No, Women Don’t Make Less Money Than Men

This article assumes that there's nothing affecting or constraining people's career choices besides interest in a particular field. It's not that women choose careers that pay less - it's that careers dominated by women are frequently perceived to be less valuable to society and are therefore paid at a lower rate. Careers in which men historically dominated, but which later become "female professions", pay less when done by women. "Women make less remunerative life choices" seems like a fairly ignorant way to explain wage disparity.

Fallacy of negation...<p>The Daily Beast denies Obama&#x27;s statement A:&quot;Women make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns&quot; and conclude B:&quot;No, Women Don&#x27;t Make Less Money Than Men,&quot; a non sequitur. Unfortunately, A and B aren&#x27;t mutually exclusive, so not-A doesn&#x27;t imply B.<p>Daily Beast refers to a &quot;correction&quot; printed in the Washington Post which says: &quot;Women earn 91 cents for every dollar men earn--if you control for life choices.&quot; Source: <a href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/post/women-earn-91-cents-for-every-dollar-men-earn--if-you-control-for-life-choices/2012/06/04/gJQAqrHkEV_blog.html" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.washingtonpost.com&#x2F;blogs&#x2F;wonkblog&#x2F;post&#x2F;women-earn...</a><p>So, Yes, Women Do Make Less Money Than Men (even after controlling for different life-choices). It&#x27;s just that the wage gap isn&#x27;t nearly as wide as Obama said. Obama exaggerated the wage gap. But Daily Beast made an invalid argument and reached a false conclusion.<p>False dilemma seems to be programmed into the US psyche. For instance, they seem to think they need to choose between Democrats and Republicans, and dismiss third parties. This kind of manichean thinking, reinforced by poorly thought out op-ed pieces like this, make civilized conversation and progress in the US difficult.

I really wish we could stop focusing on statistics based on a gender binary and instead used a continuous measure for masculine&#x2F;feminine traits like ring to index finger ratios instead, since that is a pretty solid proxy for the levels of testosterone present in the womb during gestation.

Hey, apparently patriarchy costs women 23% of their wages. But I want to ignore 18% of that. That leaves me with 5% which I don&#x27;t think is a problem. And I&#x27;m a woman, so I can&#x27;t possibly be perpetuating patriarchy, can I?

This article is typical of the hateful shit that gets too many HN upvotes. It starts with a headline saying that women don&#x27;t get paid less than men, but then shows that they do, argues that the gap is less than we think (but still exists) and then argues that it&#x27;s all the fault of women anyway.<p>It does have an interesting bit in a tble though:<p>1. Petroleum Engineering: 87% male 2. Pharmacy Pharmaceutical Sciences and Administration: 48% male 3. Mathematics and Computer Science: 67% male 4. Aerospace Engineering: 88% male 5. Chemical Engineering: 72% male 6. Electrical Engineering: 89% male 7. Naval Architecture and Marine Engineering: 97% male 8. Mechanical Engineering: 90% male 9. Metallurgical Engineering: 83% male 10. Mining and Mineral Engineering: 90% male<p>Seems like mathematics and computer science are doing reasonably well at recruitin women. Better than anything but pharmacy. That&#x27;s good.