The Gender Gap

I've come across quite a few articles over the past few days that discuss the gender gap. They all say something to the affect of "Women make $0.75 for every dollar a man makes." I'm not sure exactly what the current statistic is, but that's generally what people say. The arguments then go back and forth about discrimination, the socialization of women, the role of women in families, the education and careers that women chose, etc., etc.

Now, I am confident that discrimination exists in the world, but I will not assume that inequity is the result of discrimination. Why? Because I find it wholly un-American and un-Christian to find someone guilty before they are proven innocent. Using statistics to prove someone or some group is acting illegally or unethically is very difficult to prove.

Take my boss, for instance. He confided in me that he was disappointed that our company has very few minority (read African American) employees. He had no intention of hiring a black employee just so he could say he hired a black employee, but he wanted to find and hire qualified black candidates. However, if you were to judge my department based on the percentage of blacks to whites my boss would not look good. In this case, and in many cases, the statistics do not prove guilt.

Let's get back to men and women. There are so many statistics that don't mean anything because they fail to create a good control group. For example, comparing all men to all women is not a good idea because many women stay home to take care of children. If you think this is trend is somehow "wrong", then I suggest you start your battle here. So, the control group has to be working. But some women work part time to be with their children. Same probelm. So, they must be working full time. In fact, let's take children out of the picture entirely because single moms will skew the data. We could compare men with no children to women with no children, but there may be factors that we are unaware of that would make women pick different jobs than men. So, do we compare the same job with the same experience? That may show a pay difference (if there is one), but it won't show discrimination in hiring. How about the same field. Same education? We should probably also survey their values to make sure that men and women are both equally career driven. Crap! I totally forgot about the difference between married men and married women. I know many more married women that made career sacrifices for their husbands than married men that made career sacrifices for their wives. This is starting to get confusing.

Here we go: Let's take unmarried business college graduates with no children and about the same job experience, then we'll compare these people that have jobs in a similar field. We could compare their level, and the pay within that level.

That seems pretty logical, but I have never seen a study that has done this. I do recall (as if in a dream) that single women with no children make more money than single men with no children, and they are over-represented in managerial positions. Of course, I can't recall where I read this or the study that proved it. Personally, I believe it. Does that make me a progressive or a conservative. On the one hand, I am not surprised that women make great managers and might make more money than men, on the other hand I am rejecting that women are universally discriminated against.

The lesson that I take away from all this is: there is more to life than money. You cannot compare any one group to any other in terms of money. Why? Because different people value different things. Some cultures produce more engineers, some more linguists, some more musicians, some more athletes, some more doctors, some more accountants. People value different things. Some of that is culture, and some of that just might possibly have something to do with the possibility that men and women just might maybe be possibly a little bit different from one another... maybe.