A recent article by the ABC indicates that females may soon be on wage parity with their male counterparts,
Statistician Brian Pink says higher education levels among women could soon see them earning as much as their male counterparts.
"As we see the proportion of the female population being more highly educated, then it follows that one would expect that they will progressively appear in the statistical profiles as having income that's commensurate with a higher education," he said.
Lets first ignore the fact that it was a statistician making the claim; neither of us are qualified to speculate as to the reasons behind the gender gap, but Walter Block has a few ideas as to why this gap may exist and, in fact, never close:
As for the pay gap, I made the case that it was due, instead, to the asymmetric effects of marriage. This institution enhances male earnings and reduces those of females. Why? Because wives do the lion’s share of cooking, cleaning, shopping, child care. (A survey I took of my Loyola Maryland audience overwhelming supported this contention.) This is an example of the basic economic axiom of opportunity, or alternative costs. When anyone does anything, he is to that extent unable to do something else. Since I was in Baltimore, I illustrated this by use of Michael Phelps, world champion swimmer. I opined that he probably wasn’t a world-class cellist, because to achieve that goal in addition to having a lot of talent, you have to spend many hours each day practicing, and he was busy with other (watery) pursuits. Well, women are also busy with activities other than supplying labor to the market, hence their lower productivity in this sector, compared to what it would be if they were never married.
I gave several bits of evidence, or proof, or illustrations, of this. For one thing, when you compare not all men and all women, but only the never-marrieds, the wage gap between males and females virtually disappears. When you take only young people, aged 18–24, again the male-female wage gap cannot be found, since most of them have never been married. And this entirely reasonable. After all, while women’s productivity on average may well have been lower than men’s in past centuries, when physical strength was important in this regard, in the present century this is no longer true. For another thing, if (all) women really had the same productivity as men, nowadays (they don’t, due to marriage), then there would be additional profits available to any firm that specialized in hiring females. Surely this is a situation that could not long endure.
Now consider the glass ceiling, where Austro libertarians have an even more radical explanation. While men and women, on average, have equal productivity in the market (apart from the influences of marriage), their variance is not at all the same. Rather, men are God’s, or nature’s, "crap shoot": they are all over the lot, ability-wise. In comparison, women are God’s, or nature’s, insurance policy: they are for the most part bunched toward the middle of the IQ, or productivity, frequency distribution. Their standard deviation is very low. I gave examples of this. Take, first, the left-hand part of this bell curve. Men vastly outnumber women in prisons, as homeless street people, in mental institutions, and cemeteries at early ages (that is, men die way before women, not only from natural causes, but also as murder victims). At the other end of the spectrum, there are also precious few women to be found. There are very few female chess grand masters, Nobel Prize winners in hard sciences or economics, top physicists, chemists, mathematicians. Larry Summers was booted out of his Harvard presidency for speculating that part of the explanation for this state of affairs was biological in origin. I went him one better by claiming that this was an important part of the cause, and made the socio-biological case that low female variance allowed our species to out-compete others. E.g., if females were now found in disproportionately high numbers in prisons, on the street, in mental institutions, etc., they would have been incapable, a million years ago, of raising babies. Such a species would have lost out to our own, where very few women are not able to raise the next generation.
Interesting huh?
