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[chaoticag]

*clears throat*

Train is heading off the rails at this point. Prolly a good idea to spin this off into a separate topic. And if you expect that the thread it would get spun into would get purged, prolly not a good idea to talk about it anyway.

Not that it's something we shouldn't be talking about, but the thread title does mention that we ought to keep focused here, and this kinda discussion tends to have a habit of eating a thread whole.

[mainiac]

Link in post look for blue. Can't copy because I phone bad.

[Reelya]

I've looked over the page numerous times, but none of the links are related to your graph.

[mainiac]

I took the data and made the graph myself.  Pay gap and weeks of paid leave times pay percentage .

I just didn't chuck inconvenient data to make a sub sample to exaggerate. If you want to actually talk about the importance of paid leave by this metric (not my favorite btw) then you can only say it explains 2.7% of the difference between countries. Do you want to say that?

[Reelya]

Multiplying by pay percentage would seem to distort things a bit, so that's one thing that's different about how you did that graph, it would tend to pull things to the left, making many countries with longer leave seem shorter.

why should I trust your analysis vs one done by economists at the OECD themselves?

Well let's look at what the PEW / OECD graph actually says. For 42 weeks of paid leave, the increase in the wage gap averages 12.5% (10% - ~22.5%) - for women aged 30-34. About a 7% increase in the wage gap if you add 6 months of paid leave. You can downplay that if you want, but it might be something to think about, even if that's ideologically inconvenient for you.

Look up those articles about paid leave in Sweden, 75% of it is taken by women, even with strong kick-in-the-pants incentives for dudes to take it. In the USA, they're adding the leave but it is being specifically messaged as a thing for women. So women are going to take more leave and they will do nothing to try and balance that between the genders, meaning it will have a worse outcome that in Sweden on the wage gap. Note I cited a link showing Sweden has a whopping huge wage gap. Apparently all those policies to help women in Sweden ... didn't actually help the wage gap whatsoever. So no reason to believe they'll help in America either, is there?

[mainiac]

You mean economist singular at pew?  I am not doing a study I am just showing some skepticism.  It is something called reproducibility. Just think imagine if one of these countries had a lot of pregnant 20 year olds and another a lot of pregnant 30 year olds. What would that do to the study that uses a subsample of 30-34 at ditches the rest.

[Reelya]

In the Pew study, the wage-gap data was for 30-34 year olds, who are in full-time employment. That wage gap reflects all cumulative effects of conditions since they entered the workforce. So it is actually a pretty good indicator of how much those policies have affected women across their careers. Clearly, the reason to choose a specific age-group such as that was to allow for differences in when women had children, but not to be so old as to poorly reflect current policies.

For older women, the pay gap they experience is less likely to correlate with current family policies. For younger women, they usually haven't thought about having kids yet. Adding both of those to the data merely swamps any correlation with fairly irrelevant data. What matters is how the policies that exist affect any single woman over their career, and the 30-34 data is a better indicator of that than just cramming all the data together.

[mainiac]

But age differences exist between countries!  And anyway you slice it the data is not showing the specific words you were talking about. It is a subsample.

[Neonivek]

And of course this is all there to hide the real issue...

Lack of Child Care services!

No really

[mainiac]

I donylt think there is a silver bullet.

[Neonivek]

I dunno my conclusion on this whole Wage Gap thing after looking at it well enough is...

No one knows what the heck is actually going on or what to do.

One person says that the majority of women work in lower pay jobs and thus we should focus on the wage gap there.

Another person says that we need more women in top level positions like to be CEOs

And they do not work together.

Like really... What do those statistics tell you? "Men and women get paid differently" but why? What are the reasons?

Is it entirely Maternity Leave?

[Reelya]

But age differences exist between countries!  And anyway you slice it the data is not showing the specific words you were talking about. It is a subsample.

The age range of first child in OECD countries is only a few years. And definitely before 30.

But it also turns out that some countries that offer more liberal parental leave policies have higher pay gaps among men and women ages 30 to 34, according to analyses of 16 countries conducted by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. OECD theorizes that this link may be  driven by the fact that women are more likely than men to actually use their parental leave, and that time out of the workforce is associated with lower wages.

Yeah, it's a subsample of 30-34 year old women's wage gap. Which is after the age at which all OECD country's women tend to start families. Sure you can add data from younger women in, but those age-brackets would not have been affected by this stuff, yet. Meaning it's only sweeping the relevant data under the carpet by swamping it with unrelated info.

I'm really not sure here what you even mean by "the data is not showing the specific words you were talking about".

Sure, the site doesn't actually say that 30-34 age is after women start having kids. But that's just a known fact, whether or not the site mentions it.

[mainiac]

I doesn't say what you say it does because you aren't talking about the wage gap just for 30-34 year olds.  Nobody gives a shit about that.  Or at least I really hope you aren't trying to talk about that.  It's a subsample which happens to be a fluke.  If you deliberately pick the high point and then treat it as representative when you know it isn't then you are really missing the point.

Allow me to metaphor.  Imagine you have an average baseball team that happens to have a fantastic player at second base.  You wouldn't just talk about that baseball team by talking about the second baseman.  Sure he is in there.  Sure if you want to talk about what is good about that baseball team you talk about him.  But that team also has a bad player somewhere.  Because the team is average which means that the good and the bad average out.

The relationship at 30-34 is above average.  But I know for a fact that there is a negative correlation in at least one other cohort.  That is because I swapped the axis on my graph last page.  There is actually a negative correlation between the size of the gender pay gap and weeks of paid leave.  Countries with more pay leave have smaller gender pay gaps.

[Neonivek]

Countries with more pay leave have smaller gender pay gaps.

Ok... but why?

That goes against the conventional wisdom of why pay leave is important.

[mainiac]

Maybe because feminists let women achieve in the workplace. Probably just statistical noise however. It is less then a cent on the dollar. If I was doing a real analysis I wouldn't do anything as superficial as plotting countries on two axis. We might as well throw darts. I was just seeing if he would defend a 2.7% rsquare