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[origamiscienceguy]

A big reason for income inequality is that people don't talk about their salary.

[Reelya]

http://www.consad.com/content/reports/Gender%20Wage%20Gap%20Final%20Report.pdf

There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that
 collectively account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.

Source: U.S. Department of Labor, Employment Standards Administration report, 2009

This is my point, when you adjust for all the things that Equal Pay Acts and the like are NOT going to correct for, the remaining gap that they can influence is very small and it's certainly not a sufficient response to the "77 cents in the dollar" battlecry. It is therefore misdirecting effort. And that "unexplained" 5-7% is just "unexplained", i.e. it's factors we haven't taken into consideration. Some of that could be differences in self-confidence between men and women for example. An Equal Pay Act can only enforce wage standardization within individual businesses, and gender wage disparities within a single business are likely to be an extremely small portion of the unexplained wage gap.

Other evidence direct from the BLS:
http://www.bls.gov/opub/reports/cps/highlights-of-womens-earnings-in-2014.pdf

A large majority of both male and female full-time workers had a 40-hour workweek. Among these workers, women earned 89 percent as much as men earned.

\

Women who were paid hourly rates had median hourly earnings of $12.18, which were 85 percent of the median hourly earnings of men ($14.39).

[SalmonGod]

A big reason for income inequality is that people don't talk about their salary.

This is a major peeve of mine.  I've so far only known two types of employers.

1.  This is what everyone makes for this position, and this position does exactly one clearly defined thing.  Period. 
2.  If we suspect that you've talked about your pay rate with your coworkers, you will be walked out immediately, even if we have to ruin our operations in the process.

[mainiac]

This is my point, when you adjust for all the things that Equal Pay Acts and the like are NOT going to correct for, the remaining gap that they can influence is very small and it's certainly not a sufficient response to the "77 cents in the dollar" battlecry. It is therefore misdirecting effort. And that "unexplained" 5-7% is just "unexplained", i.e. it's factors we haven't taken into consideration. Some of that could be differences in self-confidence between men and women for example rather than employers plotting away to pay women less for the same role.

Just because only 5-7% is in the residual doesn't mean only 5-7% is going to be affected by a law.  If x% is due to women not being interested in a field that pays well but treats them badly, that doesn't show up in the residual.  If y% is due to women taking maternity leave (and paternity leave is also being pushed by all three democrats) part of the pay gap for maternity leave that persists even if you compare to fathers who take paternity leave.

The only way to control for all this stuff would be to run panel experiments where you change people's genders randomly but that's not really a viable experiment.

[Baffler]

A big reason for income inequality is that people don't talk about their salary.

This is a major peeve of mine.  I've so far only known two types of employers.

1.  This is what everyone makes for this position, and this position does exactly one clearly defined thing.  Period. 
2.  If we suspect that you've talked about your pay rate with your coworkers, you will be walked out immediately, even if we have to ruin our operations in the process.

It's illegal to go with option 2 these days, and from what I've seen most folks know it too.

There was actually a fairly major stink a while back when a certain regional company which had recently come under new management that employed a lot of people started telling new hires that talking about their salaries was frowned upon. Most of them smelled bullshit and proceeded to talk about their salaries to everyone. It turned out that they'd cut their starting pay by quite a bit, and slashed periodic raises. The old timers were being phased out all quiet like so as not to disrupt operations (operations were still disrupted) but kept them at their current pay rate until they were let go. I'm not sure what came of that, but it certainly can't have been good for them. They may well have had to cut costs, the company had come under new management after all, but they decided to concoct some scheme to avoid damaging the value of their investment instead of doing it properly.

[Frumple]

A big reason for income inequality is that people don't talk about their salary.

So... more union work, you say. Interesting, ehehe.

... incidentally, that's like half the reason it's fairly common that businesses crack down on basically any intercommunication between workers regarding various conditions related to the job. Gotta' keep those unions out. Being fair, something like the other half is just to prevent on-site conflict, which isn't entirely without merit.

There's a third half shoved somewhere in there hiding various sorts of corruption. Plus somewhere around another quarter or so labeled "miscellaneous" without further explanation. We wouldn't be talking about business if we weren't cooking the numbers :V

And yeah, baff, plenty of that shit is various sorts of illegal, or skirting the line so close they might as well be sketching it. The problem with noting that is that it doesn't exactly stop employers, especially in the lower income areas. Something being illegal only particularly matters if the people being stepped on can afford to do something about it

Beyond that, of course most employers aren't stupid enough to actually fire you for talking like that. They'll just find another reason (assuming you're working in an area where they need a reason), or manufacture a scenario where you get yourself fired. Is damned simple thing to do, really.

[Reelya]

x% is due to women not being interested in a field that pays well but treats them badly, that doesn't show up in the residual.

This law isn't going to magically make women more interested in becoming engineers or anything.

I see it as a feel good / do nothing law at the end of the day. Basically, reading the proposals in the Act it's a toughening up of the Equal Pay Act of 1963. The gist here is that the Equal Pay Act did not make much of any dent the wage gap - almost all of the improvement since the 1960s can be better explained by more women graduating highschool and college rather than lawsuits arising from the Equal Pay Act.

So rather than go and look at other theories they've doubled-down on the "sneaky employers" conspiracy theory (and are generally hostile to any suggestion that any portion of the wage gap whatsoever is NOT due to direct employer discrimination) and want to make "Equal Pay Act Plus" which intends to make pay discrimiation lawsuits harder for businesses to win. But not actually much different at all if you look at things logically. It's not all THAT different from the 1963 act, overall. I'm going to predict here that the law passes, then nothing concrete will eventuate, and further down the track they'll be pushing for yet another version of the law. This is what I mean about misdirected efforts. Every so often you should check that your strategy, no matter how elegant, is actually getting results.

[mainiac]

x% is due to women not being interested in a field that pays well but treats them badly, that doesn't show up in the residual.

This law isn't going to magically make women more interested in becoming engineers or anything.

Dont know how you'd get that from what I said. 

So rather than go and look at other theories they've doubled-down on the "sneaky employers" conspiracy theory

Nice strawman you got there.  Let's take a look at some of these conspiracy theories:

4. Motherhood is associated with a wage penalty and lower future career earnings. One reason the gender wage gap has narrowed faster among younger women is that between 1980 and 2013, the median age of first birth rose from 22.6 to 26.0. Because motherhood is associated with a wage penalty and lower wage gains later in a woman’s career these delays in childbirth have helped narrow the pay gap. Research has shown that delaying child birth for one year can increase a woman’s total career earnings and experience by 9 percent. But research shows that a lack of paid leave is one reason mothers with infants leave the labor force and therefore earn less later in life. So policies providing paid sick and family leave encourage women to participate in the labor force and therefore bolster their lifelong earnings.

My preferred translation: "grrrrrr, evil misogynistic companies!"

[SalmonGod]

A big reason for income inequality is that people don't talk about their salary.

Beyond that, of course most employers aren't stupid enough to actually fire you for talking like that. They'll just find another reason (assuming you're working in an area where they need a reason), or manufacture a scenario where you get yourself fired. Is damned simple thing to do, really.

This.  I live in a "right to work" state where they supposedly don't need any reason at all to fire you.  And every employment contract I've seen here has some phrasing of "We reserve the right to sever our business relationship with you at any time, for any reason.". We all sign that junk.  We shouldn't... But what's the alternative?

[origamiscienceguy]

I work in a job that does that too (lifeguard). I asked for a raise at the start if the winter season, which happened to be right after I was "guard of the month". So I got a raise pretty easily. I guess you should just work hard until your boss notices you, then ask for a raise. They shouldn't fire you for asking for a raise.

[Baffler]

A big reason for income inequality is that people don't talk about their salary.

Beyond that, of course most employers aren't stupid enough to actually fire you for talking like that. They'll just find another reason (assuming you're working in an area where they need a reason), or manufacture a scenario where you get yourself fired. Is damned simple thing to do, really.

This.  I live in a "right to work" state where they supposedly don't need any reason at all to fire you.  And every employment contract I've seen here has some phrasing of "We reserve the right to sever our business relationship with you at any time, for any reason.". We all sign that junk.  We shouldn't... But what's the alternative?

Organized labor. Which brings us back to the original problem.

[mainiac]

Look, I dont know how to say this in english so I'm just going to say it in math.  Suppose you have a model of wages:

W = B1*experience + B2*overtime_willingness + B3*career_choice + a0 + u0

What you are doing is saying "discrimination is u0".  Because a0+u0="5%-7%" you conclude that discrimination is small.  But discrimination is not u0.  Let's make a new variable "D" for discrimination and then propose a model of B1:

B1 = D1*sexism_field + u1 + a1

and for B2:

B2 = D2*elasticity_of_labor_with_respect_to_earnings_gap + u2 + a2

and for B3

B3 = D3*elasticity_of_labor_with_respect_to_adjustment_of_lifecycle_discount_adjustment + u3 + a3

So you've said that "discrimination is u0" but in fact that was wrong.  The impact of discrimination is:

D = W - ( a0 + a1 + u1 + a2 + u2 + a3+ u3).

And I'm trying to point out to you that:

B1>a1+u1
B2>a2+u2
B3>a3+u3

Arriving at a precise estimate of all of these terms is like impossibly hard. For one thing a1,a2,a3 are all going to overlap each other.  And we'd need a lot more models because what I've tossed up here are just the first three variables I thought of but there are going to be dozens of important ones.  Each of them will have the fixed effects residual overlap the others.  It's theoretically possible but I wouldn't want to try.

But what I can tell you is that I'm pretty effing sure that:

B1>a1+u1
B2>a2+u2
B3>a3+u3

[Flying Dice]

Yeah, that language is well-familiar to me. Most everywhere I've worked, you had to sign a contract allowing termination at any time for any reason or none, and in one was expressly told both as an individual and as part of a group that any attempt to organize would mean being fired on the spot.

I may suppose, that  chances of getting stabbed by lunatic with knife in no guns zone are not much different from chance of getting shot by lunatic with gun in Gunlandia.

I've found that it's much easier to run away from or fight back against someone with a knife compared to someone with a gun. Britain's got big problems with knife crime, ferex... but their worst years are still at less than one stabbing death per 100,000 people. This gets dredged out all the time, but the fact is that someone with a knife, club, &c. is vastly less dangerous than someone with a gun in the same situation, and that injuries from the same are less likely to be fatal.

So to put it bluntly, in a place where guns are not commonly available, you're vastly less likely to be murdered at all, simply by virtue of the easiest tools for murder being largely unavailable.

[Reelya]

4. Motherhood is associated with a wage penalty and lower future career earnings. One reason the gender wage gap has narrowed faster among younger women is that between 1980 and 2013, the median age of first birth rose from 22.6 to 26.0. Because motherhood is associated with a wage penalty and lower wage gains later in a woman’s career these delays in childbirth have helped narrow the pay gap. Research has shown that delaying child birth for one year can increase a woman’s total career earnings and experience by 9 percent. But research shows that a lack of paid leave is one reason mothers with infants leave the labor force and therefore earn less later in life. So policies providing paid sick and family leave encourage women to participate in the labor force and therefore bolster their lifelong earnings.

My preferred translation: "grrrrrr, evil misogynistic companies!"

The Act we're talking about won't have any impact on that. Which is right back to my original point that having children is what makes the difference, not unequal pay rates. Thanks for backing up my original point.

Look, if women putting off having a kid for 12 months can make a 9% difference to their later pay, and that's with existing child-care arrangements, then that's wiped out half the raw pay gap before we even consider equal pay laws and expanded childcare spending. Maybe we just encourage women to wait a little longer to have kids, that sounds like it's far more effective (and provable) than any other hypothetical suggestion.

[mainiac]

The Act we're talking about won't have any impact on that.

Unless B3 < u3 + a3...

Gee if only we had some sort of psychologically experiment where we tested people of the same skill level (say violinists) in a blind test.  Then we could find out whether B3=u3+a3 or B3<u3+a3.

But no, the people interested in doing tests like that are just social justice warriors trying to shove their views down our throats.  Why can't scientists just use common sense instead of a bunch of egghead theories?