Starting lower on the pay scale, the gender penalty, will reverberate for the rest of your career so long as salary history is allowed to be required.
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Gender equality will never be achieved if there continues to be articles like this one. As long as jobs are divided by gender and not abilities, we will continue to see articles like this.
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In declaring that employers "discriminate against men when they apply for any female-dominated jobs," the closing sentence reminds me that after fifteen years of both private and public education--including three years of private preschool--my 17-year-old daughter has had only five male teachers (approximately 3%). Hey, someone's gotta teach phys. ed., no?
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The article cites the rapid growth of women’s employment in male-dominated sectors. "Women’s employment in the male-dominated jobs within these male-dominated industries — mostly making and moving around physical goods — rose 6.9 percent, versus just 2.3 percent for men."
In the US, according to NIH, $201 billion is spent on mental disorders ($79 Bil. in 1996). "In a given year 43.8 million, or 18.5%, (1 in 5 adults) experiences mental illness that substantially interferes with or limits one or more major life activities. Prevalence rates for the majority of the anxiety disorders are higher in women than men. 9.8 million, or 4.0% are afflicted with a serious mental illness like obsessive-compulsive disorder, anxiety disorder, personality disorder and depression, making it the costliest medical condition."
To keep Mr. Kolko’s report in context, even with faster dispersion of females in the labor market their new won pursuits in male dominant jobs seems not the likely means to a more composed life for the gender.
One wonders if men will make gains in "Life Span Equality" and "Healthy Body Equality" as women, at last, take up jobs in construction, mining, and agriculture.
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Left out significant bi-gender (at least) work force of firefighters, paramedics, and police. Equal pay by position with good benefits.
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So, basically, pay declines since women are discriminated against, so women should stay away and take some other job. Gotcha. How about...we force the issue that women shouldn't be paid less and discriminated against. Yes, I face this. I face seeing men without my skillset getting promoted to managing me, and then my better skillset goes to making them look good. Won't be doing that much longer, that's for sure.
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Is immigration a factor in "unemployment at its lowest level in almost 50 years...." The Immigration Act of 1965 came into effect a little over 50 years ago, thereby increasing the labor supply. Also, since the Great Recession of 2008 immigrants entering illegally have gone down. The article talks about a "tight labor market." Could lower immigration be a reason?
Of course, over the last 2 years immigration is down under Trump, but his tactics are reprehensible and have made discussion of a measured, non-exploitative immigration policy pretty much impossible.
Ive been a union electrician for 20 years. We are all paid the same wages and benefits due to our union contract. This article is inaccurate, insulting to women in the trades, and badly written. It reads like a 9th grade English class essay that has to be a minimum # of words. The picture is probably someone's daughter that you stuck a pink hard hat on because she is certainly not a tradeswoman. She could have at least tried to pose like she is working.
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@Kristin
Unbelievable. You didn't even bother to read the caption of the picture. If you have a point, I can't find it--what, exactly, is the problem with the article? You simply insult the subjects, the author, and, by implication, the readers, then leave.
Less insults, more thoughtful comments. Or don't bother.
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Traditionally women have been discriminated against in the workplace, whether by being frozen out from traditional, higher paid, male jobs, or by being paid less for traditional women's work. Look at the teacher strikes in the US to erase the notion that women are easily finding higher paid work in traditional women's jobs. Eleanor Holmes Norton, long ago, said that if women came to dominate a traditional male workplace, the wages then went down. This article simply shows that nothing has changed. All in all, sounds like a plaintiff attorney's fertile field.
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Just yesterday I met a tiny young women who was a tank mechanic in the Army. When I asked her how she handled the big heavy pieces she said she had difficulty but it was more than offset by her ability to get into tight places. She even told of being lowered head first into restricted areas that men couldn’t get into. She really liked her job and the pay for women is the same as for men.
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Only the NYT could find something bad about something good. If these people in the future want some other opportunity they could go for it. As long as the economy is making opportunities. This economy is allowing those with talent and drive to improve themselves, due to opportunities. Excellent news after believing that there would be very limited ones under the previous view of economic growth. More coming as trade issues improve.
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@vulcanalex
what's good about working the same jobs for 30% less?
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Related to this, there is a recent study https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/bolotnyy/files/be_gendergap.pdf that shows that much of the gender pay gap is due to different choices men and women make. The study was conducted among bus and train operators at the MBTA, where pay is determined solely by union contract and seniority. Women's weekly pay was 89% of men's pay for the same jobs and same level of seniority. The difference was that men were more willing to work overtime while women were more likely to take unpaid time off.
You can complain about societal expectations for men vs. women, but the pay gap is not substantially due to discrimination.
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@J. Waddell This shows that what women need, like all workers, is strong unions.
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And men are moving into historically female-dominated jobs.
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@Ed
And when that happens, the pay tends to go up (like in nursing)
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@vacciniumovatum I believe that the increases of men in nursing came after their wages began to rise, not before. Nursing is a skilled activity that requires specialized training. As women entered the workforce in the 70s and 80s in greater numbers jobs besides nursing and teaching became available to women and nursing no longer had a captive workforce. So wages rose. That made the profession more attractive to men.
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Historically after women enter a field dominated by men and then become the majority, the wages of that field drop dramatically.
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You have an article about how women are filling in a gap in the labor market, but you show a picture of a woman leaning on a barricade poking at her phone. Great optics.
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@Chris, the image I see is of a women scooping up drywall mud in safety glasses.
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@Chris
that's a container of plaster, not a phone.
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@Chris I see a picture of a woman clearly in a construction environment holding a trowel or paint brush. Has the photo been changed?
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You are overlooking age discrimination here. One of the problems in claiming that unemployment is low is that the cutoff age for prime age workers is 54. How many people, male or female, are ready to retire at the age of 54? We aren't eligible for social security until we're 62 and at that we take a huge hit. But employers look at almost anyone with more than a few years experience as too expensive. How they look at people over the age of 50 is worse.
Employers discriminate against age, gender, skin color, and any other qualities they can. They employ their HR departments to eliminate as many experienced (and hence expensive) people as possible from the company and then they whine that they cannot find the right person to fill the job.
Unemployment is not as low as claimed. Ask any person over the age of 45 trying to find a job in IT. Ask any person over the age of 50 in most other fields what their experience has been. The answers are dismal. This country has a large number of unemployed highly skilled and highly competent people in need of jobs. Yet companies continue to whine about there not being any Americans who are competent to do the jobs.
We're here. If you interview us, hire us, pay us wages reflecting our skills and treat us like human beings you'll have what you need. As long as you continue to look for purple squirrels jobs will go begging.
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@hen3ry As a worker currently in his 50s, I see a dichotomy with older workers. We're the least likely to be unemployed (we have lower unemployment rates than younger workers), but if we become unemployed, it's much harder to find the same level of work. So, I work twice as hard to try and stay employed. And keep my fingers crossed.
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This piece, like much current reporting and commentary, implies over and over again that, absent discrimination, men and women would sort themselves proportionally across professions and other activities. This assumption belies history, logic, current science, and common sense. We must improve equality of opportunity and stress that fields once closed to women or other groups are open to them. However, proportional representation across professions could only be achieved by forcing or coercing many women to stop seeking jobs in medicine, sociology, etc. and pushing them into fields they don’t favor as often as men. Different average preferences and aptitude’s among groups have complex and multiple causes. Eliminating discrimination is vital, but leading people to believe the goal should be proportionality in all outcomes is damaging to the goal of equal opportunity.
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@Kevin Johnson Economics indicates that the free market will sort out these issues better than anything else. After all today few would exclude employees that can increase your profits due to gender or other non performance factors.
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@vulcanalex
I seem to recall claims that the free market would eventually sort out slavery and Jim Crow. Those of us non-white and non-male who are alive now cannot wait for the purported magic of your economics.
You greatly underestimate the effect of bigotry on hiring, promotion and salary.
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Is it possible you could have found a picture of a woman actually working instead of leaning against a sign while on her cell phone? It's hard to believe that this image wasn't purposefully selected to reinforce the idea that women actually don't belong in certain jobs.
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I have also noticed on road construction jobs in my area that women are inevitably flagging traffic.
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