Morning Must-Read: Daniel Kuehn: Strong and Weak Forms of Gender Pay Gap Skepticism

Daniel Kuehn: Strong and Weak Forms of Gender Pay Gap Skepticism: “Critics assert… that invocation of the gender pay gap is usually of the form…

…”the entire 23% gap is discrimination by employers”. Rarely is any evidence offered that this is what most people claim…. Strong claim: The conditional difference in means is the amount of discrimination between men and women in pay and therefore there is little discrimination because women choose different occupations, majors, etc. Weak claim: The conditional difference in means is the amount of discrimination between men and women in pay and therefore there is little discrimination but there might be other social problems we don’t like…. So what are the issues with Steve’s post?… You can’t simply control for occupation and major and call it a day because people select into occupations and majors based on expected wages, and that selection process influences the observed wage distribution…. The framing problem…. Steve uses “discrimination” to refer to discrimination in the salary determination and “sexism” to refer to everything else. With these definitions in hand he starts off his video by telling people (like Perry and Biggs did) that the pay gap is an economic “myth”, and that “it’s ‘mostly’ not discrimination”…. This muddies the waters…

April 14, 2014

AUTHORS:

Brad DeLong
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