12 May 2015
by Jim Rose
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, politics - New Zealand, unions
Tags: employer discrimination, gender wage gap, gender wage gap discrimination, government discrimination, New Zealand Greens, sex discrimination
The unions representing public servants and the Green Party are very excited about the gender wage gap this week. So much so that the public service union presented the Treasury with an invoice for that wage gap in the public sector of 14.1%.
Oddly enough, despite their concerns with the gender wage gap in the public service, the public service unions are stridently against both privatisation and contracting out.
It is almost trite to note is that one of the earliest analytical results in the labour economics of discrimination was that profit maximising employers are much less likely to discriminate than firms that are not subject to a profit and loss constraint and the discipline of bankruptcy.
A prejudiced employer pays a wage above the competitive wage to attract the particular recruits he or she is prejudiced in favour of and does not hire enough workers because he must pay higher wages. This results in lower output and profits than without discrimination.
Bureaucrats can indulge their prejudices without putting the survival of their business in jeopardy. Entrepreneurs who don’t hire on merit risk running out of going out of business because their costs are hire and their businesses less productive.
…market mechanisms impose inescapable penalties on profits whenever for-profit enterprises discriminate against individuals on any basis other than productivity. Though bigoted managers may hold sway for a time, in the long run the profit penalty makes profit-seeking enterprises tenacious champions of fair treatment.
Early examples of the greater propensity for discrimination in the public sector and non-profit organisations are by Armen Alchian and Ruben Kessel in Competition, Monopoly, and the Pursuit of Money in 1962 and Gary Becker’s pioneering The Economics of Discrimination in 1957.
11 May 2015
by Jim Rose
in discrimination, gender, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA, population economics
Tags: gender wage gap
1. Today’s working women (henceforth described as “daughters”) have higher wages than their mothers – but do not have higher wages than their fathers. Men have higher wages than both their fathers and their mothers.
2. The poorest women are doing best. 80% of daughters raised in the bottom quintile have higher wages than their fathers did. (h/t Scott Winship)
3. “Men’s wages remain more important to increasing couples’ family income,” despite “women’s significant generational gains” …
4. Women who grew up in households where their mother did not work actually have the highest family incomes today—but not because they themselves earn more. Daughters’ individual incomes do not vary significantly by mother’s work status, but family income does—suggesting that daughters whose mothers didn’t work have higher earning husbands. (Catherine Rampell discovered this by asking Pew to split out their analyses by mothers’ labor choices.) Perhaps those raised in more traditional settings are more likely to replicate a traditional division of labor?
via via Women and Social Mobility: Six Key Facts | Brookings Institution.
04 May 2015
by Jim Rose
in applied welfare economics, discrimination, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice
Tags: gender wage gap, reversing gender gap
Why have women outpaced men? There’s little cognitive difference between the sexes, and males do better on standardized tests.
But Murphy, Becker, and Hubbard argue that women tend to have better “non-cognitive skills” than men do. Those personal skills and character traits such as persistence, self-control, and conscientiousness may help women excel academically and stay in school until they graduate.
The academic achievement gap actually starts before college: 25 percent more females than males took high-school advanced-placement tests in 2010, the Cleveland Fed economists find.
“There is a substantial gap between the measured high school performance of males and females,” Topel and Murphy write in a 2014 study, noting that female graduating high school seniors have, as a group, higher grade point averages than their male counterparts. “This high school gender gap in academic performance persists in the population that continues on to college.”
via Women are winning the human capital race | The University of Chicago Booth School of Business.
27 Apr 2015
by Jim Rose
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - New Zealand
Tags: activists, do gooders, gender wage gap, Left-wing hypocrisy, Leftover Left
With the rapid closure in the raw female male wage gap in New Zealand over the last 15 or so years, the lack of celebration of this achievement among equal pay activists is puzzling.
Source: Statistics New Zealand, New Zealand Social indicators, Median hourly earnings.
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