This article considers the pay gap between women and men in the United States compared with other countries around the world. The United States is known for its pay gap, however a new study by Glassdoor has taken into consideration only the unexplained factors of the gender pay gap (the ones that can be presumed to be bias) and ranked the US against other countries. The pay gap can mostly be explained by factors such as the sorting of men and women into different occupations, and worker differences, and surprisingly the United States and other countries are pretty even when only the unexplained aspect is used. The unexplained aspect means that the two workers of different genders are similar in skill but have different wages, suggesting discrimination. Other differences in the pay gap between men and women stem from entry barriers and social pressures that prohibit women from entering certain industries.
The article states that even though the United States in this study has similar 'unexplained pay gap' to other countries around the world, this does not mean that there isn't a problem. The gender pay gap in the US is significant and stems from systematic problems in society such as educational access. Based on this, the article poses the question: "Is this better than a small gender gap that cannot be economically explained?"
http://news.yahoo.com/does-us-gender-pay-gap-compare-internationally-pretty-164734793.html
While I may be speaking truisms, how inaccurate is it to say that the sorting of occupations based on gender is due heavily to engrained gender roles. Entry barriers seem to be the key to solving this sorting problem as an article posted earlier today on the NIBC Blog did mention that men earn roughly 20 cents higher than women do.
ReplyDeleteEven though we have gendered occupations that can be male or female dominated, I think an issue would be the difference in salary for the male vs female dominated fields when they both require a similar skill level. I think typically the male dominated field tend to have higher wages regardless of the skill level.
ReplyDeleteI had some problems with the article itself. It seems to be justifying gender related wage gaps in U.S. by making a comparison to other big economies. However, the comparison wasn't even nearly extensive enough.
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