"It’s just easier this way for everyone. You don’t argue with a four-year old about why he shouldn’t eat candy for dinner. You don’t punch a mentally handicapped guy even if he punches you first. And you don’t argue when a women tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar. It’s the path of least resistance. You save your energy for more important battles."
My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..."
You can see it in this thread, and I guess I'm walking into the trap in this very post
> And you don’t argue when a woman tells you she’s only making 80 cents to your dollar.
I think it's misleading to group these you-should-not-argue about statements together. They're not the same.
Can you explain why someone would want to "well actually" a woman who says they only earn 80 cents on the dollar versus men?
To me sounds like "Well, actually, men don't have that much of an advantage over women. So could you please stop trying to raise women's earnings?" Tell me where I'm not understanding.
- not all of it is an apples-to-apples comparison of job/experience/hours
- not all of it results from discrimination
Put another way: is all of that pay gap due to "sexism"/"discrimination"? If not, then simply removing discrimination won't necessarily result in equality. What else might be at play, and what does that mean for public policy?
> Mechanically, the earnings gap can be explained in our setting by the fact that men take 48% fewer unpaid hours off and work 83% more overtime hours per year than women. The reason for these differences is not that men and women face different choice sets in this job.
Rather, it is that women have greater demand for workplace flexibility and lower demand for
overtime work hours than men. These gender differences are consistent with women taking
on more of the household and childcare duties than men, limiting their work availability in the
process (Parker et al., 2015; Bertrand et al., 2015).
The original (provocative) "80 cents" statement seems to imply that the problem is simply solved by making sure we don't discriminate in pay (or perhaps just boost women's pay to compensate, or, as I described here, offer higher referral bonuses: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43890123) and that's that, we've solved it. But it sounds like there's more to it, doesn't it?
See also "why is there a gender pay gap" (https://ourworldindata.org/economic-inequality-by-gender#why...), which discusses various adjustments, which in that dataset (contemporaneous with Scott's post, coincidentally) brings it to roughly 90 percent. So right off the bat there exists "well, actually, it's closer to 90 cents when adjusting for..."
To me it was an inflammatory way to say, "for a happier life, just smile and nod and do not engage with the topic", set up to provoke exactly the sort of internet back-and-forth to illustrate the point. Parent at least tries to look for some good faith, whereas its sibling straight out yells that I must be a sexist bigot.
>My takeaway of the point was there are situations in which you will end up in an unsympathetic quagmire of "well, actually..." IF YOU'RE A SEXIST BIGOT.
Well thanks for revealing yourself for what you "well, actually..." are.
It's only a "trap" if you you're a sexist bigot, and don't want people to know what you are, but you just can't keep your mouth shut.
