Starting tomorrow, Basic Skill Levels Still Down: For readers of the Washington Post, it was a very tough weekend.
For example:
Yesterday afternoon, we wasted hours clicking the links in the Sunday Outlook essay authored by Jay Newton-Small.
After that, we tried to convince ourselves that Outlook had actually published this essay by 31-year-old on-line classicist Donna Zuckerberg. The essay, though perhaps not the person, was a truly strange piece of work.
In the case of Newton-Small, we were maddened by the number of links which led to sources which made no reference to the points, or to the statistical claims, supposedly being established.
Do editors at the high-profile Outlook section make any attempt to check such things? By the end of the day, we assembled the analysts and made a hard statement:
Despite our reports from two weeks ago, basic skill levels still seem to be way, way down!
Full disclosure! Beyond the narrower question of basic skills, several mournful future anthropologists called our attention to several basic aspects of Newton-Small's report for the Post.
"[In her essay, y]ou see the need to make all observations conform to pre-existing tribal narrative," these disconsolate future scholars almost despairingly said. "Beyond that, you see the ancient, hard-wired need to create a group of Others, then to aim a sweeping moral denunciation at this disfavored group."
After hearing from the anthropologists, we were able to see the way these basic "human" impulses surfaced in Newton-Small's essay. Indeed, we almost thought we saw the same pattern in this latest sneak attack on our own award-winning work by our favorite blogger, Irvine's Kevin Drum!
Newton-Small attacked the Others for their sexism. Writing from Irvine, Drum had spotted the "red-blooded racism" the Others had displayed by moving to the very same city he did!
While Drum checked in from Orange County, Zuckerberg wrote from the far side of Neptune. All in all, we'd have to say that basic skill levels remain way down, even within our own tribe!
(Then too, there was Candidate Harris' statement yesterday about the gender pay gap. Under current tribal rules, when Others make statements this misleading—so misleading that they're essentially wrong—we liberals feel obliged to describe such statements as "lies." This seems to fit the pattern described by the future anthropologists, who claim that decades of such behavior greased the skids towards Mister Trump's Eventual Lunatic War.)
Starting tomorrow, we'll postpone our study of Professoriate Down to focus on these new developments. Last week, we explored the dispiriting history of this decades-old leadership fail—The Rise of Leadership Down.
We studied The Rise of Leadership Down! Our reports went exactly like this:
Tuesday, May 14: Alex Jones didn't start Leadership Down. Neither did Donald J. Trump!In the view of many future scholars, Trump is merely the craziest yet. Starting tomorrow, a troubling anthropological series:
Wednesday, May 15: In a clear case of Trump-before-Trump, disordered behavior by stars of the press was already taking us down!
Thursday, May 16: Diane Sawyer popped the question to Maples. This too was Leadership Down!
Friday, May 17: Drinking beer with Candidate Bush—plus Candidate Muskie's lost tears!
Basic Skill Levels Still Down!
All accusations, no evidence. Kevin Drum is wrong because he lives in Irvine (which is minority majority despite being in OC, which is increasingly blue these days due to the large number of Hispanics). And Somerby repeats his specious claim that women are not underpaid because of a loophole concerning whether the phrase "for equal work" is true or not. Somerby is apparently untroubled by the fact that women receive less pay than men almost everywhere you look. As long as it is not "for equal work" he is OK with the penalty imposed for bearing and raising children in our society. Well, that's probably to be expected since he hasn't got a horse in that race.
ReplyDeleteToo lazy to back up any of his accusations but he expects us to believe him because he says so. Not there and never will be, Somerby.
Hardly a loophole. In the aggregate, women are significantly underpaid (the unadjusted gap), but comparing by job (the adjusted gap), not so much. A brief trip to the google finds that the unadjusted gap is about 20% — women earn about 80 cents to a man’s dollar. The adjusted gap is about 2% — a woman doing the same work as a man earns 98 cents to his dollar.
DeleteNo reasonable person would compare the incomes of male neurosurgeons to the incomes of female janitors and conclude that thereby women are underpaid. Do you?
TDH is apparently troubled by an impending war and by politicians who act from script. It may well be the case that women are constrained to work in lower-paid professions because of their extra burden in child bearing and raising. But if that’s your claim, you’ll need to make a case for it.
While you’re working on that, you can gather some evidence that TDH opposes things like paid family leave.
…
I’m just messing with you. I don’t really expect you to actually back up your claims.
@deadrat:
DeleteOk, I’ll bite. First of all, you provided no evidence for your own assertion. Guess we are just supposed to believe you, possibly because your “nym” gives you automatic authority?
At any rate, here are comparisons by occupation. Take a look at Table 1 [The Gender Wage Gap in the 20 Most Common Occupations for Women (Full-Time Workers Only), 2018] and Table 2 [The Wage Gap in the 20 Most Common Occupations for Men (Full-Time Workers Only), 2018].
(https://iwpr.org/publications/gender-wage-gap-occupation-2018/)
From Table 1, women earn anywhere from 70.7-104.6% of men. From Table 2, it ranges from
67.4-98.7%.
Deadrat, you are perhaps too young to remember the cases where women were labeled typists and paid lower than men who were labeled data entry specialists. Playing games with job titles has a long history.
DeleteWomen have the capacity to do equal work if provided with the same training and job opportunities as men. When those opportunities are closed to women, it makes no sense to insist on an "equal-pay-for-equal-work" comparison. The situation in the job market is that women are segregated into jobs that men will not do and prohibited from entering the occupations that men want, which are routinely paid more regardless of the content of the job itself.
I will not cite sources or provide you with any evidence of this because there is a voluminous literature examining this issue and you are capable of looking it up yourself. Men who remain deliberately ignorant of women's issues are not the responsibility of others to educate in blog comments.
At this point, someone insisting that women's pay issues are not real is just trolling.
You will no doubt want to go back and quibble over wording of specific sentences. Sorry -- I don't play that game with you any more.
einsam,
DeleteBite away. I went and looked up the figures, and you can do the same.
Oh, wait. You did. So there’s no reason to believe me simply because I posted something and certainly not because of my nym. Although how deadrat could automatically give me authority is a mystery to me.
Women earn up to 104.6% of men in some occupations? That’s a helluva wage gap.
The point here — and I promise I’m typing as slowly as I can in the hope that you’ll be able to follow — that “79 cents on the dollar” is script. TDH says it’s not helpful. I agree. YMMV.
The point is not that working women don’t face problems that working men don’t. Family responsibilities fall more heavily on women, and we have little decent family leave policy in this country. We have to make sure to remove systematically placed barriers to women’s entry into higher-paid professions. The studies cover full-time workers, but part-time work is increasingly common (at least until Trump’s economic miracle). And so on.
It sucks to have to face up to complicated problems with nuanced solutions. But you want to lead with 79 cents on the dollar, then you’re unlikely to be able to deal with the rightard counter “Uh, uh. It’s only 2 cents.”
Deadrat, you are perhaps too young to remember….
DeleteI’m the oldest whore on the block, dearie.
Women have the capacity to do equal work if provided with the same training and job opportunities as men.
Nowhere in contention.
I will not cite sources or provide you with any evidence….
Just try to imagine my surprise.
At this point, someone insisting that women's pay issues are not real is just trolling.
No one here is “insisting” that.
You will no doubt want to go back and quibble over wording of specific sentences.
Were you the Anonymous about whose egregiously bad writing I ranted about a few days ago? Sorry, the editor in me took over. But if you can’t write clearly, you can’t think straight. And you demonstrate that every time you post.
@deadrat
DeleteDid you provide any proof of your original 2% number? (No, you did not. Still waiting).
The data I listed show that, for many professions, there is a significant pay gap. That refutes the idea that there is only a 2% difference. And this study addresses the 80% number by comparing *by occupation*. You are the one who complained about comparing a janitor with a neurosurgeon. Here you have direct comparison *by occupation* and it shows significant gaps. If you can explain why a female financial manager should earn 70.7% of a male financial manager’s salary, then go ahead. But it is a gap, and it is not comparing different professions.
You made this claim: “The adjusted gap is about 2% — a woman doing the same work as a man earns 98 cents to his dollar.” The study I quoted refutes that.
GIYF. Go to payscale.com No one is claiming that every profession has a negligible pay gap.
Delete@deadrat:
Delete“No one is claiming...”
Then why did you say “a woman doing the same work as a man earns 98 cents to his dollar?” That sounds rather like such a claim, and as bogus as anything else.
And payscale.com? That doesn’t show anything. It certainly doesn’t validate your number. There’s absolutely nothing gender-related there either.
And GIYF? I cited a study that contradicted your assertion, and you can’t or won’t do the same? And you demand others prove their assertions, but you won’t do the same for yours? You can literally use google to “validate” almost any crackpot thing you want. So, perhaps you have an actual source for your claim, or are you just making it up?
You can't quote me properly.
DeleteYou can't find https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap
GIYF? Sorry, I meant GFY.
I checked the links in the first couple of pages of Newton-Small's essay and they were fine. Some were behind pay walls but the ones I could read said what was attributed to them.
ReplyDeleteI believe Somerby may have been frustrated because he didn't like what Newton-Smalls was saying, not because there was a problem with the links.
Time for a little quiz.
ReplyDeleteWho said the following, at 11:32 AM · Apr 2, 2019:
“Women on average make just 80 cents for every dollar a man is paid, and it’s even lower for women of color:
-61 cents for Black women
-57 cents for Native women
-53 cents for Latina women
Equal pay for equal work is an issue of basic justice. #EqualPayDay”
1) Kamala Harris
2) Bernie Sanders
3) Donald Trump
If you picked #2, DING DING DING!!WE HAVE A WINNER!!!!
Sanders made a statement on that particular day because it was break even day, the day that women must work until to equal the pay earned by men during the previous year.
DeleteUnlike Kamala Harris, who has a detailed plan for addressing pay equity issues, feelthebern.org spends a lot of time addressing the equal-pay-for-equal-work dodge that is always raised by men and conservatives, who don't want to change things. The entire job market is rigged to deny women access to high paying jobs with advancement potential so confining the comparison to equal jobs makes no sense. But Bernie's supporters spend a lot of time examining those stats, as if buying into this as a legitimate comparison.
Earlier, deadrat says that a neurosurgeon shouldn't be compared to a janitor. I think they should if the job of neurosurgeon is closed to women, as it effectively is through hazing of female doctors who might like to enter surgery as a specialty. Oddly, the job of janitor isn't particularly open to women either. Is deadrat unable to think of two jobs that are done by both men and women?
In employment, equal access is an issue too, not just equal pay. Women are largely confined to service roles that are not well compensated compared to working with things or money. For example, women are shut out of lucrative jobs in Wall Street, again by hazing if they are hired in the first place.
So no points for Bernie. He has supported equal pay legislation:
"In 2012, Bernie support the Paycheck Fairness Act and helped the effort to bring it to a vote again in 2014. The bill was designed to strengthen the claims that female employers had against companies in cases of sex or gender discrimination. Among his twelve point Economic Agenda for America, Bernie wrote that we must “provide equal pay for women workers who now make 78 percent of what male counterparts make.” In addition to these more recent efforts, Bernie voted in favor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, which aims “to ensure that individuals subjected to unlawful pay discrimination are able to effectively assert their rights under the federal anti-discrimination laws.” Learn more about Bernie’s record on related issues at the Women’s Rights issue page."
But what has he done lately? What has he done that isn't routine for even the most backward female legislators?
On April 2, Kamala Harris was speaking a labor group and suggested unionizing childcare workers. Unlike Bernie, she has a detailed plan for fining companies that do not pay women equally. She gets specific where Bernie narrowly defines the issue and then vaguely supports it -- and they both will probably vote for the equal pay legislation passed by the House, although there is no chance it will pass in the Senate.
Yes. And I find it interesting that Somerby chooses to criticize Harris, but not Bernie, for the supposed “lie” of the gender pay gap. Somerby generally only speaks positively about Bernie.
DeleteEarlier, deadrat says that a neurosurgeon shouldn't be compared to a janitor. I think they should if the job of neurosurgeon is closed to women, as it effectively is through hazing of female doctors who might like to enter surgery as a specialty.
DeleteSlightly over half of incoming US medical students are women; for young doctors (age 35 or less) there's roughly parity between the sexes. You're gonna have to find another hobbyhorse to ride.
No, I am a parent of a female physician. I watched her pick her specialty. She thought surgery was fascinating but went a different way because of the hazing and inhospitable atmosphere in surgery residency. This was true not just for her but is described in detail in every autobiographical book written by female surgeons. It is well known to exist in the medical field. It is even depicted in TV shows, although there is now also support for female characters depicted on such shows.
DeleteWhen you look at the medical specialties selected by women, you will see that they are disproportionately concentrated in obstetrics and pediatrics and as primary care physicians. These are not the higher paying areas of medicine.
Interestingly, women who are talented in math and science and enter college seeking science careers tend to gravitate to medicine and biology because there is less resistance to them in those fields, even if they might be more interested in physics or engineering. There is hazing of women in the so-called harder sciences and most women, being highly intelligent, seek a path of less resistance.
I believe that women should have the same opportunity as men to train in the fields where their interests and talents lie, not in the fields that will accept them without making life hell on a daily basis.
Hazing comes not simply from fellow students but also from supervisors, male surgeons and doctors in the case of medicine. The male students follow the lead of their mentors, not wishing to jeopardize their own prospects. There is an imbalance of power that permits this to go on and underlying it, a belief that women should be able to "take it" if they are going to advocate for their patients effectively. While women can "take it," many are pragmatic and decide it is not worth it to put up with that treatment.
In her subsequent career, my daughter encounter quite a bit of obstruction from male physicians that might be characterized as sexism. My daughter is highly talented, has four board certifications, and is well regarded in her field but she is short and Hispanic and has had to earn respect in every situation she has entered. Men are accorded respect automatically, until they mess up.
Deadrat, you are nothing but a troll. You will no doubt claim that anyone can be anything on the internet so nothing I say carries any weight. But you come across as an ignorant person and you should spend more time listening to others and less time nitpicking.
This issue is not only important to women but to their parents and especially their patients, who might benefit if the people with the highest test scores and the highest grades were actually permitted to study and pursue their ambitions without being mistreated in ways that their male counterparts are not. How do I know men are not treated the same way? Her husband is also a physician, in Emergency Medicine, and he says it was different for him. More men need to see what their female colleagues have to go through, and never talk about because they cannot embarrass men in power or don't want to make things harder for themselves, or just want to focus on doing their jobs.
Our country should be ashamed of itself that it lets this kind of stuff happen routinely in the workplace to women of talent and ambition.
Deadrat, you are nothing but a troll.
DeleteThen you don’t know what a troll is. Mao is a troll. I might be wrong, but that’s different.
You will no doubt claim that anyone can be anything on the internet so nothing I say carries any weight.
It isn’t just an idiosyncratic claim. It’s actually true. That doesn’t mean that your heartwarming story about your daughter doesn’t carry any weight. Those that like that sort of thing like that sort of thing. But it doesn’t count as statistical evidence for anything. That’s because an unevidenced personal anecdote is just that, and even the plural of anecdote still isn’t data.
It is even depicted in TV shows,….
Well, that cinched it for me.
But you come across as an ignorant person and you should spend more time listening to others and less time nitpicking.
Yeah, if only I’d spent more time listening to people like you, then maybe I too could have grown up to be a talented but unrespected short Hispanic woman with four board certifications. But it’s too late now.
It’s not that I didn’t enjoy your biographical narrative — really, I laughed; I cried. It’s not that I don’t believe your story. Even if you made up the entire thing, it’s consistent with the results of studies. It’s not that I don’t agree with your conclusion. In fact, I’ll go farther and say that it’s shameful that “this kind of stuff” happens in the workplace to any women, not just those as talented and ambitious as your alleged daughter.
But. This. Isn’t. A. Pay. Issue.
In the sense that this problem won’t be solved by adjusting pay scales, and it won’t be fixed under the banner of 79-cents-on-the-dollar.
This IS a pay issue.
DeleteIf you compare women physicians against men physicians as a category, there will be a gap because more of the men will be neurosurgeons and more of the women will be primary care doctors. The surgeons get paid much more than the primary care doctors, way more. Since more of the men are in the higher paying jobs and more of the women are in the lower paying jobs, there will be a gender gap for physicians as a group.
This happens in all kinds of job categories because the better paying jobs go to men and the lower paying ones go to women.
Among teachers, more women teach elementary school grades and more men teach high school. The men get paid more because high school pays more than grade school. The men are more likely to be coaches than the women, which bumps up their pay. So when you lump them together there is a gap.
No one does these comparisons by matching female high school coaches with male high school coaches directly. For one thing, there are far fewer female coaches. But if they did do it, there would still likely be a gap because male teams are more highly valued than the female ones.
But don't kid yourself that this isn't a pay issue. Of course it is.
I’ve had my say on the 79-cents-on-the-dollar strategy, and although some around here will find it hard to believe, I’m done.
DeleteThat’s the hill you want to charge? In hoc signo, vinces
It seems to me that for TDH, this is a moral issue. It's wrong to make simplistic, misleading claims. That's for his political opponents. In particular, liberals should get their numbers straight and accurate. "Conservatives" use numerical sleight of hand. He sometimes makes a nod to liberal approaches losing elections, but I think that's secondary for him. Now that's just me, speculating.
ReplyDeleteI no longer have any moral perspective. For me, it's wrong if it's a loser. If you think you can win with 79 female cents on the dollar, the more power to you. I don't think you stand a chance with the grifters on the right -- they're just better at misleading. Probably a matter of more practice.
I feel sorry for you.
DeleteBut, the liberal candidates (including Bernie) are offering policy proposals and bills that are called things like “equal pay for equal work.”, so they aren’t misleading anyone as to their objectives. And the “80 cents on the dollar” isn’t really a “lie” or misleading, because it gets to the reality that women overall earn less. Some of that may be by choice or non-discriminatory reasons, but some of it is due to discrimination. That is why I cited that data above. There are pay gaps. If you believe they should be addressed, then perhaps you are a liberal. Harris, for example, wants employers to be held accountable for providing equal pay for equal work. Now, if you believe, as you claimed above, that there is no significant pay gap for women doing the same work, then there would be no reason to even bring up the issue at all, since it it would all be a lie in that case. But that study shows this isn’t the case.
DeleteAnonymous @5:29P,
DeleteThat's just about the nicest thing anyone has ever said about me in cyberspace. Thank you.
Have we actually met?
einsam,
DeleteI'm going with the charitable conclusion that you can't read for comprehension. So stop telling me what I believe until you can.
"80 cents on the dollar" isn't really a "lie"? Why the scare quotes? Because since it "gets to the reality," it's the "truth"?
OK, then. Let's see how that works out.
Personally, I am outraged that Barry The Demigod is paid $400K for an hour of clowning, and the psych-witch only $200K.
ReplyDeleteI have no doubt whatsoever that her act of presenting 69 excuses why she lost the election in 2016 is just as entertaining.
Trump won because Ivanka and Jared use private servers for government work. Using a private server , while doing government work is one of the 3 legs of the GOP stool. The other two being "treason" and "bigotry".
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