Durham-Chapel Hill has the smallest gender pay-gap in the nation

[wheelsup]

Reading the article, it states the median wage for men and women across all job categories. It's just a general women made this much, men made this much.

I'm not sure what relevance this has as women in general tend to gravitate toward lower paying fields. This isn't a societal conspiracy.

Example you see many more women in marketing while men are engineers. Women are flight attendants and men are pilots.

It's not that they can't do those jobs, they just are t interested. Like how more women like pink than men...IMO.

[Fepibert]

Originally Posted by wheelsup

Reading the article, it states the median wage for men and women across all job categories. It's just a general women made this much, men made this much. I'm not sure what relevance this has as women in general tend to gravitate toward lower paying fields. This isn't a societal conspiracy.

I think we are in agreement here, because this is in line with what I'm saying. You can measure pay equity as it applies to something like office administrative work or food service, and you probably won't see much pay discrepancy between male or female. If you measure it in a number of highly technical professions, there probably will be. Why? A number of factors, first because for whatever reasons females tend to be less attracted to these jobs (there are exceptions to anything but I'm generalizing). This means even if a female does have a passion for the field, once she enters it she is going to feel a bit surrounded by the opposite gender, and may even feel compelled to change careers. Also, anyone who has ever worked in an engineering capacity with otherwise qualified females knows exactly what happens the moment she has her first child, and then again with subsequent children if applicable. Most of her technical passion and the focus she used to devote to her job beings to take a secondary role to motherhood, if it doesn't dissipate completely and result in a career change. That's not something to be ashamed of, motherhood is an important role. But it does tend to diminish her passion and time commitment to the technical goals of the team in every single case I've witnessed. Humans are not superheros and we can't be all things to all people. I've seen similar phenomenon in females that enter menopausal conditions, I don't know if that's hormonal or not, but it's a fairly predictable behavioral pattern.

These female-specific traits may not apply to all positions. The report shows Community and Social Services jobs as being a big reason for higher female pay. Females tend to gravitate toward these positions, and motherhood probably gives them ad advantage in many of these positions, where it would be disadvantagous (from the time commitment alone) to many engineering jobs.

So, if "cities" (or in the case of the report, specifically selected statistical areas) are identified that have a high number of the types of jobs that happen to offer higher female pay, or have a higher success rate for females, then it's very easy to say that city offers better pay equality than other cities (when that's not the case at all, the results are due to the types of jobs in that particular "city").

Since the report calls "Durham-Chapel Hill" a city, we might as well accept the reality that the job market consists of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill, Cary, and other nearby areas and that people consider the Triangle area a job market, not just "Durham-Chapel Hill".

Once we draw the map around the real world job market, the pay situation starts to more accurately mirror national averages, as would be expected.

[warriorfan63]

Originally Posted by wheelsup

Wife recently went on a business trip where they did some extracurricular team building. I saw the photo - out of 20 people TWO were male.

She works for a large IT company in RTP.

No concern for the white male whose wage and earning power has been decreasing for decades, but let's worry about a perceived wage gap....

See? This is how you fix the gender wage gap. You do not bring the lower end up, you bring the upper end down. Same goes for "wealth inequality" argument. Nobody cares to educate and fix the skill gap between the haves and the have nots, we just want to take from the haves and distribute it to the have nots, who simply blow it on whatever the hell they want thus keeping them in poverty.

I hire highly skilled software engineers for a large international corporation and your gender or race has nothing to do with your salary. If you have the skill, experience, and/or education to do the job, you are hired.

[Bull City Rising]

Originally Posted by warriorfan63

See? This is how you fix the gender wage gap. You do not bring the lower end up, you bring the upper end down. Same goes for "wealth inequality" argument. Nobody cares to educate and fix the skill gap between the haves and the have nots, we just want to take from the haves and distribute it to the have nots, who simply blow it on whatever the hell they want thus keeping them in poverty.

I hire highly skilled software engineers for a large international corporation and your gender or race has nothing to do with your salary. If you have the skill, experience, and/or education to do the job, you are hired.

While I am all for folks educating themselves and achieving better paying jobs and better lifestyles, there will always be someone at the bottom of the economic pile. They're the people who mow your lawn, drive your taxi, mop your supermarket's floors, and so forth.

There are not and never will be enough jobs at the middle and upper end for everyone. We can't all be airline pilots or engineers or whathaveyou -- there just ain't enough jobs. You can educate everyone but there will never be enough high-skill, high-pay jobs for everyone who wants them.

For those who can get them, of course, that's great. For everyone else, we need a higher minimum wage, indeed a living wage for all jobs.

I do agree that every person should be making a productive contribution to society. I see no problem with expecting that if people are not raising small children (which IS a productive activity, given what happens to economies of countries with low birth rates) or disabled/ill, they should be expected to work, care for an aging/ill parent, or perform community service work under the aegis of the state. And for working a private sector job or performing one of these tasks, they should be entitled to enough resources for basic housing, health care, and food.