Of 534 occupations tracked by BLS, ONLY 7 pay women more than men http://t.co/Xh8T7eckJJ pic.twitter.com/XRunQkiav8
— American Progress (@amprog) January 30, 2015
The labour force participation of mothers in the 20th century
30 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in gender, labour economics, labour supply Tags: engines of liberation, female labour force participation, gender wage gap, sex discrimination
First, work changed to offer more jobs to women. Farming declined sharply; industrial jobs peaked and then declined. Brawn became less important; precise skills, learning, and personal service became more important.
The new economy generated millions of white-collar and “pink-collar” jobs that seemed “suited” to women. That cannot be the full story, of course; women also took over many jobs that had once been men’s, such as teaching and secretarial work.
Second, mothers responded to those job opportunities. Some took jobs because the extra income could help families buy cars, homes, furnishings, and so on. Some took jobs because the family needed their income to make up for husbands’ stagnating wages (a noteworthy trend after the 1970s). And some took jobs because they sought personal fulfilment in the world of work.
via Why Did Married Mothers Go To Work? » Sociological Images.
The Bechdel Test: whether women are in a movie as fully human characters, or as plot devices for the male characters
27 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of media and culture, gender, industrial organisation, movies, occupational choice, survivor principle Tags: co-worker discrimination, consumer sovereignty, customer discrimination, employer discrimination, Hollywood economics, sex discrimination, The meaning of competition
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Hollywood is a slave to the box office on the most cutthroat industry there is. Film producers and screenwriters will portray men and women in whatever roles and whatever extent sells tickets.
How women are represented in the movies is determined solely by the preferences of the audiences willing to buy tickets. It’s a buyers market out there. Film producers would do whatever it takes to finance films that sell tickets, as even Five Thirty-Eight realised:
“Movies that are female-driven do not travel,” said Krista Smith, West Coast editor of Vanity Fair, describing the broader sentiment in Hollywood. There are almost no women who have sales value in multiple international territories, maybe with the exception of Sandra Bullock, she said.
Times change, and film producers change with the times. Consumers are both sovereign and change their minds, and in the case of movie audiences, constantly demand novelty and surprises, as even Five Thirty-Eight picked up on:
Hollywood is the business of making money. Since our data demonstrates that films containing meaningful interactions between women do better at the box office than movies that don’t, it may be only a matter of time before the data of dollars and cents overcomes the rumours and prejudices defining the budgeting process of films for, by and about women.
This moral panic over gender wage gaps between millionaire actresses and actresses dare not say that for want of offending the audience that is actually the main driver of any gender gap in movies.
Hollywood activists complaining about the gender wage are to business minded to dare insult the audiences that pay their wages.
Afghan Women in 1950 vs. 2013
26 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
Gender pay gap: do women earn 77% of what men do?
22 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, economics of love and marriage, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA Tags: employer discrimination, gender wage gap, sex discrimination
Thomas Sowell Dismantles Feminism and Racialism
20 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: gender wage you, labour economics, racial discrimination, racial wage gap, sex discrimination, Thomas Sowell
The link between parental leave and the gender pay gap | Pew Research Center
19 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in discrimination, gender, human capital, labour supply, occupational choice, population economics Tags: gender wage gap, Parental leave, unintended consequences
“NZ up until the 1980s, was a fairly egalitarian country, apart from Maori and women”
18 Jan 2015 1 Comment
in applied welfare economics, economic history, gender, labour economics, Marxist economics
Max Rashbrooke is at it again in today’s Sunday Star Times – Wellington’s Sunday paper. He was painting pre-economic reform, pre-1984 New Zealand is a golden era of egalitarianism.
To do this, to paint pre-1984 New Zealand, pre-neoliberal New Zealand as a fairly egalitarian paradise, he only had to ignore up to two thirds of the population and the inequalities they suffered.
“New Zealand up until the 1980s was fairly egalitarian, apart from Maori and women, our increasing income gap started in the late 1980s and early 1990s,” says Rashbrooke. “These young club members are the first generation to grow up in a New Zealand really starkly divided by income.”
Racism and patriarchy can sit comfortably with a fairly egalitarian society if you are to believe the Left over Left.
As he implies in the paper today, captioned and quoted above, New Zealand in the 1980s was not fairly egalitarian for women, the majority of the population, and Māori, another 10% or so of the population.
This ignoring of racial and gender equality is very much in keeping with Max Rashbrooke’s boy’s own view of egalitarianism: women and ethnic minorities such as Māori and Pasifika don’t count in the greater scheme of the Left over Left when they whine and bitch about the Great Enrichment.
The mission in life of the Left over Left is desperately seeking poverty even if they drop out of the statistics most of the people who are no longer in poverty because of the Great Enrichment and the latest blessings of capitalism and freedom.
As shown in figure 1 below, between 1994 and 2010, real equivalised median New Zealand household income rose by 47%; for Māori, this rise was 68%; for Pasifika, the rise in real equivalised median household income was 77%.
Figure 1: Real equivalised median household income (before housing costs) by ethnicity, 1988 to 2013 ($2013)
Source: Bryan Perry, Household incomes in New Zealand: Trends in indicators of inequality and hardship 1982 to 2013. Ministry of Social Development (July 2014).
Median household income increases of nearly 50% in 16 years, and larger increases for ethnic minorities such as Māori and Pasifika should be celebrated rather than simply ignored because they are inconvenient to Left over Left sniping.
As is common with every member of the Left over Left that I run into these days, such as Max Rashbrooke,, their analysis has no gender analysis.
The Left over Left invariably fail to mention that New Zealand has the smallest gender wage gap of all the industrialised countries.
Sources: Ministry of Women’s Affairs and Statistics New Zealand: New Zealand Income Survey
Over the last more than two decades in New Zealand, there has been sustained income growth spread across all of New Zealand society contrary to hopes and dreams of the Left over Left.
Perry (2014) reviews the poverty and inequality data in New Zealand every year for the Ministry of Social Development. He concluded that:
Overall, there is no evidence of any sustained rise or fall in inequality in the last two decades. The level of household disposable income inequality in New Zealand is a little above the OECD median. The share of total income received by the top 1% of individuals is at the low end of the OECD rankings
Milton Friedman – Case Against Equal Pay for Equal WorkY
15 Jan 2015 Leave a comment
in applied welfare economics, discrimination, economic history, gender, labour economics, labour supply, liberalism, minimum wage Tags: equal pay, Milton Friedman
Utopia, you are standing in it! 
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