From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
Subject: Re: Entry level salaries (was: Re: Elle MacPherson causes rape?)
Date: Wed, 11 Nov 1992 23:28:53 GMT
Organization: mydog in exile

sethb@fid.morgan.com (Seth Breidbart) writes...
|  | >More recently, I've seen statistics that when men and women have the
|  | >same level of education and experience, they earn about the same.  The
|  | >only reference I have is that in the most recent salary survey taken
|  | >by the MAA that I've seen (probably a year or two old), women with new
|  | >PhD's in math earned more, on average, than men with new PhD's in math.

nissim@mary.fordham.edu (Leonard J. Nissim) writes:
|  | Here are the *new* statistics (from the November 1992 issue of "Notices of 
|  | the American Mathematical Society"):
|  | 9-month academic salaries of people with new Ph.D.'s in mathematics:
|  | (`new' means granted during the 1991/92 academic year) 
|  | Median salary for men----$34,000  (interquartile range--31,000 to 36,000)
|  | Median salary for women--$34,900  (interquartile range--33,000 to 37,100)
|  | Note that women earn over $1.02 for each $1 earned per man.  

sb:
|  | >And anybody who claims that only men can be sexist is a reincarnation
|  | >of Ed Nilges.

gf:
|    "Experience" and "education" actually denote dimensions of
|    status in the hierarchies typical of bourgeois institutions.
|    Consequently, to note that persons equally advanced in these
|    dimensions are equally compensated, regardless of gender,
|    seems vacuously tautological.  The interesting question is
|    how and whether status is achieved, which is what differs
|    per gender, not how well it is compensated, which evidently
|    does not.  
| 
|    When Ed comes back he'll go into the reasons for your not
|    observing this on your own.

hod@amazon.chem.columbia.edu (Hod Greeley):
| Sorry, this is just too pompously stupid 

I'm not sure, but I think this means "You used real long
words I had to look up, and I still didn't understand it,
so it must be stupid!"  But we'll press on...

hg:
|                                    to let pass.  First of all,
| the whole argument is about whether men and women of equal status
| (e.g. holding identical jobs) receive equal pay!  

Is that so?  I don't think so.  I don't have the entire
thread at hand, but the argument advanced by Seth Breidbart
at the beginning has become the stock response to the
contention of feminists that women make less money than men
-- the most recent common figure being a female $.59 against
a male dollar.  If there were any uncertainty about his 
intent in introducing this figure, the tail of his paragraph
("And anybody who claims that only men can be sexist....")
left under Leonard Nissim's contribution removes it.

So your view of the "whole argument" turns out to be highly
constrained one.  Can it be that by doing so you exclude
data which is disadvantageous to your position?

hg:
|                                              Secondly, experience
| and education are quantifiable things.  The measure may be inexact,
| but still exists.  These often correlate strongly with status, but are
| by no means equivalent.  The statement is a tautology only if you take
| pay as the measure of status.  To even carry on the argument, you have
| to have a premise that a different measure of status is the correct
| one.

I said that experience and education were "dimensions" of
status.  So is inherited wealth.  None of them, alone,
necessarily confer status; but the likelihood that one will
get certain kinds of experience (as in "resume" or 
"curriculum vitae") or education or get paid at a certain 
level are closely correlated.  So I find it tautological to 
say that all PhDs or all executive vice-presidents are about 
equally paid regardless of gender.  Of course they are.  
It's not tautological in the mathematical or grammatical 
sense, but we're not talking mathematics here.  If you can't
handle that degree of metaphorization, I'll try to find 
other, simpler, duller ways of expressing myself.

| There is a certain amount of fallacious reasoning in the nissim post,
| however.  Or rather, I should say, it's dangerous to draw any far
| reaching conclusions from such limited data. ... I would be much
| more interested in data on, say, middle management positions.

I have seen such data.  It was very much like the comparisons
given above.  The one area of comparison I have _not_ seen
is for lower-level, working-class jobs.  I suspect that this
is because the data is more favorable to the feminist
argument.  However, an aspect of working-class compensation
is that it has had a substantial downward trend over the
last twenty years, at the same time as women have been
entering the workforce in increasing numbers.  As the women
lack seniority and, possibly, influence, factors which have
been of considerable importance in determining working-class
compensation, they receive lower pay and poorer job security,
conditions, and opportunities, leading to charges of unequal 
pay for equal work.  The charge has truth, but the cause
generally lies outside the immediate workplace.
-- 

 )*(    Gordon Fitch    )*(    gcf@panix.com    )*(
( 1238 Blg. Grn. Sta.,  NY NY 10274 * 718.273.5556 )
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