You are simply wrong about what the point of the thread was. I'm in a good position to know because I wrote the OP. The point was to highlight the idiotic wrongness of the gender pay gap narrative.
Ya know [MENTION=103]Metaphor[/MENTION]; , here's a problem.
I agree with you on this part. I agree that to an enormous extent the "pay gap" is now mostly about women choosing their own priorities like men do. But they tend to prioritize differently from men. They tend to prioritize flexibility, secure working environment, transportable skills and other things more than men. The tradeoff is lower income. The wage gap is primarily the collective choices women make compared to the ones men make.
But that wasn't at all clear in the OP. You knew what the point was, but even I(who agrees with you) didn't see anything like that. Given your OP history, like Cornell and Vermont and such, you kinda need to be very clear.
Tom
That's only part of the story.
Women DO tend to value flexibilty, etc. At least women with children do, or those who are planning to have children. Why is this less a concern for men? ...
Call me an old fogey with lingering sexism, but I agree with a point TomC and Toni (and Metaphor!) are driving at. There are valid reasons for pay gaps; trying to impose pay equality can lead to silliness.
In fact, when I compare the WH pay by gender looking at several percentiles I see the OPPOSITE of what Perry and Metaphor see. The identity of mean pay, and pay at almost every percentile EXCEPT 50% makes me suspect that some staffing official was running special software or looking at spread-sheets to artificially impose pay equality on the WH roster! (I'm guessing, but I think Metaphor — and presumably Perry — would find this to be silly, at best.
I tend to agree with them!)
If the pay grades and hiring were done to deliberately create pay equality, why the bulge at 50%? I don't know whether there's a special reason for that bulge; maybe it's just evidence that the Holy Grail which Metaphor envisions, in which statisticians look ONLY at the Blessed Median — praise be unto it — is not as universally worshiped as Mataphor thinks.
I find it amusing that some of us (TomC and I) might agree with Metaphor that working statistics to ensure that an organization like the WH has "pay equality" may be an example of excessive wokeness! I look at the data (same 40% salary, same 45%, same at 55%, same at 60%, etc.) and it leads me to guess that WH staff and salaries were carefully tuned for that equality.
Yet Perry and Metaphor, who presumably would despise such tuning far more than I do, are promoting a statistic that suggests those salaries were NOT tuned: the discrepancy near 50% specifically. A discrepancy they should applaud but, like an action-movie hero jumping from one train to a train moving in the opposite direction, they grab onto that statistical quirk and advance a charge of hypocrisy!
The whole thing really is amusing!
As I've said, I don't care about WH pay disparity or lack thereof. For me the thread is a case study in the Right-Wing Bullshit machine. And definitely a black-eye on AEI research ... and on those who use that site for "information."
Professor Perry EITHER was unaware of the remarkable equality of WH salary stats (shown in the table I posted) OR saw that equality and suppressed it in his write-up because it didn't fit his theme. In the first case, Perry is an incompetent statistician; in the latter case he's dishonest. My guess is he's both.
I don't know Professor Perry. For all I know if I e-mailed him that table he'd reply "Gosh, you're right! I was so busy that week, getting my family vaccinated etc. that I didn't run all the statistical tests I usually do. I'll do an edit on that webpage. Thanks for pointing this out!"
I really do NOT think I'd get that response from Perry, but I can't rule it out. However Metaphor HAS been presented with the table and has NOT retracted.
I am pleased and proud that I spent an hour or so on the WH salary data (the hardest part of the task was ungarbling the result of copy/paste from the pdf file) and
refuted Perry's bulge!
Attention Good Googlers: Is Perry's Bulge making the rounds of political talkers? (Did it really get mentioned in the
Fucking Guardian for God's Sake as Metaphor seemed to claim, or is AEI just a thing with [sarcasm on] Parler and QAnon?) I ask because I'd like to e-mail my result to an appropriate commentator. In fact I think I will: I've exchanged e-mail with Robert Reich in the past and some others. ... Off to Gmail.
