Anna at Dakota Women responds to my post on gender disparity in income. I noted the Washington Post article by Linda Hirshman, which summarizes a recent study by the American Association of University Women. Here is a key passage from Hirshman:
The conventional wisdom assumes that employers are discriminating against young women, despite the laws against it. And some of the disparity -- about 5 percent -- does appear to be at least partly discrimination. But most of it isn't. . . . In fact, what the AAUW report reveals is that, at almost every step of the way, women could make decisions that would keep them even with their male classmates. But they don't.
Here is some of Anna's reply:
It surprises me that Ken Blanchard would try to minimize the real issue of pay discrimination with a discussion about the types of work men and women choose to do. That's entirely beside the point. Real pay discrimination does exist and needs to be addressed. It obviously doesn't "punish itself," as Ken put it, because this discrimination has existed for as long as women have engaged in the same paid work as men, and it still exists today. One-quarter of the wage gap is due to discrimination on the basis of gender.
Hirshman puts the influence of discrimination at 5%. I couldn't find any confirmation of Anna's 25% figure at the link she provides. And I am quite sure the influence of discrimination here is not a positive finding; it is calculated from what is left over when other factors have been controlled for. That doesn't mean that it isn't real, or that we shouldn't try to do anything about it, as I acknowledged in my post.
In American politics everyone wants to play the victim card. This is just as true of conservative and gender traditionalists as it is of liberals and feminists. Conservatives love to point out that the Press and the Universities are heavily biased toward the left, and that is of course true. They also love to believe that without the influence of this bias their cause would dramatically advanced, that conservative principles would reign supreme in an unbiased marketplace of ideas. That is very unlikely, because such discrimination just isn't that powerful a force. At best the conservative position would be marginally more successful in an unbiased environment.
The same is true of the kind of income disparities described in the AAUW study. Invidious discrimination can have a major influence only when powerful social and/or legal sanctions prevent markets from working at all. That was the case when African Americans were systematically excluded from many universities and professions. A major league baseball team could not afford to take on Jackie Robinson, so long as the manager could be sure no one else would field him. It is surely not the case that discrimination came to an end with the collapse of segregation. It just became a marginal influence.
If Ms. Hirshman's interpretation of the AAUW study is correct, that 5% of the gender pay gap is due to discrimination, that proves my point. Get rid of discrimination altogether (and I am for that, if anyone knows how to do it), and the outcome would be only marginally different from the current situation. If you don't like the current situation, you would be well advised to give up playing the victim card and instead try to persuade people to make different choices.
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