From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: WELFARE:  AN IDEA
Date: Fri, 4 Sep 1992 14:09:24 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

>>  If you can show me that men and women doing the same work with the 
>>  same experience and education, have big income disparities I would
>>  be quite interested -- I'm not saying these don't exist, just that
>>  I haven't seen them documented and if they were I think they would
>>  be easily actionable, legally.   Do male and female software
>>  engineers writing similar types of software and having similar 
>>  degrees and years of experience suffer income disparities?
>
>You deleted my citation on PR work (where a woman stands to lose $1
>million on gender).  Surely men and women working in this one industry
>would have comparable salaries.

  Why "surely"?  Again, if they are doing different work, have 
  different experience, or different training then there's no 
  basis for comparison.


>In regard to legal action, how sympathetic have the conservative
>courts and regulatory agencies been?  Gains in employment equity by
>women have been evaporating for the past decade.  For instance,
>Reagan's FCC "cut back on information it compiled on women and
>minority employees, making it virtually impossible to document
>discriminiation in class-action suits." (p.372)

  All this says is that it's harder to compile the kind of
  statistics required.  it doesn't show that such disparities
  are widespread.  
     

>Yes, there is a concentration of women in service jobs.  Faludi notes
>that the proportion of women in white-collar jobs has been shrinking,
>while the proportion of women in traditionally-female jobs has
>increased.  This does not account for the all of the inequity: "as
>much as 45 percent of the pay gap is caused by sex segreation in the
>work force." (p.365; her sources are _American Woman 1988-89_, which I
>suppose is a statistical book; "Is Sex Discriminiation The Root Wage
>Differences?" from _Women at Work_, April 1989) 

  Just once, I'd like to see data that job-for-job this is a real
  problem.  Anecdotally, I've never seen it in this industry: to
  the limited extent that I have personal knowledge of what people make 
  doing software engineering it appears that to the extent that they 
  do the same kinds of programming as men they get paid the same.
  Now my anecdotal knowledge may be wrong, or this industry may be
  an exception.  I have personal interest in this since my wife also
  works in this industry and if she's being discriminated against
  then I want to know it.


>In Michael Lewis's _Liar's Poker_, he noted that the women recruits at
>Salomon Brothers were relegated to backroom equity department
>positions.  The men consistently landed the more glamorous, fixed
>income department positions.  Hint: investment banks made their money
>off the bond traders, and rewarded them quite well.  These were all
>recruits, so you can't say that one was more experienced, had more
>seniority, etc., than the other.  This is anecdotal, but perhaps
>instructive.

  And isn't it actionable?   And is it representative?


>Why would women prefer to relegate themselves to low-paying, dead-end
>clerical jobs?  Doesn't this go against notions of rationality?

  People are products of culture as well as reason.  Why don't more girls
  play with computers, ask for chemistry sets or electric trains for
  their birthdays, or major in engineering?   


> Faludi details Sears, for instance.  "The average female salesworker earns
>$226 a week; her male counterpart earned $431.  In retail, that's
>largely because the average department store is still set up like the
>traditional family household, with the women dusting the cosmetics
>counters and straightening the dress racks in the minimum- wage
>'ladies' departments, while the men adjusted television sets and
>maneuver hot-water heaters in the 'big ticket' departments -- and rack
>up big commissions on these sales." 

  Right: the guys sell "guy things" and the gals sell "gal things".
  But doesn't this reflect their interests?   If I were staffing a
  deparetmnent store I would certainly prefer to staff it with people
  who have at least some exposure to and interest in the things they
  were selling!   And in our culture that means tools, electronics, 
  etc, for the men, cosmetics for the women.

>investigated for sex discriminiation in 1973.  "At least 40% of the
>applicants who met the requirements for commission sales were women.
>Yet, in the five years before the EEOC launched its investigation,
>less than 10 percent of the high-paying commission sales jobs had gone
>to women each year." 

  Right, so again: actionable.   But this doesn't change the cultural
  realities, that even witout active discrimination the men will still
  dominate the big ticket items.  

>the EEOC in 1979, as the political climate was shifting, and "in 1986,
>the company won -- with help from a judge who had trouble believing
>that any working woman had ever faced discrimination."

  If they had a strong case I hope they appealed.


---peter




Xref: sparky talk.politics.misc:42441 talk.abortion:33823 alt.politics.bush:3239