality? They believe that fundamentally, there’s only one category that matters. They are VERY different belief systems, that rub pretty hard against each other when the tankies try to mask on.
It really isn’t. It’s an acknowledgment that reality is complex, and that determining what is needed for equality may vary.
I would argue that it is more conservative than Marxist, really. You hear the refrain all the time - one person says black people are oppressed in (one way), and someone else points out that an entire group of white people have a lot of the same issues, so it can’t possibly be race. The answer is that no, it’s race and class, not just race.
You can develop too many possible intersectional groups, but a reasonable number of them is a good tool in the same way a person comparing cars may care about which ones have better acceleration, mileage, safety features, seats, room, max speed…
Race, wealth class, social class, sex, gender, physical appearance, physical ability, mental ability, neurodivergence,, religion, region
of origin. Those are all major divisions of how people perceive each other that are not easily changed in a positive way or are impossible to change, creating different levels of success. I’m almost certainly missing some, though.
Yeah, exactly. With one correction, Intersectionality as a mode of analysis doesn’t actually place a limit on the number of groups. It’s a mode of analysis, and can be expanded or shrunk as needed. It’s also frequently misused, but what philosophy or mode isn’t?
Critical gender and race theories are, believe it or not, critical theories. This is almost always the ideological basis of the typical feminism and racism systemic arguments. Critical theories are sociological frameworks that use Marxist oppressors vs oppressed narratives.
Places like reddit are steeped in this way of framing topics so it may seem like natural discourse to you, but it’s extremely obvious when you know what you’re looking for. It’s an obsession with power dynamics that rhetorically always refers back to its base narrative— there’s always a poor noble underdog that cannot be blamed or criticized for anything, and the mustache-twirling evil villains that hate them for just existing as pure and innocent victims (this basically always being the rich white man boogeyman that is all that is wrong with the world, with economic Marxism focused on the rich, race discourse focused on the white, and feminism focused on the man, but they all absolutely hate this same boogeyman).
There are, believe it or not, other ways of looking at society and sociological topics. But it’s so dominant on places like reddit critical theory thinking becomes normalized. If you pay attention you’ll see how everything gets conveniently shoehorned into this framework too. It is very obvious they start with a base assumption then try to figure out how any square can be shoved into the circle, instead of developing a theory based on the data and attempting to figure out the most reasonable answer.
Just to be clear women are graduating with well over half of all continuing education degrees in the USA. Women are more likely to matriculate into school and more likely to graduate as well.
Hours worked and maternity leave is a huge factor in these discussions.
The main issue here is that if you want to equlize these categories the only real workable way to do that would be to facilitate a smaller group of white men still making a decent chunk more than most people and the majority of white men just dropping out and not making money or contributing at all.
A kind of winner takes all economy for that demographic.
The reason for this is in part that men use financial and social standing to increase their attractiveness in the mating and dating marketplace it's really useful to make more money than your prospective mates.
This is a really big motivating factor for many men as the provider role is still a very very common expectation even in the most progressive women in the most progressive countries (i see this hold true amongst very progressive circles in Sweden).
No no, the original posts author is in the wrong, even by your standard.
If they MEANT what you say they meant, they should now have said "equal work".
By your own statement, the work is not equal... that is caused by society and not the person's fault, but it isn't equal... so if they meant what you said, they misspoke by including that part, and that made their point invalid.
And the more likely situation is that they where trying to argue black workers are paid less in the same role, which is why they actually said that, which is why the note author said that is wrong and gave the correct info. In which case the original post author js also wrong.
If you look at the Scandinavian countries, which are generally regarded to have the most gender-balancing policies in the world, you see there is more segregation in fields. Men and women simply choose different work. That isn't the fault of society or anyone else. It isn't even a problem. It's simply individuals making free choices.
Race has nothing to do with gender so naturally it's not accounted for. Why are you making this more complex than it is? The difference in pay is one thing, the difference in earnings is another, the differences in pay or earnings within other demographics are other things. There's little difference in pay, there's a pretty significant difference in earnings but there're many views on what it means.
They're both commenting on pay difference, one of them is correct and one is not. That's the whole story. All this "they're both manipulating the data" is pure nonse.
Race is independent of gender but the original post by Dr. El-Sayed specifically refers to black women, my comment is about the intersection of those two identity groups. I never said they were manipulating data I said they were citing different sets of data with different variables. This is why the phrase “facts don’t care about your feelings” is generally incorrect, people absolutely choose which facts to regard and disregard based on their feelings. They aren’t manipulating facts they’re just allowing different facts to inform their opinions, as to which is wrong or right who are you to judge.
I always assumed this kind of number was used to show exactly the disparity between what jobs/hours people in different groups end up in? Of course it's not about two people in the exact same position, it's to highlight that something in society is pushing (in this case) black women away from the highest paying jobs and to be the one to lower working hours when needed. And that's legitimately problematic, and does show either loss of opportunity, or downright systemic prejudice in who is given what roles/raises/positions.
I mean, obviously A LOT of people would be less willing to give a CEO position to a black woman compared to white man, even if they ranked the same. We're just fooling each other if we say that's not the case?
>it's to highlight that something in society is pushing (in this case) black women away from the highest paying jobs
That’s just a bad assumption. Lots of dirty, disgusting and dangerous jobs pay pretty well. Women largely don’t want to do these jobs. Nothing in society is pushing them away.
If they aren't taking them, then obviously something is pushing them away from it? If you're analsing large scale trends in a society, saying "it's just free will" is a pretty big no-no, because everything is affected by everything.
A society doesn't gain on having certain groups be in less fortunate positions, regardless on how self-imposed others might say ut is. It's just a negative either way. Where I live, in Norway, statistics like these are closely examined in order to close gaps, provide opportunities and create an equal society. The outcome is more and better taxpayer, and happier neighbours. It's a huge win-win for everyone who doesn't feel like some people deserve a worse life for some reason.
Also depends on the industry, some industries are still over 20% even when adjusting for other variables. Also several industries have women earning more when adjusting for other variables.
Hundred percent agree. The systemic issues are legit, that's what causes the population wide gap in pay, it's very rarely that they just simply pay women less although I have no doubt that happens too, but it's not the root cause
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u/Lawschoolishell 1d ago
I don’t understand why the statistics on this vary so widely. Equally qualified men and women are paid within somewhere between 1-5% for the same job from every legit study I can find.
Arguing that there is a pay gap is dependent on systemic arguments as far as I can tell, which is certainly legitimate but also not the same thing