【海外の反応】「女性の給料が安いなら女だけ雇えばよくない？」→ Reddit民の答えが意外と深かった

I recently found out a male coworker was paid 6$ an hour more than me for the same job except with less experience or knowledge.

I called them on it and got a 40% raise in under 24 hours. BAHA

Generally companies don't really intend to pay women less and for positions in which pay isn't negotiable they are payed the same.

Often pay discrepancies within the same position is linked to social factors. Women generally do not push as hard for pay rises as men for a number of reasons but when they do women often face more negative reactions than men do. Now this isn't to say that every woman is going to be paid less than every man but if you take a average of all the men and women in a workplace ofren you'll find women are paid less overall.

There are whole industries based on this. They're usually the lowest paying. Fashion industry is a great example. Look who is working in the factories.

It's illegal. Hiring a protected group at a rate less than 80% of the rate for your highest hiring group is considered evidence of unlawful discrimination in the US. Other countries have similar antidiscrimination laws.

It's also illegal to pay women less than men for the same job with the same responsibilities because they are women – that isn't what the wage gap is actually about. Female dominated fields tend to pay less (this is the big one), women are more often passed over for promotions, women have more disruptions in their career due to caregiving, women tend to negotiate salary less aggressively, etc. The "wage gap" means that on average women who are full time year round employees, as a group, earn less than men who are full time year round employees, as a group. It's less "women earn less than men for the same work" and more "somehow, in industry after industry, wages go down when a field becomes dominated by women and go up when it becomes dominated by men." Pediatricians had salaries more equal to other medical specialties when all pediatricians were men, but when it became a female dominated field pay went down. Computer programmers made less relative to other fields when most programmers were women, but when it became a male dominated field pay went up.

Without comment on this issue, behavioral economics studies why people, organizations, and nations very often do NOT do what's in their best interest.

"Behavioral economics combines elements of economics and psychology to understand how and why people behave the way they do in the real world. It differs from neoclassical economics, which assumes that most people have well-defined preferences and make well-informed, self-interested decisions based on those preferences.

"Shaped by the field-defining work of University of Chicago scholar and Nobel laureate Richard Thaler, behavioral economics examines the differences between what people “should” do and what they *actually* do and the consequences of those actions."

Behavioral economics, explained

Shaped by Nobel-winning UChicago economist Richard Thaler, behavioral economics examines the differences between what pe...

news.uchicago.edu

(https://news.uchicago.edu/explainer/what-is-behavioral-economics)

In many jobs women are seen as risky or flighty especially when they are around birthing ages because they’re more likely to have a family to care for and/or take maternity leave.

Employers pay the minimum they believe the worker will accept and because employees don’t always share their salaries or wages with each other they can get away with paying some employees less in the same role. Men are more forward to ask for raises and higher wages from the jump so this explains some of the gap.

With that said women barely make less than men in the same job working the same hours the adjusted wage gap (comparing similar jobs and hours) is about 3 cents less per dollar. In other words women make 97cents for every dollar a man makes when doing the same job and working the same hours.

The commonly cited wage gap compares all male wages with all female wages and it stems in large part from women working less hours and taking more time out of the workforce (usually to have kids) when compared to men. Women also tend to work in fields that pay less but there is some evidence that fields pay less altogether as they become female dominant so that could influence things as well.

Lastly I don’t think such employers would “just hire women” regardless because what drives employers to pay men more is the belief that they deserve more because they are men or even that they do a superior job (even if they don’t) because they are men. I would actually guess that the more sexist employers would be less likely to hire women based on a belief of male superiority. They wouldn’t think they could pay women less for the “same work” they would think women don’t do as good of a job so they should be paid less (even if that wasn’t true).

Corporate culture tends to be cliquey. I don't remember who did it exactly, but there was a study that showed corporate leaders are more likely to support, mentor, and sponsor people who remind them of themselves. That's where gender, race, sexuality, and ethnicity biases come in.

Whoever tries to "break in" gets paid less than the demographic that holds the status quo. And that has a cascading effect. So, in the US, white women tend to earn less than white men for the same job. Black men tend to earn less than white women. Black women tend to earn less than Black men, and so on.

People are more likely to see their own "group" as more valuable or a better investment. This, of course, can sometimes even have the reverse effect in certain industries. White people, for example, might talk about how difficult it is to break into tech jobs in the US, and might even be paid less than their immigrant counterparts. But that's generally an anomaly, all things considered.