The pay-gap figure measures only women and men who work full time, for a full year. It does not include women who took time off during the year or worked part time.

This is cherry picking. By picking a short time period, it treats those with short (one year) seniority the same as those with decades. If employee A has worked continuosly for a year and employee B has been continuos for ten years and B earns more than A, then that is on no way proof of wage discrimination.

The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir

In fact, I'm on a mission to find out her salary if anyone wants to help a sister out.

Ms. Lukas made $67,888 in 2004, according to page 7 of the Form 990 for IWF (not sure the link really works, but you can register on Guidestar.org and look it up for yourself). That makes her not the best paid non-profit employee on the eastern seaboard by any stretch. But she's not working the floor at WalMart, either.

While I was poking around their 990, I noticed that the Forum received a State Dept. contract worth $339,780 to promote democracy for women in Iraq. I imagine that they are busy telling Iraqi women that they are free to be personally fulfilled.

Good for Lukas and the "hundreds of thousands" of women like her that have found their place in todays work world. I am not concerned about her and her hundreds of thousands. Sometimes the views of the entitled class baffle me. And if women truly desire men who are intellectually superior, oh! do we have a lot of work to do.
Since we no longer live in a society where one wage will support a family, the issue of occupational gender segregation is more pressing. What programs are being promoted that assists women in landing traditionally male and higher paying jobs?
It is an easier (not easy) task to demand equal pay for equal work at an institutional level. I use the State of Minnesota's wage restructuring as an example where the differences in occupations were minimal and a measure of a job's worth was easy. But how do you do this economy wide? And as I might expect, this restructuring would be long in coming. In the meantime, how do we get the 2/3 of the women's workforce who are in traditionally lower paying jobs positioned in jobs that pay better. Is every day going to be like a day from the movie "Northcountry?" The economic needs of women are changing much faster than the social segregations still set in a '50's' mindset.
The larger theoretical question is one of a job's inherent worth. Unless we can have and honest discussion about the certain merit and demand that each persons work is due, we really are missing the point. But until we can adopt social values that don't allow a pro-sports player to make more than a professional educator, people's wallets are being restricted because of their gender and the "choices" they make.

The last stats I saw for same age, college educated, never married, and childless men and women had a 1.2% pay differential. Comparing people like this is very much apples to apples as they have mostly all been working full time since graduation, and college grads are sparsely into those jobs that carry a premium for risk of death or dismemberment that skew wage differentials toward men.

Its a rare year when an Alaskan king crab deck hand is not killed or maimed. Big pay. Big risk. Big dead and disabled. Almost no women.

OTOH, can it really be true that an employer can reduce their labor cost by a whopping 20% by just replacing men with women? Employers (even women employers) will cheerfully discriminate against LOW COST labor. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.

The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir

You are missing the point. Apples to apples comparisons are not the problem.

The problem is, why are men selling apples and women selling oranges? We are relying on the wages of women more and more in our society for the health and security of our families. If the female workforce is centered in gender segregated, lower paying jobs, then the health and security of the families they support are at risk. They aren't at risk because of dismemberment (which is a very small component in our workforce), they are at risk because they are falling behind in their earnings bank book for their employment life.

Yours is an interesting claim; if there is such a thing, I think it requires extraordinary proof.

As I understand you, your claim is that high paying low skill jobs are typically dangerous, and more likely to be taken by men because of they physical demands and risks. (I assume, that is, that we can agree that the jobs that pay really well in the American economy aren't especially a threat to life and limb.)

Two empirical questions first: 1. is it true that disparities don't show up among white-collar workers? 2. What are the differences between lower-skilled professions of roughly equal risk?

I think you could be right and at the same time, wrong. It is true, so far as I know, that working on an oil rig or an Alaskan Fishing boat pays better than many other blue-collar jobs, because of the risks. But I doubt that enough people work in risky professions to make a significant difference in statistics. Really, how many American workers, men or women, are in professions where they might lose a limb? A few % points might be explained by this phenomenon, but my guess is that it isn't at all close to the disparity that exists (whatever that turns out to be).

"Abdul", Why the fuck do you have that stupid fucking rhyme at the end of each of your posts? Is this your way of fighting the War on Terror? Because frankly I doubt that Islamofascism is quaking in its fucking boots. If you're THAT worked up about Muslims, why don't you just join the Marines, you pusillanimous fuck?

On the subject, what is extraordinary proof anyway?  Either something is proven, or it's not.  You can't really, really prove something.

This information

The pay-gap figure measures only women and men who work full time, for a full year. It does not include women who took time off during the year or worked part time.

does not establish this contention

That 23-cent differential is not because some women take time off to give birth or raise children.

At best, it establishes that the wage gap women suffer does not disappear after one full year of full-time work.

The cited and linked-to (thank you) Amy Joyce Post article includes this fascinating Q&A:

But don't women earn less over time because they might more often take time off to give birth or raise a child? According to Murphy, that's an incredibly lame argument. Most women who can take time off and go back to work full-time earn more in the first place. Any drop in salary they might experience would not pull the average down, she argues.(emphasis added)

Can someone deconstruct this text for me, please? It sounds to me like someone is having a problem with 'fuzzy math.' But I must be wrong. Right?

The occupational death rate for men is actually about ten times that for women, but even if you factor in eventual deaths from occupational diseases, which still affect men more than women, but not as lopsidedly, I hardly think that any rational valuation applied to dangerous jobs vs. safer jobs would produce the pay gap alleged. What you highlight might deserve two or three cents per dollar in an economy-wide average, but nowhere close to 23 cents.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/bv.fcgi?rid=healthus05.table.397

And your theory is no answer to those who point out that even in safe jobs, women are paid less than men.

I'm not sure I've met too many women who even believed men could be their intellectual superiors, much less women who wanted a man who was their intellectual superior...

More likely I think, is that at least some women want a man intellectually superior to other men.

-Dave Adams-

Its the first line of the song "Abdul Abulbul Amir" written about 1870 by Percy French. I have liked the song long before the WOT. My use of it was not prompted in any way by the WOT.

The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir

Did you know that making less money than men is a good thing? Oh, you like paying the bills and feeding your kids? Well don't fret, Carrie Lukas is here to set you straight!

In the "civilized world," there is a trade off... The typical family is getting smaller and one of the reasons could be that women want to do other things with their lives than have kids. I think the Star Tribune, here in Minnesota, noted that 65% of divorces are filled by women and many women filed "because they were bored."

Now, something tells me that Lukas--who has a BA from Princeton and a MA from Harvard, btw--probably isn't struggling.

You "texas-two-stepped" into a different argument. She said that she could be making more if she made different decisions but she preferred flexibility over selling her soul.

As a male, I can relate to what she says because I've opted out of military work due to ethics. If I did that sort of work, my salary would have doubled and I would have had "work for life."

She argues that the wage gap exists because women "choose" to make less money by taking time off or working in jobs for "personal fulfillment" over pay.

I believe this. My sister took time off because she wanted to spend time with her two children and the CEO, and his brother, at the company I work for, both have stay at home wives-- they run their houses, take care of the kids and have their own lives too.

But don't tell that to Lukas, her oh-so-unimportant paycheck depends on convincing people that sexism is actually good for women.

My sister wasn't able to work when her children were really young because she was too worried about them to focus on work. It wasn't an issue of sexism but "peace of mind." Obviously, the people who "keep working" will get ahead in skills and connections.

In general, I'm not sure what your point is... other than tearing Lucas down...

"In general, I'm not sure what your point is... other than tearing Lucas down."

Well, she (Lukas) is "full of shit," so isn't that enough?

"Obviously, the people who 'keep working' will get ahead in skills and connections."

DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT!!

But do you have any evidence that more dangerous jobs actually ARE higher-paying? I've looked at the most recent statistics for most dangerous jobs in the U.S., and there doesn't seem to be much of a corellation between danger and high pay. Agricultural workers and delivery drivers, for example, aren't exactly among the economic elite.

Safer jobs held predominantly by women pay less than more dangerous jobs held predominantly by men.

This is moronic. So a coal miner - one of the most dangerous jobs around, or a taxi driver in NYC, also a dangerous job, pays more than, say, a lawyer?

If you would think before you post you might embarrass yourself less.

Well, she (Lukas) is "full of shit," so isn't that enough?

Since that is a fifth grade taunt, it demeaned the poster's character, in my opinion.

Technically, we all have an intestine so aren't we are all full of shit?

I think the poster was envious of Lukas' happyness and was shedding jealous tears.

DON'T YOU DARE SAY THAT!!...

I'm single and, every day, I have to remember who's married because they typically don't have the time to do as much research as I do. So, yes... I will dare to say that practice makes perfect.

the problem is, when both parents work, the costs of living goes up. isn't it curious that even though both men and women now work our country's deficit's (trade and budget) and debts are higher than ever before?

the money presses could print out more money and the unions could give it away but the question is: "does all that work add up to more output than before."

in general, I think that, historically, a stay at home spouse created more wealth than the situation now where he/she becomes another indentured servant-- for life, in an effort to buy a better life.

The marketers know the "pied piper's story" and realize that if you doubt your happyness, you'll sell your soul!

I've seen similiar statistics. But those data do not disprove a wage gap; on the contrary, that stat proves the robust persistance of a glass ceiling. There is little doubt that men and women are entering most fields at the same rate - women graduate at the same rate (or higher) from college and professional schools as men. Starting salaries and incomes in the first years are generally equal. But thereafter, both the number of women and the salaries they recieve fall behind that of their male collegues they climb the ladder.

Your stat tells us precisely what has been described over and over in various fields: women now have virtually unlimited access to both education and the workforce and women have the desire and aptitude to compete with men. However, from education to business to academia, consistently fall behind in salary advancement and promotion beyond the entry-level. Access does not equal success.

The real question is not why is there a salary gap - but why is there STILL a glass ceiling.

"If I had to make a bet, the statistics will change as women start graduating and take the "top spots," not because they're women but because they're driving company productivity better than anyone else."

Women have been "in the pipeline" for 30 years. At rates equal to or surpassing men for the last 15. The problem is not entry into the pipeline, it is exit from it. More women graduating and entering the workforce will change nothing as long as they are not promoted and do not advance within various workplace structures. This, however, is a much harder problem to define much less solve. Numbers are easy.

based on what you say in other posts, I'd believe that it was a joke,... but it wasn't obivious.

So I think that we both agree the poster was ranting and sometimes unprofessional.

no, I agree with you that one person working is better than 2 because studies have shown that working is expensive. if you're highly paid, then outsourcing is affordable. if you're not, then it isn't.

one of the guys in my office told me that his "girlfriend" just graduated with $100,000 in debt, at least. He's $30,000+ in debt plus his mortgage. They're both in their 30's.

I find very few people with my attitude that "when I drive my Honda Civic, it's my 'second job'" since, if I drove an SUV, I'd had to work more to pay for it.

Why progressives want to monetize the value of life befuddles me....

It's an interesting possibility; if workplace promotions were driven only by productivity, I'd say you're probably right.  But I'm not sure that this is the case.

I know a number of women, and a few men, who work in corporate law.  It's well established that partners and senior associates at major law firms prefer to assign work to female associates, because women in that environment are thought to perform much better.  I think of one woman I know who went to work one Tuesday morning, and came home on Friday afternoon.  (All of this is anecdotal, of course).  But women still don't make partner in nearly the numbers that men do - at one firm I know of, 10% of new partners last year, which is to say 2, were women. The fact that women are more likely to 'opt out' is said to be at least part of the problem (as far as I'm concerned, any healthy person will get out of that environment as soon as possible).  But another woman I know was passed over for a particular partnership slot in favor of a man whose performance measured significantly below hers, apparently because their supervisor was more comfortable around him (the supervisor is known to be uncomfortable with female associates).  

None of this comes with hard data, but I think it suggests a point that stands fairly well on its own: as long as there is a largely male network in power in a field like this, it will take more than just superior performance for women to make it in equal or better numbers than men. 

It is silly to compare jobs that require advanced degrees to those where a high school degree is often optional. This is apples to oranges.

If you compare coal mining jobs to others with the same educational requirements you will see the miners do pretty well.

http://www.bls.gov/oco/cg/cgs004.htm

Note higher than average pay.

The sons of the prophet are noble and bold,
and quite unaccustomed to fear.
But the bravest by far in the ranks of the Shah
was Abdul Abulbul Amir

I'm really trying to follow what you are saying, but I'm having a hard time...

BTW - my comment about "doing the math" to afford one parent at home was sarcastic. I *don't* agree that one person working is categorically "better". In fact, I would go so far as to say that two sources of income provide a layer of back-up in today's economy that can buffer a family against lay-offs, dowbnsizing, and increased costs of health care, etc. Plus two incomes can give each worker some added flexibility to not work overtime, choose positions with less salary but more flexibility/less travel/telecommuting, etc than a single breadwinner is likely to experience.

I agree that many young couples are starting their lives together already in a great deal of debt. Hopefully, one would assume that 100k in educational loans was to attain entry into a profession that offered a salary high enough to comfortably pay off those debts....assuming your collegue does not anticipate that his "girlfriend" stay at home should they have children.

I reject the notion that amilies with two incomes are simply working for fancier lifestyles. The mean income between families with two earners is only about 10k more than single-provider families. It is not double.