Tuesday, August 8, 2023

The EB of the WSJ says that focusing on median wages to measure discrimination is a Sham and a Shame

The Editorial Board (EB) of the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) notes that the median woman on Biden's staff earn 80% of what the median man earns. It goes on to point out that this one statistic does NOT demonstrate discrimination or sexism. Here are three nuggetts.

  1. "How can this be, since the salaries are public and people with equal titles get equal pay? The answer is that there’s a composition effect: Among 269 female and 179 male White House staff in Mr. Perry’s spreadsheet, there are more women in lower-paid roles such as staff assistant." 
  2. "Many trends feed into the aggregate wage gap, including people’s free choices. To take one example, more than 90% of workplace deaths in 2021 were men, and dangerous jobs like repairing power lines command a wage premium."
  3. "Lumping all these people together and then cutting the data set by gender is not a way to understand what’s truly going on in the world."

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