Politics

Author: Richard R. Tryon and others

Response to Ms Miller:
by Richard R.Tryon

Of all the details of Economic Theory and Political-economic arguments, few are as exciting and emotional as the one that is now a part of the NY Times political-economic efforts in this election season. The media gets paid by writing about controversial subjects. 100 years ago no such concern existed, as every married man supported his mate and the children produced by what most thought to be God's will being exercised through the partnership of a male and female in Holy Church weddings!

Sacramental unions called marriages are no longer thought to be nearly as important by a majority of Americans as they were back then which had not been changed since the age of the cave man and woman. Now the subject of equal pay is a key plank in the socialist propaganda accepted by the Democrat candidates as part of the menu to publicize in the NY Times.

This example in the NY Times issue of 3/19/16 serves as a case in point. It rambles on for some 1,500 words to explain how occupations formerly known to be male-dominated, become lower-paying when women become acceptable replacements. Nowhere does it seem to occur to Ms. Miller that the two most important factors in her review are missing! One is the impact of technology that makes the physical efforts be no longer a constraining influence over some males and perhaps a few more among females be able to perform; but the larger one is simply a function of supply and demand! Of course, sociologists pay more attention to other facts of life.

As an inventor of a technological combination that eliminated duplicate keyboarding of 10,000 sets of texts of perhaps 250 characters each to imprint about 250 different forms and products for physicians and dentists to use in office practice procedures, I helped my firm grew from six to six hundred employees. The original sex breakdown included three males and three females; but at 600, the spread was about 50 men and 550 women. The competition and indeed in the shops of our former suppliers that used technology that we helped make become obsolete, the ratio was clearly male-dominated. The machines in use were nearly unchanged in the prior 50+ years and were still heavy, mechanical beasts that few women wanted to mess with. Molten lead and fumes in composing rooms were not regarded as a healthy place for expectant mothers; and the printing presses were also heavy and regarded as not the place in which the union dominated ranks wanted to bring in wives to help. Hand work in a shop's bindery was open to women, as were clerical or stenographic jobs in the better office environment more preferred by women that had to work outside the home of their husbands.

Of course, our society has now embraced a whole new paradigm in which marriage is mostly thought of as a legal right of sharing property between two or more members of the species- currently limited to any two to conform to sexual preferences. Of course, many other social factors are covered well by Ms. Miller to show how each might relate to the drop in calculated pay, adjusted for value of the dollar; but nowhere in the article is the simple logic of supply and demand considered.

Our female dominated work force was working with a far less costly total means of making the products our 300,000 customers needed fast, accurately printed, and of high quality but low cost. Our simple less costly A.B. Dick office duplicators were inferior to real printing presses, but for what we needed, they could be operated by many women, untrained, but quickly able to learn in two weeks what the union based apprentice approach took as much as six years to achieve journeyman status, meant that the available pool of applicants very willing to be paid 30% more than other semi-skilled jobs available, but much less than was being paid to journeymen hampered by costly work rules and slow to produce equipment. Did these women help Ms. Miller's argument that pay to put the ink on the paper or enter the order typesetting characters to be 'composed' by the computer's software in 1975 instead of a journeyman of the ITU, as evidence of women lowering the pay for the obsolete male-dominated union jobs? No, they simply outperformed the men and their dependence on an obsolete technology. In fact the print shop in which they were employed regarded this work as being too simple for what they did to justify their cost of production. Of course, all the rest of that work quickly disappeared in the next decade and their technology is now employed rarely and is only seen in summer fairs featuring farm equipment run by steam engines- another type of work that saw few women as employees. A few women of far above average physical dimensions were able to roll logs into the giant saws driven by belts from steam tractors operated by strong drivers with excellent skills to cope and often in very hot, dirty, and undesirable locations.

Now to give Ms Miller her due, it is fair to note that men almost never need time off from work to care for or deliver babies. They do not suffer from some repetitive minor ailments that frequent females and seem to require work on a team to stop until a temporary team-mate can be called into place. Learning to juggle staff is a management problem that has a related cost. It may be that such cost, in terms that considers impact on customer relations as well as just internal payroll expense is not a subject for consideration by government to be paid for via tax revenues plus administrative expenses to determine and make sure that the oversight efforts prevent fraud!

No, the NY Times can be congratulated for searching for and finding issues to help sell its product to advertisers and an ever smaller array of subscribers. But, it should not be hailed as doing a public service by publishing articles that fail to consider the major impact of supply and demand. Of course, they can and do offer space for the Bernie Sanders perspective that eliminates the impact of supply and demand. Its function is just dictated by the socialist experts. They determine and dictate who does what, where, when, why, and for how much!

The Times may see Bernie win to start the American effort to prove that Marx and Lenin were right but that Stalin and his successors spoiled the perfect way to make a system convert all into being part of the ruling or worker classes. But, the power to make socialism work always fails because of human nature to want to survive! Clearly ruling in the name of the people is a fine way for rulers to survive- especially those like Bernie who never found a productive path for personal survival- but a political one that he likes.

Clearly the NY Times should be looking for articles to advise how our grand-children will find any jobs for both sexes. Robots with A/I will settle the pay question. The robots will produce most of what we really need in the way of air, water, food, and shelter. So getting paid to buy what we want instead of using barter exchange will become rare. The issue being examined here is mostly irrelevant; but, it stills drives readership and thus profits those that own or work for the NY Times.

Yes, technology and supply and demand for jobs drives the price up and down, not perceived social values in the minds of the sociologists.


As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops
Economic View
By CLAIRE CAIN MILLER MARCH 18, 2016

Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.
That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.
Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the other end of the wage spectrum, janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”
She is a co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study, which she conducted with Asaf Levanon, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.


And there was substantial evidence that employers placed a lower value on work done by women. “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” Ms. England said. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”
A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
While the pay gap has been closing, it remains wide. Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance centrist policy ideas.
Today, differences in the type of work men and women do account for 51 percent of the pay gap, a larger portion than in 1980, according to definitive new research by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, economists at Cornell.
Women have moved into historically male jobs much more in white-collar fields than in blue-collar ones. Yet the gender pay gap is largest in higher-paying white-collar jobs, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn found. One reason for this may be that these jobs demand longer and less flexible hours, and research has shown that workers are disproportionately penalized for wanting flexibility.
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.
Many differences that contributed to the pay gap have diminished or disappeared since the 1980s, of course. Women over all now obtain more education than men and have almost as much work experience. Women moved from clerical to managerial jobs and became slightly more likely than men to be union members. Both of these changes helped improve wage parity, Ms. Blau’s and Mr. Kahn’s research said.
Yes, women sometimes voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations because they are drawn to work that happens to pay less, like caregiving or nonprofit jobs, or because they want less demanding jobs because they have more family responsibilities outside of work. But many social scientists say there are other factors that are often hard to quantify, like gender bias and social pressure, that bring down wages for women’s work.
Ms. England, in other research, has found that any occupation that involves caregiving, like nursing or preschool teaching, pays less, even after controlling for the disproportionate share of female workers.
After sifting through the data, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn concluded that pure discrimination may account for 9 percent of the gender pay gap. Discrimination could also indirectly cause an even larger portion of the pay gap, they said, for instance, by discouraging women from pursuing high-paying, male-dominated careers in the first place.
“Some of it undoubtedly does represent the preferences of women, either for particular job types or some flexibility, but there could be barriers to entry for women and these could be very subtle,” Ms. Blau said. “It could be because the very culture and male dominance of the occupation acts as a deterrent.”
For example, social factors may be inducing more women than men to choose lower-paying but geographically flexible jobs, she and Mr. Kahn found. Even though dual-career marriages are now the norm, couples are more likely to choose their location based on the man’s job, since men earn more. This factor is both a response to and a cause of the gender pay gap.
Some explanations for the pay gap cut both ways. One intriguing issue is the gender difference in noncognitive skills. Men are often said to be more competitive and self-confident than women, and according to this logic, they might be more inclined to pursue highly competitive jobs.
But Ms. Blau warned that it is impossible to separate nature from nurture. And there is evidence that noncognitive skills, like collaboration and openness to compromise, are benefiting women in today’s labor market. Occupations that require such skills have expanded much more than others since 1980, according to research by David J. Deming at Harvard University. And women seem to have taken more advantage of these job opportunities than men.
Still, even when women join men in the same fields, the pay gap remains. Men and women are paid differently not just when they do different jobs but also when they do the same work. Research by Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, has found that a pay gap persists within occupations. Female physicians, for instance, earn 71 percent of what male physicians earn, and lawyers earn 82 percent.
It happens across professions: This month, the union that represents Dow Jones journalists announced that its female members working full time at Dow Jones publications made 87 cents for every dollar earned by their full-time male colleagues.
Colleen Schwartz, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We remain absolutely committed to fostering an inclusive work environment.”
Certain policies have been found to help close the remaining occupational pay gap, including raising the minimum wage, since more women work at the lowest end of the pay scale. Paid family leave helps, too.
Another idea, Ms. Liner of Third Way said, is to give priority to people’s talents and interests when choosing careers, even if it means going outside gender norms, for instance encouraging girls to be engineers and boys to be teachers. “There’s nothing stopping men and women from switching roles and being a maid versus a janitor except for social constructs,” she said.