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   From: gcf@panix.com (Gordon Fitch)
   Newsgroups: alt.supermodels,soc.women,alt.feminism,soc.men
   Date: 9 Nov 92 20:00:44 GMT
   References: <1992Nov6.150355.9849@rtf.bt.co.uk> <1992Nov7.213707.15211@fid.morgan.com> <9NOV199210165558@mary.fordham.edu>
   Organization: mydog in exile
   Lines: 34

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

   "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.
   -- 

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

Sorry, this is just too pompously stupid 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!  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.

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. The sample size for female
Ph.D. recipients in mathematics each year is probably small.  It's
possible mathematics does not suffer bias as much as the professional
market on the whole.  It's possible that organizations that want
mathematicians are subject to greater pressure to employ women (and
minorities) because the ratios of people graduating with Ph.D.s are
not in synch with the equal opportunity guidelines.  I know for a fact
that this happens in science oriented institutions.  It's simply not a
matter of whether they want to hire equal numbers, the numbers just
don't exist.  It's possible that early societal bias succeeds in
dissuading women with motivation and aptititude equal to the average
male Ph.D. recipient from entering the field in the first place, so
that those that do come through deserve better pay.  I would be much
more interested in data on, say, middle management positions.
Newsgroups: alt.supermodels,soc.women,alt.feminism,soc.men