9 Comments

I’m very late, but is it perhaps future risk of pregnancy?

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Nice format! My initial hunch is: might the man just get a - raise - more often, for instance because he already worked at that same company for a longer time?

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Ha, in the initial version of this post I mentioned they had the same history, but then I re-wrote it for clarity and forget to mention that. I'll add this constraint back in the prompt (the "official" solution is another phenomenon)

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So for the lazy yet curious, which is it? :)

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In ROT13: Gurer'f n genqrbss orgjrra fnynel naq pbzzhgr gvzr, nf ybatre pbzzhgrf tvir npprff gb zber erzbgr jbexcynprf. Zra graq gb pbzzhgr sbe ybatre guna jbzra, fb gurl pna trg uvture fnynevrf rira vs gur npghny pbagrag bs gur wbo vf gur fnzr.

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This explanation doesn’t make sense to me. If [trait] didn’t cause a difference in performance, a leftward shift in labor supply for men/rightward shift in labor supply for women should lead to lowered equilibrium quantity for men/increased equilibrium quantity for women but still equal labor price due to the labor being a perfect substitute for one another.

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I see two ways to look at it: either they're doing the same job in different places (e.g. one is more remote or in a less pleasant neighbourhood, and then this changes the salaries a bit even if the nature of the job and productivity is identical. Or they're doing the same job in the same company, but then, since men have more options available to them at the time they're looking for a job, men can take advantage of mispricings in the job market. Here's a paper about it, if I remember correctly they are talking about the first situation: https://doi.org/10.1093/qje/qjaa033

Happy to know what you think!

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I understand now. Both men and women can be Pareto optimal with regards to costs and benefits in this case but only looking at one variable makes it seem like there is a gap. I wonder to what extent commute preferences are downstream of stuff like societal obligations in parenting or similar.

A somewhat consistent thing I seem to see is that the modern wage gap is mostly driven by systemic things like child rearing responsibilities rather than personal animus. I’m pretty sure this is the kind of thing the term systemic discrimination was coined to refer to.

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Thx! Never would have guessed that in a million years (since the factor you indicate would never be considered a factor for ‘salary’ in my country, rather a separate stipend/imbursement on top of ‘salary’ or something).

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