Explaining the Gender Wage Gap
From Thomas Edsall in the NY Times
At one end of the scale, men continue to dominate.
In 2016, 95.8 percent of Fortune 500 CEOs were male and so were 348 of the Forbes 400. Of the 260 people on the Forbes list described as “self-made,” 250 were men. Wealth — and the ability to generate more wealth — must still be considered a reliable proxy for power.
But at the other end of the scale, men of all races and ethnicities are dropping out of the work force, abusing opioids and falling behind women in both college attendance and graduation rates.
Edsall’s comments are very compatible with this by Deary et al:
There is uncertainty whether the sexes differ with respect to their mean levels and variabilities in mental ability test scores. Here we describe the cognitive ability distribution in 80,000+ children—almost everyone born in Scotland in 1921—tested at age 11 in 1932. There were no significant mean differences in cognitive test scores between boys and girls, but there was a highly significant difference in their standard deviations (P<.001). Boys were over-represented at the low and high extremes of cognitive ability. These findings, the first to be presented from a whole population, might in part explain such cognitive outcomes as the slight excess of men achieving first class university degrees, and the excess of males with learning difficulties.
It is also compatible with this by Lynn and Kanazawa:
This paper presents the results of a longitudinal study of sex differences in intelligence as a test of Lynn’s (1994) hypothesis that from the age of 16 years males develop higher average intelligence than females. The results show that at the ages of 7 and 11 years girls have an IQ advantage of approximately 1 IQ point, but at the age of 16 years this changes in the same boys and girls to an IQ advantage of 1.8 IQ points for boys.
Lynn and Kanazawa’s paper sample is for all kids born in Great Britain during one fine week in March of 1958. The abstract and the paper focuses on mean differences. They seem to mean a lot to the two authors, and most especially Lynn, but to me the differences in mean are small and of lesser importance than other things they note. To mangle a metaphor, the multiplier (when it comes to differences in population outcomes) is the standard deviation. To see what I mean, here are a couple of tables from the Lynn and Kanazawa paper:
Notice the standard deviations are larger for males in every sub-sample. What they tell you is that even if the mean intelligence of men and women is the same, you expect far many more idiots and far many more geniuses among men than among women in most areas of human endeavor that require something identifiable as cognition or IQ.
But it’s not just at the tails; you expect to see more “pretty stupid” and “pretty smart” men than women. The female population simply displays less variance at all ends of the spectrum.
Neuroscientists are also finding that there is more variability in men’s brains than in women’s. Which is to say, patterns of variability in measures of cognition observed in the studies mentioned earlier are very likely to apply to other fields as well.
Now, consider making money. Everyone does it to some extent. But we should see more variation men’s earnings than women’s earnings.
Throw on one more detail: income distributions are truncated at the bottom. There is a minimum wage, after all. People simply don’t get paid less than that. But even in the absence of a minimum wage, people who don’t make enough to survive are very euphemistically removed from the distribution. In fact, in most careers, there is a baseline and most people earn closer to that baseline than to the level that superstars in the field make. People’s abilities may fall on a standard normal distribution, but incomes are described by something that more closely resembles a Chi-Squared distribution.
Which is to say, chunks are taken out from the bottom end of the female and male income distributions. However, a larger proportion of the low end of the male distribution is removed because, due to the larger male variance, more men fall below the floor.
That right there could be the gender wage gap, as well as Edsall’s observation.
You disagree? Does today’s America’s differ from what you would expect in a world were men and women have similar intelligence, but men have a great deal more variance? If it does, tell me how.
Can you tell the difference between someone with an IQ of 142 and another with 148? Maybe so, but you do also need to show a strong correlation between IQ and pay before you claim you have an explanation.
It seems to me that I once read that the highest paid businessmen were the B students, not the A students. The B students had other skills that outweighed just the IQ.
The B students were the ones who hired the A students.
The correlation between IQ and grades falls apart at those levels, too.
I think that whatever differences in IQ there may be are of very little importance. Many very high IQ people go into less lucrative fields, such as research, because those fields are more interesting. I make more than my Computational Astrophysics professors do, but their work is much more interesting than mine.
The primary factors are career choice, hours worked, and overall labor costs. For the less-intelligent among us, there are more high-wage choices available to men than to women, simply attributable to the fact that men, on average, are stronger than women. So when it comes to physical work, men can do more than women in a given amount of time.
For the more intelligent among us, women seem to choose less lucrative fields. I know many female nurses smarter than the doctors for whom they work, but when I ask, they simply say they did not want to be doctors. (Meanwhile, one of my dearest friends is the office manager, and his wife is the doctor.) One little anecdote — my son and a female classmate from High School had approximately the same grades, in the same courses (both got International Baccalaureate degrees), with the same SAT scores, he became an Aerospace Engineer, and she an Elementary School Teacher.
All in all, you’re just another brick in the wall.
I wonder — does IQ relate to contribution to humanities well being?
I only ask because IF one’s earning power is NOT a measure of one’s contribution to humanities well being, and if IQ is positively correlated with earning power, then IQ is not a measure of one’s contribution to humanities well being.
The relevance to the posted IQ to Income information is the simple question of why IQ is positively correlated with Income? That, it seems to me is or should be the fundamental question.
A purely hypothetical:
If a population if born and raised in some location which provides no formal education at all, then is their measured IQ greater or lesser than a population born and raised with completely free formal education though advanced levels of formal education?
If I extend this hypothetical to assume the formally education society will have greater advancement in human comforts and conveniences (standards of living) than the population with no formal education, then is there actually any relation of humanity’s well being to IQ?
Obviously many things affect income, including luck, where one started in life, how much one is motivated by income, etc. But in general, all else being equal, people prefer more comfort over less, and smarter people have an easier time doing what it takes to attain their desired level of comfort than people who aren’t as smart.
There is actually a literature looking at this. For example, this recent paper controls for a number of variables, including a person’s IQ scores when in school. (http://www.mdpi.com/2079-3200/5/2/11/htm)
To quote from the paper:
A big confounding factor seems to be that people who are sufficiently smart are often not motivated by money or are insufficiently willing to take the large gambles that are required in order to make large incomes. A tenured math professor is going to be comfortable, but not a zillionaire. That said, even among math professors, the smarter ones typically make more.
So my guess is that the relationship between income and intelligence (accounting for luck, starting point, etc.) is linear, but it plateaus and then dips.
As to whether any of this is good or bad, this post is intended to be normative rather than positive. As I keep repeating over and over and over – in order for people who are somewhere near the political center (center left to center right) to influence policy that will eventually be crafted to deal with realities that are becoming more and more clear, they will first have to accept those realities. Otherwise the policy field will be forfeited to the people who are eager to accept these realities because it excuses them to unleash some ugly impulses.
Are there any gender specific studies on drive and motivation, as well as things that are most important to folks? It is clear that one source of gender inequality is marriage and family to women who get paid less if they are married and have a family, whereas men get paid more. Of then a piece of this is what the individual considers the most important thing in their life, is it family or money or showing the xxx.
Mr. Kimel,
I think you would agree that the human population is composed of a fixed distribution, roughly Gaussian, of some measure of “intelligence” though people may not agree on what “intelligence” measures mean in different cultures.
Since the human distribution is fixed, and since all humans are equally entitled to a decent life (we may disagree on what is meant by a “decent life”), then is it not the case that political and social policies of different gov’ts and different cultures decide on which portion of those distributions of humans shall be entitled to a better “decent life” than others in the distribution?
And isn’t it then also the case that those who decide these things are by whatever means also those with the greatest influence of wealth which translates to the greatest influence in political and policing powers?
And if that is the case, and I think it’s self evident that it is the case, then isn’t it also the case that wealth and power will be first applied to insure that segment of the distribution will also be provided with the means and privileges to enable and secure the more “decent life” than those who aren’t part of that distribution?
And from this, then isn’t it the case that inequality of wealth and power increases the inequality of wealth and power (e.g. positive feedback) and this will increase the magnitudes of difference between those with wealth and power and those without?
So what is it about your conclusion that
“…in order for people who are somewhere near the political center (center left to center right) to influence policy that will eventually be crafted to deal with realities that are becoming more and more clear, they will first have to accept those realities. ”
What are you suggesting or would you suggest are policies that need to be crafted to deal with “realities”? I ask because your post and the data sources you cited didn’t propose anything was necessary or not necessary to “deal with realities” and you only suggested others (center left and right) craft policies to deal with “realities”..
But as we know well, the “center” of gov’t law-makers and policy makers differs with time so and thus “center” is a moving target… with no defined point in the range of gov’t policies over time.
Lyle,
Apologies – I am rushed this morning (its 3:54 AM and I have a lot I need to get done) but yes, there is a fair amount out there. It falls into a few strands: there’s a “feminist literature” which I believe barks up the wrong tree. There is a psychology and an evolutionary psychology trend as well which in my opinion (I suggest you reach your own conclusions and don’t take my word for it) makes more sense. In any case, survey data indicates to nobody’s surprise (outside the aforementioned feminist literature) that men and women often have very different motivation. Nothing wrong with that, and neither is “better” than the other.
This might be a sufficient explanation, but there are too many other factors that influence income and too many of them have been well documented to produce a difference in pay depending on one’s sex. We know, for example, that a scientific paper with a masculine author name will be ranked more highly than the same paper with a feminine author name on it. The IQ of the author is obviously the same, but the societal and scientific judgement depends on gender.
If we didn’t have such a preponderance of alternate explanations, intelligence might satisfy.
Kaleberg,
I haven’t seen the study you mention. But I have seen this one. It would suggest that the requirements for getting into a male dominated field are lower for women and the requirements for getting into a female dominated field are lower for men. FWIW, my own lying eyes seem to suggest the same thing. If, say, female physicists have lower entry requirements, unless the entry requirements don’t correlate at all with output quality we would expect that, on average, a male physicist will outperform a female one. Of course, that does require ability as a physicist to correlate with scores on tests needed to get into the field to be true. If they do not, then the requirements for entering the field are clearly wrong.