@greencatherine @cjsbishop zero US, UK & Swiss gender pay gaps for single women

22 Jan 2016 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in discrimination, economics of love and marriage, gender, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, politics - New Zealand Tags: , ,

If victory is a zero gender wage gap, some countries have achieved it already for single female workers and long ago according to the data charted below is from the Luxembourg Income Study.

Source: IZA World of Labor – Equal pay legislation and the gender wage gap from the Luxembourg Income Study.

Discrimination cannot explain why the gender wage gap for single female is tiny relative to the family wage gap. As Solomon Polachek explains:

…the wage gap for married workers is between three and 30 times greater compared with single workers.

Employers cannot be to blame for the large difference between the single female worker gender wage gap and the family wage gap.

Aside from explaining why employers only discriminate against married women, you must explain how employers managed to find out which female applicants are married so they can discriminate against them.

Without that vital information on the marital status of female applicants and the presence and number of children as well is their spacing, the vast male chauvinistic conspiracy responsible for the glass ceiling and the sticky floors against promotion does not get off the ground.

How do employers actually pay married women less? Advertising jobs that pay women less has been unlawful for decades. Yet another hurdle to overcome for the vast male chauvinistic conspiracy.

Women move between the large number of jobs as do men accumulating human capital as they go? Somehow employers, including female owned firms, must sabotage the accumulation of human capital by married women as soon as they have children but without paying them lessen in their current jobs or advertising jobs that pay married women less.

The main drivers of the gender wage gap are unknown to employers such as:

  • whether the would-be female recruit or employee is married,
  • whether their partner is present,
  • how many children they have,
  • how many of children are under 12, and
  • how many years are there between the births of their children.

These are the main drivers of the gender wage gap – all of which are factors totally unknown to employers and of no relevance to them in making a profit.

Most explanations of the gender wage gap centre around human capital. In anticipation of time outside of the workforce for motherhood, women self-selecting to occupations that penalise career interruptions less.

Women invest in human capital that is more general, human capital that is more mobile between jobs and into spells of part-time work. Women anticipate home time after they have children so they invest in human capital that depreciations at a slower rate during career interruptions. Women also invest less overall in new capital because they expect to spend less time in the labour market.

All of these investments are made by women themselves in anticipation of motherboard rather than employers somehow paying them less after they marry and have children.

https://youtu.be/LudmHUms-g4

The solution to closing the family wage gap requires radical biological changes in who has children. There are more radical changes required than this because mothers actually like babies and enjoy spending time with them rather than going to work.

Equally challenging is the required changes in the dating market. There is an average age difference between boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives of 2 to 3 years. As the husband or boyfriend is a few years older, he has usually accumulated more human capital and is more likely to be at a critical career point for promotion.


Because the husband or boyfriend is 2 to 3 years older, it pays off well in terms of the father investing more in market-related human capital and the mother devoting more time to childcare.

Another major driver of the gender pay gap is the dating market as identified by Richard McKenzie. He pointed out that evolutionary psychology has found that in every culture one of the factors of influencing pairing off in the dating market is that the boyfriend or husband must have good prospects although this preference is weakening over this last century.

One of the reasons for the increase in single parents is that low-paid men are not as inviting prospects as long-term boyfriends or husbands is a few generations ago. There are too few good men.


Source: Why Popcorn Costs So Much at the Movies: And Other Pricing Puzzles – Richard B. McKenzie – Google Books.

University educated couples are not called power couples for nothing – their earning power is this stunning compared to going it on your own. The emergence of power couples means that less educated women may prefer to stay single and raise children on their own rather than marry what is left in the marriage pool.

Because of the requirement among women across all cultures that husbands to be must have good prospects, men have an extra incentive to invest in human capital and work harder and longer hours because of the gender specific payoff in the marriage market.

Men will also take more risks than women because risky jobs carry wage premiums. That risk premium is topped up in the mating market terms are marriage prospects because of the higher wages. Women get a wage premium for taking risky jobs but less of a payoff in the mating market for the higher wages. There is an evolutionary psychology explanation for the family wage gap.


All in all, a key requirement for the closing of the family wage gap and what little is left of the gender wage gap is women drop their standards in terms of who they choose as boyfriends and husbands. Not very likely.


The role of the six-day working week in Japanese sexism and the gender wage gap

02 Dec 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory, discrimination, economic history, economics, economics of love and marriage, gender, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, personnel economics Tags: , , , ,

When I was studying in Japan, they were at the end of phasing out working on Saturdays. The staff at my university work on Saturday mornings for four hours and then went home.

The Japanese working week was reduced by law from 48 to 44 hours per week in 1988 and to 40 hours per week from 1993 (Prescott 1999; Hayashi and Prescott 2002). The Japanese stopped routinely working on Saturdays over the 1990s. The number of national holidays was increased by three and an extra day of annual leave was also prescribed by law.

While feuding with strangers on an unrelated matter about the gender wage gap, it somehow occurred to me that the six-day working week might have something to do with what is on the face of a large amount of sexism in Japan and a large gender wage gap.

That feud with strangers was about unconscious bias as a driver of the gender wage gap in New Zealand. The gender wage gap Japan is attributed to conscious prejudice.

Source: OECD Stat.

In the above chart I have plotted the average weekly hours worked of Japanese workers and the Japanese gender wage gap. Two things can be noticed from the above chart:

  1. there is a sharp reduction in the number of hours worked per week by Japanese workers when they stopped working on Saturdays; and
  2. the gender wage gap started declining after the introduction of a five-day working week in Japan.

In a country where it is standard to work six days a week, the price of motherhood would be much higher than in other countries industrialised countries that phased out the 48-hour week decades previous. The asymmetric marriage premium would also be much higher if one partner to the marriage worked a six-day week while the other looked after the children.

Other drivers of the gender wage gap that arise from human capital specialisation and depreciation and from the differences of a few years in the marrying ages of men and women would be intensified if people worked another day per week. The payoff from a marital division of labour and human capital specialisation where one worked long hours and the other focused on investing in human capital that allow them to care for the children and move in and out of the workforce with less human capital depreciation would be much larger.

Much is made of the distinctiveness of Japanese culture and its sexism. In my time in Japan, the thing I notice most distinctively about Japanese culture was its extraordinary pragmatism and willingness to change rapidly. The Japanese economic miracle was founded on rapid industrialisation, innovation and repeated renewal of human capital. That requires an entrepreneurial spirit and open-mindedness.

Cultural and preference based explanations of the gender wage Including that in Japan underrate the rapid social change in the role of women in the 20th century in all countries in all cultures. As Gary Becker explains:

… major economic and technological changes frequently trump culture in the sense that they induce enormous changes not only in behaviour but also in beliefs. A clear illustration of this is the huge effects of technological change and economic development on behaviour and beliefs regarding many aspects of the family.

Attitudes and behaviour regarding family size, marriage and divorce, care of elderly parents, premarital sex, men and women living together and having children without being married, and gays and lesbians have all undergone profound changes during the past 50 years. Invariably, when countries with very different cultures experienced significant economic growth, women’s education increased greatly, and the number of children in a typical family plummeted from three or more to often much less than two.

A good explanation of this rapid social change is in Timur Kuran’s “Sparks and Prairie Fires: A Theory of Unanticipated Political Revolutions” and “Now Out of Never: The Element of Surprise in the East European Revolution of 1989“.

Kuran suggests that political revolutions and large shifts in political opinion will catch us by surprise again and again because of people’s readiness to conceal their true political preferences under perceived social pressure:

People who come to dislike their government are apt to hide their desire for change as long as the opposition seems weak. Because of the preference falsification, a government that appears unshakeable might see its support crumble following a slight surge in the opposition’s apparent size, caused by events insignificant in and of themselves.

Kuran argues that everyone has a different revolutionary threshold where they reveal their true beliefs, but even one individual shift to opposition leads to many others to come forward and defy the existing order. Small concessions embolden the ground-swell of revolution.

Those ready to oppose social intolerance or who are lukewarm in their intolerance keep their views private until a coincidence of factors gives them the courage to bring their views into the open. They find others share their views and there is a revolutionary bandwagon effect.

Plenty of people have had personal experiences of this in the 1980s and the 1990s when there were rapid changes in social and political attitudes about racism, sexism and gay rights. This includes Japan.

In the case of the Japanese gender wage gap, the move from a six-day to a five-day working week radically changed the asymmetric marriage premium and the payoff from investing in both specialised human capital and in human capital that depreciates quickly when away from work.

This large shift in incentives to work and invest in human capital would embolden a change in social attitudes. This is because the previous views were no longer profitable and many would gain from the change. Others who prefer just to go along with crowd would quickly follow them in to stay in tune with whatever is now popular.

Much of Japanese sexism may be the preference falsification that was low-cost when there was a six-day working week. The move to a five-day working week greatly increased the cost of that sexism and the profits from finding new ways of organising the workplace that better matched motherhood and career in Japan.

Undervalued workers are an untapped business opportunity for more alert entrepreneurs to hire these undervalued workers. In the case of Japan, with a five-day working week, hiring women for jobs that involved considerable investment in firm-specific human capital became more profitable. Previously under a six-day working week it was more profitable to invest in men because they undertook few childcare responsibilities. Under a five-day working week, that payoff matrix favours women more than in the past.

@economicpolicy gathers more evidence of a waning gender pay gap @joshbivens_DC @eliselgould

22 Nov 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in applied price theory, discrimination, economic history, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, minimum wage, occupational choice, poverty and inequality Tags: , , , , , ,

As part of a large paper calling for massive government intervention, the Economic Policy Institute, impeccably left-wing, massed a considerable amount of evidence about the withering away of the gender wage gap and anomalies in what is left of that gap. None of these anomalies bolster the case for more regulation of the labour market.

The first of their charts showed the large reduction in the gender wage gap in the USA. Women’s wages have been increasing consistently over the last 40 years or so. The second of their tweeted charts shows that women of all races consistently outperformed men in wages growth, often by a large margin.

Their most interesting chart is about how the gender gap is not only highest among top earners, their pay gap has not fallen at all in the last 40 years. If anything, that gender wage gap is rising at the top end of the labour market albeit slowly. Progress in closing the gender gap been pretty consistent at the lower pay levels. That progress is certainly better than no progress at all.

gender gap largest among highest earners

Source: Closing the pay gap and beyond: A comprehensive strategy for improving economic security for women and families | Economic Policy Institute.

The Economic Policy Institute didn’t enquire in any detail into why women with the most options in the labour market had made the least progress in closing the gender wage gap.

None of their solutions such as more collective-bargaining and a higher minimum wage will help the top end of the job market.

There is an anomaly in the Economic Policy Institute’s reasoning. The women who would suffer least from a purported inequality of bargaining power inherent in the capitalist system and have plenty of human capital have had least success in closing the gender pay gap. These women can shop around for better job offers and start their own businesses. Many do because they are professionals where self-employment and professional partnerships are common.

The better discussions of the gender wage gap emphasise choice. Women choosing at the top end of the labour market to balance career and family and choosing the occupation and education where the net advantages of doing that are the greatest. As the Economic Policy Institute itself notes:

In 2014, the gap was smallest at the 10th percentile, where women earned 90.9 percent of men’s wages. The minimum wage is partially responsible for this greater equality among the lowest earners, as it results in greater wage uniformity at the bottom of the distribution.

The gap is highest at the top of the distribution, with 95th percentile women earning 78.6 percent as much as their male counterparts. Economist Claudia Goldin (2014) postulates that the gap is larger for women in high-wage professions because they are penalized for not working long, inflexible hours that often come with many professional jobs, due in large part to the arrival of children and long-standing social expectations about the division of household labour between men and women.

What the Economic Policy Institute does not explain is why these long-standing social expectations about the division of household labour should be strongest among well-paid women with plenty of options.

Among these options of high-powered women in well-paid jobs is the ability to buy every labour-saving appliance, hire a nanny and ample childcare and acquire everything else on the list of demands of the Economic Policy Institute on closing the gender pay gap. Something doesn’t add up?

Of course, the Economic Policy Institute discusses the unadjusted gender wage rather than the adjusted gender wage. When you study the gender wage gap after making adjustments for demographic and other obvious factors, it is clear that this pay gap is driven by the choices women make between career and family.

Claudia Goldin did a great study of Harvard MBAs using online surveys of their careers. This is the very group that according to the Economic Policy Institute have made the least progress in bringing down patriarchy in the labour market. Specifically, the overturning of traditional expectations about the marital division of labour in childcare and parenthood.

https://twitter.com/alyssalynn7/status/669219008747610113

Goldin found that three proximate factors accounted for the large and rising gender gap in earnings among MBA graduates as their careers unfold:

  • differences in training prior to MBA graduation,
  • differences in career interruptions, and
  • differences in weekly hours.

The greater career discontinuity and shorter work hours for female MBAs are largely associated with motherhood. There are some careers that severely penalise any time at all out of the workforce or working less than punishingly long and rigid hours.

A 2014 Harvard Business School study found that 28 percent of recent female alumni took off more than six months to care for children; only 2 percent of men did.

Claudia Goldin found one counterfactual that cancels out the gender wage gap amongst MBA professionals: hubby earns less! Female MBAs who have a partner who earn less than them earn as much as the average MBA professional on an hourly basis but work a few less hours per week.

The gender wage gap is persisted in high-paying jobs because career women have so many options. Studies of top earning professionals show that they make quite deliberate choices between family and career. The better explanation of why so many women are in a particular occupation is job sorting: that particular job has flexible hours and the skills do not depreciate as fast for workers who take time off, working part-time or returning from time out of the workforce.

Low job turnover workers will be employed by firms that invest more in training and job specific human capital:

  • Higher job turnover workers, such as women with children, will tend to move into jobs that have less investment in specialised human capital, and where their human capital depreciates at a slower pace.
  • Women, including low paid women, select careers in jobs that match best in terms of work life balance and allows them to enter and leave the workforce with minimum penalty and loss of skills through depreciation and obsolescence.

This is the choice hypothesis of the gender wage gap. Women choose to educate for occupations where human capital depreciates at a slower pace.

The gender wage gap for professionals can be explained by the marriage market combined with assortative mating:

  1. Graduates are likely to marry each other and form power couples; and
  2. There tends to be an age gap between men and women in long-term relationships and marriages of two years.

This two-year age gap means that the husband has two additional years of work experience and career advancement. This is likely to translate into higher pay and more immediate promotional prospects.

Maximising household income would imply that the member of the household with a higher income, and greater immediate promotional prospects stay in the workforce. This is entirely consistent with the choice hypothesis and equalising differentials as the explanation for the gender wage gap. As Solomon Polachek explains:

At least in the past, getting married and having children meant one thing for men and another thing for women. Because women typically bear the brunt of child-rearing, married men with children work more over their lives than married women. This division of labour is exacerbated by the extent to which married women are, on average, younger and less educated than their husbands.

This pattern of earnings behaviour and human capital and career investment will persist until women start pairing off with men who are the same age or younger than them. That is, more women will have to start marrying down in both income and social maturity.

The decline of the British breadwinner – distribution of working hours of married fathers since 1998

16 Nov 2015 1 Comment

by Jim Rose in economics of love and marriage, labour economics, labour supply Tags: , , ,

The number of British fathers in a couple who worked more than 45 hours a week has dropped from about 60% to under 40% since 1998.

image

Source: OECD Family Database.

Most of the gender pay gap explained by age, marriage, hours worked

05 Nov 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in discrimination, economics of love and marriage, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA Tags: , , , ,

image

Source: New BLS report on women’s earnings: Most of the 17.9% gender pay gap in 2013 is explained by age, marriage, hours worked – AEI | Carpe Diem Blog » AEIdeas.

HT: Lorenzo Michael Warby.

@EconomicPolicy showed gender pay equality when arguing the opposite @CHSommers @Mark_J_Perry

02 Nov 2015 2 Comments

by Jim Rose in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, discrimination, gender, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice, politics - USA Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

The Economic Policy Institute were good enough to dig out unit record data on the unadjusted US gender wage gap by percentiles. In attempting to show there was a persistent gender pay gap, the impeccably left-wing Economic Policy Institute showed that the unadjusted gender pay gap has all but disappeared in the USA.

There is next to no gender wage gap even in unadjusted terms towards the bottom of the labour market. This is despite all the protestations of the Left of an inherent inequality of bargaining power between the bosses and workers.

The low paid are supposed to be powerless unless unionised. Declining unionisation is a leading explanation on the Left of the rising income shares of the top 10%, top 1% in the top 0.1%.

If that inherent inequality of bargaining power trundled out at every opportunity by the Twitter Left explains anything in the labour market, this inequality of bargaining power should be operating with greatest strength at the bottom of the labour market.

Clearly the inherent inequality of bargaining power between the bosses and workers is not doing its job regarding the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap in the USA increases as you move up the income ladder rather than the other way around.

The explanation of the Economic Policy Institute for greater gender pay equality at the bottom is the minimum wage and male wage stagnation:

It is interesting to note that the wage gap between genders is smaller at the 10th percentile than at the 95th. At the 10th percentile, women earn 91 percent of men’s wages while women make only 79 percent of men’s wages at the 95th percentile.

The minimum wage is partially responsible for this greater equality among the lowest earners—it sets a wage floor that applies to everyone, which means that people near the bottom of the distribution are likely to make more equal wages. Also, low-wage workers are disproportionately women, which means that the minimum wage particularly bolsters women’s wages.

…Although women have seen modest wage gains in the last several decades, the main reason the gender wage gap has slowly narrowed is that the vast majority of men’s wages have stagnated or declined.

It is a bit rich for the Economic Policy Institute to praise the minimum wage as a force for increasing incomes after spending so much of its time saying how the minimum wage has fallen way behind wages growth in general.

The gender gap lingers at the top of the labour market despite the quite substantial wage gains  for women as compared to men over the past 15 years. The Economic Policy Institute dismissed the substantial gains as modest despite their own documenting of them.

It is even richer for the Economic Policy Institute to start extending the male wage stagnation hypothesis to the top 20% and top 10%.

The top of the income distribution has not been known previously known as victims of wage stagnation.

The gender wage gap remains stubbornly high at the top end of the US labour market at 20% for the last few decades. The gender wage is so large and has stayed large at the top half of the labour market  for the past few decades because of compensating differentials. Women on higher incomes are balancing families and careers in choosing the occupations that best suits each individual woman, their talents and educational choices.

image

Source: OECD Employment Database.

Studies of top earning professionals show that they make quite deliberate choices between family and career. The better explanation of why so many women are in a particular occupation is job sorting: that particular job has flexible hours and the skills do not depreciate as fast for workers who take time off, working part-time or returning from time out of the workforce. Low job turnover workers will be employed by firms that invest more in training and job specific human capital.

  • Higher job turnover workers, such as women with children, will tend to move into jobs that have less investment in specialised human capital, and where their human capital depreciates at a slower pace.
  • Women, including low paid women, select careers in jobs that match best in terms of work life balance and allows them to enter and leave the workforce with minimum penalty and loss of skills through depreciation and obsolescence.

This is the choice hypothesis of the gender wage gap. Women choose to educate for occupations where human capital depreciates at a slower pace. This gender wage gap for professionals can be explained by the marriage market combined with assortative mating:

  1. Graduates are likely to marry each other and form power couples; and
  2. There tends to be an age gap between men and women in long-term relationships and marriages of two years.

This two-year age gap means that the husband has two additional years of work experience and career advancement. This is likely to translate into higher pay and more immediate promotional prospects. Maximising household income would imply that the member of the household with a higher income, and greater immediate promotional prospects stay in the workforce.

This is consistent with the choice hypothesis and equalising differentials as the explanation for the gender wage gap. As Solomon Polachek explains:

At least in the past, getting married and having children meant one thing for men and another thing for women. Because women typically bear the brunt of child-rearing, married men with children work more over their lives than married women. This division of labour is exacerbated by the extent to which married women are, on average, younger and less educated than their husbands.

This pattern of earnings behaviour and human capital and career investment will persist until women start pairing off with men who are the same age or younger than them.

In low-paying jobs, there is little in the way of trade-offs other than full-time or part-time work. Low-paid jobs do not involve choosing majors at university, choosing careers, industries and employers that call for long hours and uninterrupted careers or not so long hours, fewer human capital and promotional penalties for time off and more work-life balance. The choice hypothesis is the far better explanation for the persistence of the unadjusted gender wage gap in  the USA as Polachek explains:

The gender wage gap for never marrieds is a mere 2.8%, compared with over 20% for marrieds. The gender wage gap for young workers is less than 5%, but about 25% for 55–64-year-old men and women.

If gender discrimination were the issue, one would need to explain why businesses pay single men and single women comparable salaries. The same applies to young men and young women. One would need to explain why businesses discriminate against older women, but not against younger women. If corporations discriminate by gender, why are these employers paying any groups of men and women roughly equal pay?

Why is there no discrimination against young single women, but large amounts of discrimination against older married women? … Each type of possible discrimination is inconsistent with negligible wage differences among single and younger employees compared with the large gap among married men and women (especially those with children, and even more so for those who space children widely apart)

The main drivers of the gender wage gap are unknown to employers such as whether the would-be recruit or employer is married, their partner is present, how many children they have, how many of these children are under 12, and how many years are there between the births of their children.

The marital division of labour

24 Oct 2015 Leave a comment

Image by Jim Rose

South Korean gender pay gap for the 10th, 50th and 90th percentile since 1985

24 Oct 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in development economics, discrimination, economic history, economics of education, gender, growth miracles, human capital, labour economics, labour supply, occupational choice Tags: , , , ,

image

Source: OECD Employment Database.

Has the gender gap closed for graduates over the last generation? @greencatherine

19 Oct 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in discrimination, economics of education, gender, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice Tags: , , , , ,

Today’s women who are well-established in their careers in their 30s and 40s are doing better than their mothers who are also tertiary educated in terms of closing the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap in the chart below is unadjusted. It is the raw gender wage gap for women aged 35 to 44 and for women aged 55 to 64.

image

Source: Indicator A6 What are the earnings advantages from education? – Education at a Glance 2014 – OECD iLibrary.

In Canada and the USA there is been no progress at all. In New Zealand, the gender gap between male and female tertiary educated workers is a little larger for today’s prime age women graduates than for older female workers who completed a tertiary education.

I suspect that  gender gap be no smaller for today’s career women as compared to two decades ago has something to do with compensating differentials.

Today’s career women want it all: both motherhood and a career. They trade-off work-life balance for wages.

Women choose university degrees and occupations that are more agreeable to a balancing motherhood and a career.

@janlogie The dramatic closing of the gender pay gap at the 10th percentile in the US, UK, Australia and NZ since 1970 but not at the 90th percentile!

15 Oct 2015 4 Comments

by Jim Rose in discrimination, economic history, gender, human capital, labour economics, politics - Australia, politics - New Zealand, politics - USA Tags: , , ,

It seems that the top 10% of men are so busy oppressing the top 10% of women that they forgot to keep up the violence inherent in the capitalist system against the bottom 10% of women. The gender pay gap at the bottom of the economic strata closed quite dramatically and consistently since 1970 or as far back as data was available in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and USA. Much of the closing of the gender pay gap for the low-paid was under the scourge of Reagan, Thatcher, Hawke and Keating and Rogernomics.

Source and Notes: OECD Employment Database. The gender gap plotted below is unadjusted. It is calculated as the difference between the 10th percentile earnings of men and the 10th percentile earnings of women relative to the 10th percentile earnings of men. Estimates of earnings used in the calculations refer to gross earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. However, this definition may slightly vary from one country to another.

By comparison to this dramatic liberation of women from the gender pay gap at the bottom, the gender pay gap for full-time employees has not really tapered down that much at the top of the income distribution and has been pretty flat for coming on 20 years. It seems the class war is over and has been won by women at the bottom but not at the top?

Rather than up the workers, the battle cry of the Posh Trots is up the managers, liberate them from insidious pay inequities imposed upon them by a vast sexist conspiracy of male managers.

Source and Notes: OECD Employment Database. The gender gap plotted below is unadjusted. It is calculated as the difference between the 10th percentile earnings of men and the 10th percentile earnings of women relative to the 10th percentile earnings of men. Estimates of earnings used in the calculations refer to gross earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. However, this definition may slightly vary from one country to another.

This failure to close the gender pay gap at the top requires more investigation. The available of reliable contraceptives in the late 1960s led to an explosion of investment by women in long duration professional education and in careers where absences because of motherhood in their 20s and 30s was penalised in terms of human capital depreciation and promotional opportunities.

The reason for the endurance of the gender pay gap at the top of the income distribution is compensating differentials. Women at the top were able to have it all.

Professional women could invest in a career and a family and mix-and-match according to their own preferences for career and family and timing of births rather than the preferences of others who looked upon them as some sort of pathfinder for their gender. It is at the top of the income distribution where short absences from the workplace can has very large consequences for wages and promotion.

The dating gap on campus

06 Oct 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in economics of education, economics of love and marriage, gender, health and safety, labour economics Tags: , , , , , , ,

Men need to get off the sofa and do some housework

04 Oct 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in economics of love and marriage Tags: , , ,

The impact of household composition on income inequality

30 Sep 2015 1 Comment

by Jim Rose in labour economics, population economics, poverty and inequality Tags: , , , , ,

Will the standard policy response to a labour market crisis reduce inequality?

24 Sep 2015 2 Comments

by Jim Rose in applied price theory, applied welfare economics, economic history, economics of bureaucracy, economics of education, human capital, labour economics, occupational choice, poverty and inequality, Public Choice Tags: , , , , , , , , ,

Whenever there is a crisis in the labour market, the standard policy response is send them on a course. That makes you look like you care and by the time they graduate the problem will probably fixed itself. Most problems do. I found this bureaucratic response to labour market crises to repeat itself over and over again while working in the bureaucracy.

The standard policy response to a normal problem in the labour market is send them on a course. Clever geeks as yourself sitting at your desk as a policy analysis or minister did well at university. You assume others will as well including those who have neither the ability or aptitude to succeed in education. Lowering university tuition fees and easing the terms of student loans simply means that those who do well at university will not have to pay back as much to the government. People who succeed at university already have above average IQs so they already had a good head start in life.

The standard solution to growing inequality is to send people on a course. Trouble is that just make smart people wealthier without helping the not so smart and increases the chance of smart men and women marrying off together. This increases the inequality between power couples and the rest.

Why did married couples get a pass on the great wage stagnation and the ravages of the top 1%?

20 Sep 2015 Leave a comment

by Jim Rose in economics of love and marriage, labour economics, law and economics, poverty and inequality Tags: , , , , , , ,

Marriage used to be a pairing of opposites: Men would work for pay and women would work at home. But in the second half of the 20th century, women flooded the labour force, raising their participation rate from 32 percent, in 1950, to nearly 60 percent in the last decade. As women closed the education gap, the very nature of marriage has changed. It has slowly become an arrangement pairing similarly rich and educated people. Ambitious workaholics used to seek partners who were happy to take care of the house. Today, they’re more likely to seek another ambitious workaholic.

The rich and educated are more likely to marry, to marry each other, and to produce rich and educated children. But this virtual cycle turns vicious for the poor.

Source: How America’s Marriage Crisis Makes Income Inequality So Much Worse – The Atlantic

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Homepaddock

A rural perspective with a blue tint by Ele Ludemann

Kiwiblog

DPF's Kiwiblog - Fomenting Happy Mischief since 2003

The Dangerous Economist

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Watts Up With That?

The world's most viewed site on global warming and climate change

Climate Etc.

The Logical Place

Tim Harding's writings on rationality, informal logic and skepticism

Doc's Books

A window into Doc Freiberger's library

The Risk-Monger

Let's examine hard decisions!

Uneasy Money

Commentary on monetary policy in the spirit of R. G. Hawtrey

Barrie Saunders

Thoughts on public policy and the media

Liberty Scott

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Point of Order

Politics and the economy

James Bowden's Blog

A blog (primarily) on Canadian and Commonwealth political history and institutions

Science Matters

Reading between the lines, and underneath the hype.

Peter Winsley

Economics, and such stuff as dreams are made on

A Venerable Puzzle

"The British constitution has always been puzzling, and always will be." --Queen Elizabeth II

The Antiplanner

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Bet On It

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

History of Sorts

WORLD WAR II, MUSIC, HISTORY, HOLOCAUST

Roger Pielke Jr.

Undisciplined scholar, recovering academic

Offsetting Behaviour

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

JONATHAN TURLEY

Res ipsa loquitur - The thing itself speaks

Conversable Economist

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

The Victorian Commons

Researching the House of Commons, 1832-1868

The History of Parliament

Articles and research from the History of Parliament Trust

Books & Boots

Reflections on books and art

Legal History Miscellany

Posts on the History of Law, Crime, and Justice

Sex, Drugs and Economics

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

European Royal History

Exploring the Monarchs of Europe

Tallbloke's Talkshop

Cutting edge science you can dice with

Marginal REVOLUTION

Small Steps Toward A Much Better World

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

“We do not believe any group of men adequate enough or wise enough to operate without scrutiny or without criticism. We know that the only way to avoid error is to detect it, that the only way to detect it is to be free to inquire. We know that in secrecy error undetected will flourish and subvert”. - J Robert Oppenheimer.

STOP THESE THINGS

The truth about the great wind power fraud - we're not here to debate the wind industry, we're here to destroy it.

Fruits and Votes

Lindsay Mitchell

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

Alt-M

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

croaking cassandra

Economics, public policy, monetary policy, financial regulation, with a New Zealand perspective

UK Constitutional Law Association

The Grumpy Economist

Celebrating humanity's flourishing through the spread of capitalism and the rule of law

International Liberty

Restraining Government in America and Around the World