We really prefer for ideological academics with a bad case of class-blindness to usurp personal decision-making

Fascinating to see how careful academics have to be in order to avoid the destructive rage of ideologues. Or how blind they can be to their own biases. I don't know which it is, but there is a lot of misdirection here. From How to Win the Battle of the Sexes Over Pay (Hint: It Isn’t Simple.) by Claudia Goldin. Its almost as if she is trying to ease ignorant ideologues into a reality they don't want to acknowledge.

I am familiar with Goldin's work and I regard it highly. It is also consistent with most other robust research I have seen though she got to some of the key findings earlier.

The popular ideological position is that women face great wage discrimination in the marketplace with figures bandied around of women making only 70-80% of men for the same work. This popular position has been completely discredited by repeated research and replication across the OECD over the past thirty years. Women make the same amount as men for the same work under the same work conditions. In most studies there is usually a margin of around 1-2% wage differential for the same work with unclear grounds. Young women in cities make more than their male counterparts for example.

But basically, the empirical evidence for systemic wage discrimination is nugatory. The claim is essentially an ideological rallying cry for political purposes.

Goldin's work has reached the same conclusions but she casts it in much more tempered wording. Four paragraphs in to this current article she says:

Fighting to eradicate discriminatory employment practices is absolutely needed, of course. I’ve spent many years studying this subject, and my research shows that unequal treatment in hiring and in the work setting is real and may be reflected in unequal pay.

Yes - equal application of the law to everyone. No discrimination based on sex, race, etc. We can virtually all of us agree on that. The problem is "my research shows that unequal treatment in hiring and in the work setting is real." Well yes, it is real and it affects men and women both. The issue is whether there is systemic discrimination so that women are more affected than men. If men and women are paid the same for the same work, as all the robust research, including Goldin's, shows then what evidence can there be that there is systemic discrimination against women? Goldin elides this issue by the always popular weasel word "may" as in "unequal treatment in hiring and in the work setting is real and may be reflected in unequal pay."

Goldin seems to be deliberately indulging in amphibology where ambiguous sentence structure causes ambiguity of meaning. In this case, the original claim is that men and women are paid differently for the same work. The data refutes that hypothesis. Controlling for all the relevant variables, men and women are paid the same for the same work. Goldin subtly changes the claim. She is now claiming to see differences in how men and women are hired, and how men and women are treated in the workplace and hypothesizing that that may lead to differences in compensation for the same work.

It might or might not be true that men and women are systematically hired and treated differently, but that is a different argument. What we do know to be true is that whether men and women hired and treated differently, they are paid the same for the same work. So what is going on? Why is Goldin playing with words like this?

The next several paragraphs make the issue clearer if you know the field and know Goldin's earlier work. She points out the various variables which determine compensation such as type of degree, field of employment, duration in role, number of years in the field, volume of hours worked, capacity to respond to great variability in work hours and circumstances, etc.

Men and women make different decisions around these variables based on their respective interests and goals. An especially consequential decision is who has primary responsibility for childcare. These are all personal decisions that can only be made based on the particulars of the individuals and their circumstances.

Goldin points out:

Certain job characteristics have a big impact on the gender earnings gap. I have looked closely at these issues, including the extent to which workers are:

■ Subject to strict deadlines and time pressure

■ Expected to be in direct contact with other workers or clients

■ Instructed to develop cooperative working relationships

■ Assigned to work on highly specific projects

■ Unable to independently determine their tasks and goals

That's not quite right. These job characteristics have a big impact on the productivity and value of the employee, not on the genders earning gap per se. Employees who can work strict deadlines and under great time pressure, who can work cooperatively with disparate clients, and work with great flexibility create enormous value for their employer and are highly compensated. Both men and women are compensated the same for this type of work.

What Goldin is skirting is that men and women elect to undertake this work in dramatically different proportions. Typically about 70% male and 30% female.

It is not job characteristics which have a big impact but personal choices. That is the hard rock Goldin is trying to sail around.

Goldin's conclusion is:

In sum, the gap is mainly the upshot of two separate but related forces: workplaces that pay more per hour to those who work longer and more uncertain hours, and households in which women have assumed disproportionately large responsibilities.

This a markedly careful phrasing of what the data can support.

The balder explication would be:

Different jobs have different burdens and trade-offs which affect the level of productivity which can be achieved (and therefore compensation).

Some extremely demanding jobs translate into very high levels of productivity and are therefore very highly compensated.

Women and men have the same access to all those jobs but make different decisions in aggregate - men more often choosing the harder jobs, gaining compensation but losing flexibility, while women more often choose flexibility over compensation.

Women make the choice of flexibility in order to accommodate the familial roles and obligations they have undertaken in coordination with their partners.

The net is that Goldin is not finding any evidence of systemic wage discrimination. She does find that some jobs are more demanding and that men and women have different decision considerations from one another and from what Goldin would prefer.

Absent discrimination and absent any clear obstacles to entry, it would appear that there is no real policy issue to be addressed.

There is only an issue to be addressed if you ideologically a priori want men and women to make the same decisions as one another. Goldin wants corporations to reengineer jobs so that they are not dependent on work effort, flexibility, work duration and work intensity. She also wants women to reduce their focus on family and be more committed to their jobs.

Reorganizing the workplace — a complicated undertaking — would help diminish the gap. It would also be narrowed if the burdens of family life were shouldered more equitably.

This doesn't just sound totalitarian but it smacks of the bubble elite centrism which infuriates more liberty-oriented people. It is not the role of self-anointed academics to reengineer the marketplace or to decide how people balance all their competing goals between family and income. Yet that is what she gets around to recommending. It almost feels like "Let us decide for you because we think it is important to have this stale 1960's-era Soviet concept of equality forced on you."

Or perhaps I am being a little harsh.