[KirinDave]

> You're comparing a difference in wages to a difference in population.

This is not actually correct (and in fact, I'm not talking about college and these numbers are not correct for college participation!), but even if it were, we can formulate wage problems in terms of populations.

> Moreover, if you want to see a large difference, what's with the gender balance in the prison population?

And it's a popular argument among MRAs, literally headlining much of their materials, that women receive much better treatment in the prison system than men. This is just another example of my argument: it's a problem if there is a bad outcome for men. It's not a problem if there is a bad outcome for women, it's "choice."

[AnthonyMouse]

> This is not actually correct (and in fact, I'm not talking about college and these numbers are not correct for college participation!), but even if it were, we can formulate wage problems in terms of populations.

But then the numbers are completely different. If you look at something like gender balance at the 20th or 30th percentile income level for full time employees, there are more men at those below-median income levels than women. Then men are underrepresented around the middle, but women are highly underrepresented at the top. The people making millions or hundreds of millions a year bring the male average way up but that does nothing for the bottom 90+% of men who on average are actually making less than the average woman.

> This is just another example of my argument: it's a problem if there is a bad outcome for men. It's not a problem if there is a bad outcome for women, it's "choice."

The argument is that there should be consistency. If it's a problem in one case then it should be a problem in every case. We have laws against employer sex discrimination and a slew of programs to try to help women advance their careers. The wage gap is smaller now than it was 20 years ago, and smaller 20 years ago than it was 40 years ago. What analogous thing is actually being done to keep men out of prison? What progress has been made there?

You're also apparently claiming that going to prison is a choice in the same way that choosing a profession is. There is theoretically a choice whether to commit a crime or not, but in the Three Felonies a Day sense there isn't, and committing a crime is demonstrably not a prerequisite to going to prison anyway.

[KirinDave]

> But then the numbers are completely different. If you look at something like gender balance at the 20th or 30th percentile income level for full time employees, there are more men at those below-median income levels than women. Then men are underrepresented around the middle, but women are highly underrepresented at the top.

This is an excellent deflection, and it's also a relatively recent phenomenon. A surge in health care worker requirements which involve a lot of traditionally gendered roles has caused this outcome.

If you control for that, this effect is substantially less pronounced.

> The people making millions or hundreds of millions a year bring the male average way up but that does nothing for the bottom 90+% of men who on average are actually making less than the average woman.

And once again, we get to a phrasing of the problem that implies that it's a problem when men are at a disadvantage but inevitable when a woman is at a disadvantage.

> The argument is that there should be consistency. If it's a problem in one case then it should be a problem in every case. We have laws against employer sex discrimination and a slew of programs to try to help women advance their careers. The wage gap is smaller now than it was 20 years ago, and smaller 20 years ago than it was 40 years ago.

And these laws are largely toothless because of forced arbitration and Non-disparage agreements. The month California nullified these, a flood of class action lawsuits against major employers opened up. New York is considering such a law as well. I wonder if other states will have the courage to actually let the law come into play>

> What analogous thing is actually being done to keep men out of prison? What progress has been made there?

This is a common MRA talking point I encounter. I absolutely agree with you that incarceration rates are absurd and dehumanizing. It's a travesty of justice and in many cases a systemic attack on citizen's rights. This does not have any bearing on our current conversation, and we as a society _MUST_ be able to pursue more than one social justice issue at a time.

> You're also apparently claiming that going to prison is a choice in the same way that choosing a profession is.

No, you did that. I claimed it was the same as doing poorly in primary school. To be clear: I think that argument is as absurd as suggesting that it's strictly women's choices that disadvantage them.

[AnthonyMouse]

> This is an excellent deflection, and it's also a relatively recent phenomenon. A surge in health care worker requirements which involve a lot of traditionally gendered roles has caused this outcome.

But that's the essence of the disparity. If you controlled for gendered roles, there would be no significant gender wage gap in any direction.

> And once again, we get to a phrasing of the problem that implies that it's a problem when men are at a disadvantage but inevitable when a woman is at a disadvantage.

Once again, the problem is the lack of consistency. If it's a problem that there are more men at the 99th percentile than women then it's a problem that there are more women at the 70th percentile than men. Either they're both problems or neither of them are.

> And these laws are largely toothless because of forced arbitration and Non-disparage agreements.

Something has been causing the wage gap to decline over time.

> The month California nullified these, a flood of class action lawsuits against major employers opened up. New York is considering such a law as well. I wonder if other states will have the courage to actually let the law come into play>

Arbitration agreements became popular when plaintiffs attorneys realized that defending against an unmeritorious lawsuit costs millions of dollars in legal expenses and companies would pay thousands of dollars to avoid paying millions of dollars. Arbitration agreements were a flawed attempt to defend against that practice. Eliminating them eliminates their flaws while reintroducing the problem they were adopted to solve to begin with, so what's your alternative solution for that?

> This is a common MRA talking point I encounter. I absolutely agree with you that incarceration rates are absurd and dehumanizing. It's a travesty of justice and in many cases a systemic attack on citizen's rights. This does not have any bearing on our current conversation, and we as a society _MUST_ be able to pursue more than one social justice issue at a time.

It does have bearing on our current conversation because it's the same issue. If gender imbalances are a problem that needs to be solved then they are a problem across the board regardless of which gender they favor in a particular context and they should be addressed in a consistent way. It is disingenuous to say that we should address imbalances that disfavor women today and imbalances that disfavor men at some indeterminate future date that in practice never comes. Neither or both, not one without the other.

> No, you did that. I claimed it was the same as doing poorly in primary school.

Which is essentially the same thing, when the argument for why boys are doing poorly in primary school is that they're being disciplined too often and disproportionately.

> To be clear: I think that argument is as absurd as suggesting that it's strictly women's choices that disadvantage them.

They are meant to be equally absurd. The point is that there is no universal gender adjustment that always applies in the same direction and with the same magnitude. You can't just average everything together into a scalar value and expect it to be meaningful or usefully inform policy.

If you have 17 male prison inmates, 80 male truck drivers, 100 female medical professionals and 3 male billionaires, just averaging their incomes by gender provides a very distorted picture of what is actually going on.

[KirinDave]

> But that's the essence of the disparity. If you controlled for gendered roles, there would be no significant gender wage gap in any direction.

Only if you ignored them. If you pass out a net economic benefit there is a gap. It's not as big as some stats name, but it's very much there.

Heck, the very study we're discussing asserts these metrics grow!

> Arbitration agreements became popular when plaintiffs attorneys realized that defending against an unmeritorious lawsuit costs millions of dollars in legal expenses and companies would pay thousands of dollars to avoid paying millions of dollars. Arbitration agreements were a flawed attempt to defend against that practice. Eliminating them eliminates their flaws while reintroducing the problem they were adopted to solve to begin with, so what's your alternative solution for that?

This wasn't ever really a problem to begin with. Forced arbitration is always worse for the workers and it's good that it's gone. They're as unethical as non-disparage agreements and no-competes.

> It does have bearing on our current conversation because it's the same issue. If gender imbalances are a problem that needs to be solved then they are a problem across the board regardless of which gender they favor in a particular context and they should be addressed in a consistent way. It is disingenuous to say that we should address imbalances that disfavor women today and imbalances that disfavor men at some indeterminate future date that in practice never comes. Neither or both, not one without the other.

Then treat them as such. Stop making excuses for one but not the other. I'm the one saying either both phenomenon need to be examined for systemic influence factors. You can't simultaneously dismiss one problem as "choice" and the other as "a problem" and retain any integrity.

> Which is essentially the same thing, when the argument for why boys are doing poorly in primary school is that they're being disciplined too often and disproportionately.

The stats I was quoting do not imply this. I've not heard boy children are disciplined in school more than girls.

> If you have 17 male prison inmates, 80 male truck drivers, 100 female medical professionals and 3 male billionaires, just averaging their incomes by gender provides a very distorted picture of what is actually going on.

Personally, I don't believe you're accidentally ignoring the number of women engaged in the strenuous but uncompensated labor of homemaking who are conveniently stricken from such discussions but if considered along with male homemakers destroy the average you're distribution you're attempting to describe.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Only if you ignored them. If you pass out a net economic benefit there is a gap. It's not as big as some stats name, but it's very much there.

Pay gap after controlling for occupation is 2%. This is statistical margin of error territory.

https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap

> Heck, the very study we're discussing asserts these metrics grow!

...when you give women more choices. What do you propose, stop offering free childcare etc. in the hopes that it causes more women to choose a career over having children?

> This wasn't ever really a problem to begin with.

Litigious trolls and wasting millions of dollars on unmeritorious litigation is an actual problem that actually happens.

> I'm the one saying either both phenomenon need to be examined for systemic influence factors. You can't simultaneously dismiss one problem as "choice" and the other as "a problem" and retain any integrity.

Who is claiming that? People argue that each thing could be true, but who is arguing that it's true for women and not men?

There is a valid conditional argument that goes like this. a) It's a result of choices, therefore not a problem. b) If you don't accept a) and continue to believe that it's a problem for women, then it's also a problem for men in the same way.

That is no inconsistent state there. If a) is true then it isn't a problem for either gender, if b) is true then it is a problem for both genders. At no point is it true for one gender but not the other.

Moreover, what seems to actually happen is that people say it's a problem for women and move to take steps against it without even considering that it could be a problem for men, and then no steps are taken against the problem for men. And if someone points that out, they get called inconsistent even though what they're asking for is consistency.

> The stats I was quoting do not imply this. I've not heard boy children are disciplined in school more than girls.

https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-06-22/boys-bear-th...

> Personally, I don't believe you're accidentally ignoring the number of women engaged in the strenuous but uncompensated labor of homemaking who are conveniently stricken from such discussions but if considered along with male homemakers destroy the average you're distribution you're attempting to describe.

Only if you assign a value of zero to the homemaking work, which is obviously unreasonable. The homemaker's household is the "employer", but because the "employer" and "employee" share finances, the credit and the debit both go to the same account and cancel out. That isn't the same as being uncompensated. If the work was uncompensated there would be an outstanding balance at the end. It's like how a programmer who writes software for personal use is neither getting it for free nor working for nothing -- the cost is in labor and the payment is in software.

And in addition to receiving the value of the homemaking services, the household also has the benefit of not paying any of the taxes that would be owed if the same labor was performed on the books, and not pushing the household's tax return into the higher tax brackets.

So what's the market value of a 24/7/365 on-call polymath with a job description requiring them to do absolutely anything that comes up? (There's a reason families can only afford it when the other spouse makes a lot of money.)

[KirinDave]

> Pay gap after controlling for occupation is 2%. This is statistical margin of error territory.

That's actually a discredited stat, but a persistent 2% discrepancy is definitionally not an error as you so slyly present here.

> Litigious trolls and wasting millions of dollars on unmeritorious litigation is an actual problem that actually happens.

So do meteor strikes on datacenters. It's not worth actually fortifying your roof; it won't make a difference anyways. Arbitration is a bad rule, it's an anti-worker rule, it's bad for the tech industry, and it's also a very expensive expectation for small companies to try and support.

If you think it's a net win, you're either siding very strongly with large corporations in exclusion of everyone else or you haven't actually examined the financials of a small tech business.

> Moreover, what seems to actually happen is that people say it's a problem for women and move to take steps against it without even considering that it could be a problem for men, and then no steps are taken against the problem for men. And if someone points that out, they get called inconsistent even though what they're asking for is consistency.

If the problem is, "Now men have less systemic power and advantage" then no, you shouldn't expect payback for that. I thought folks were all in for the meritocracy here.

> Only if you assign a value of zero to the homemaking work, which is obviously unreasonable. The homemaker's household is the "employer", but because the "employer" and "employee" share finances, the credit and the debit both go to the same account and cancel out. That isn't the same as being uncompensated. If the work was uncompensated there would be an outstanding balance at the end. It's like how a programmer who writes software for personal use is neither getting it for free nor working for nothing -- the cost is in labor and the payment is in software.

This is an absolutely absurd argument. Not only do your prior salary distribution arguments ignore homemakers, you now reveal they do so on pure sophistry. You cannot eat cancelled debt, children are not clothed on those ideas. And women shouldn't be entirely beholden to their households for life.

If women end up with no money in pocket at the end of the day for what everyone agrees is difficult work with long hours, but then you IGNORE them in your salary distributions to say, "Why can't we focus more on how men feel about all this," that makes you look pretty misogynistic.

> And in addition to receiving the value of the homemaking services, the household also has the benefit of not paying any of the taxes that would be owed if the same labor was performed on the books, and not pushing the household's tax return into the higher tax brackets.

You are speaking as someone who has not run the numbers. Even modest minimum wage would radically outperform your minuscule tax benefits here. And again, I note that you only speak to "the household" and not to the actual individual women, a tic in your prose suggesting exactly the scenario you're envisioning and how women must struggle to successfully escape it should they feel the need to.

> So what's the market value of a 24/7/365 on-call polymath with a job description requiring them to do absolutely anything that comes up? (There's a reason families can only afford it when the other spouse makes a lot of money.)

Why don't we require private interests that benefit from this essential labor to fund a reasonable working wage for this then? I am genuinely all for this. And then suddenly your aforementioned male salary woes become very prominent in the distributions, and women aren't compelled to stay with abusive partners because they don't have the resources to leave. We can focus on your evidently very urgent problems, and women get compensated fairly and may freely choose how to apply that (taxed, surely) compensation to their household.

No one disagrees on the societal benefits of strong parental involvement in childhood development. No one disagrees that this has a powerful effect on local, state and national economics. This is perhaps the single most unquestioned axiom in the politics of the developed world! The only question, raised here and elsewhere, is how equitable the arrangement is to women.