The Los Angeles Times is committed to the righteous path of social justice. From “Hillary Clinton would make a sober, smart and pragmatic president. Donald Trump would be a catastrophe.” (by the full Editorial Board):
The election of Hillary Clinton as the first female president of the United States would surely be as exhilarating as it is long overdue, a watershed moment in American history after centuries of discrimination against women.
From April 14, 2018, “A welcome assault on the gender wage gap” (by the full Editorial Board):
Year after year, study after study has come to the same depressing conclusion: Women are paid less than men in most every occupation, from accounting to teaching to sales to nursing. In the 55 years since the federal Equal Pay Act was passed, the gap has shrunk a bit, but it’s still far too wide. … it is unfair and dispiriting … prehistoric attitudes about the value of women’s work persist and are reflected in their collective pay.
These gender equity warriors are now leaving the newsroom for the courtroom, but not on the side that you might expect… “LA Times Union Preparing Class-Action Lawsuit Over ‘Illegal Pay Disparities’: Last week, an analysis of the newsroom’s pay structure revealed wide discrepancies along racial and gender lines.” (Huffington Post)
Readers: Explain this apparent paradox!
Wasn’t Trump’s win actually a victory against the gender pay gap? Trump went from making billionaire money to $400k/yr and Hillary is free to collect those million dollar speaking and consultancy fees.
Using the propaganda term “Social Justice Warrior” is a silly attempt to prejudge the argument and makes you look biased and ridiculous.
No paradox. The paper’s editorial position isn’t consistent with the paper’s business practices. Not good, and should be fixed. I have no idea what the relationship is between the editorial board and the newspaper’s HR department is.
But sure, I’ll concede that they probably don’t have the guts to directly criticize the newspaper’s business functions in an editorial.
superMike — ha ha. But Trump is still making whatever he used to be making (you think his active management actually improved his business results?) PLUS he is getting all that nice corrupt business at his hotels and resorts.
Never let personal preferences interfere with who you’re told to vote for.
Stavros, how come there is no paradox when ‘they probably don’t have the guts to directly criticize the newspaper’s business functions in an editorial’?
They seem to have the guts to cast aspersion in other directions, so why such coyness? is it unreasonable to expect people to take a stand for the values they would like others to follow? is it unreasonable to mock them when they fail to do so? if not, why not?
Federico, it is not a paradox. It seems like a bad idea to take an editorial position on a dispute between you and your co-workers and your employer, especially since (a) the analysis in question was prepared by one of the parties to the suit; (b) the dispute is still being negotiated. Perhaps cowardice, but also prudence.
a graph of The Los Angeles Times’ full-time equivalent employment over time would illustrate the big story. I am guessing it plateaued around 1996. Getting a graph over the lifetime of the newspaper, and then normalizing it for population size (Greater Los Angeles area), now that would be sweet.
If you then tweezed in female labor force participation rates (over time), I would be interested in what the curve looks like.
I am feeling lazy. Where is my AI to pull reliable numbers on this? Shouldn’t someone have written it by now? What if some University applied the mechanical turk method?
Federico: The phenomenon is called ‘hypocrisy’, so “no paradox”.
Hypocrisy is one of the defining features of SJWs who preach various progressive sermons as long as their own wallet is safe. Sometimes they do so unconsciously, but more often quite consciously: “Do as I say not as I do”.
The answer is easy. If the LA Times actually believes in the “gender gap”, they are clueless about how to evaluate numbers, control for relevant factors, examine plausibility, etc. Since they’re so clueless, they’re highly vulnerable to discrimination lawsuits, irrespective of whether such discrimination has actually occurred.
Given white males at LA-times making a median of $101K, the real scandal is that half of those hacks are making 6 digits!
I have no idea what the relationship is between the editorial board and the newspaper’s HR department is.
This is the best explanation. The members of the editorial board probably don’t have much involvement in setting salaries. In other words, the editorial board are a small group of LAT employees who express their opinions on various topics. They don’t make corporate compensation decisions.
> Readers: Explain this apparent paradox!
Suppose you believe that the difference in wages between men and women is due to discrimination. Perhaps you looked at the data and eliminated other possible explanations (number of hours worked, choice of occupation, number of hours practice in the skills the job requires, the fact that women can choose to stay at home and have their husband do the paid work, etc). Perhaps you don’t try to correct for such things, because you think society owes every person/group an equal outcome.
If you are sure that discrimination against women is common, what would stop you from finding it in your own workplace? It is always possible to assume discrimination. It is impossible to disprove that someone has a bias (since “unconscious bias” is a thing). You will be lauded as a hero for standing up for women, even if you do not win a settlement. What not roll the dice in court?
Folks, what stops the editorial board to honk, from time to time, ‘we do not set the wages here, but we are aware of this and that, and we are trying to negotiate with whomever about said problem’? that would make them look like fearless heroes, look the paper more self consistent (and maybe increase its sales?).
Because of the infinite wisdom of the editorial board I presume they would have noticed the issue a long time ago (if for no other reason that their amazing grace allowed employees to go and complain to them without fear of repercussions, right), thus giving them time to harp about the issue well before the dispute arose formally and with lawyers involved.
Am I being too naive and optimistic here?
Didn’t the Times, or its previous owner, the Chicago Tribune, or “TRONC,” buy out or push out a bunch of old white guys (and I think there are some ongoing lawsuits there) and then hire a bunch of green, wet-behind-the-ears millennials of color and of gender? Do they expect old white guy pay right off the bat? You’ve got to run up a few years of experience first. And even then, the six figure reporting and columnist jobs are not coming back.
Here’s another paradox from the FAQ …
Q: My manager has asked me to write a memo describing my accomplishments and asking for a raise. How should I proceed?
A: … we think it’s highly problematic for managers to frame illegal pay discrimination — a systemic problem in our newsroom and in society — in terms of merit. You should never have to describe your achievements and qualifications in order to make the same as men or white people who do similar work as you …
—
Q: Does the union think we should wipe out merit-based pay?
A: Not at all. Pay equity and merit-based compensation are two separate issues. To be clear, the union is never opposed to management giving employees better compensation on the basis of merit.
I understand the intention here. They don’t want what they perceive as illegal discrimination to be swept aside as merit-based, but I literally don’t understand how such a system allows for merit raises. “Sorry, you’re doing excellent work, but statistically, people of your race/gender already make too much …”
” I literally don’t understand how such a system allows for merit raises.” It doesn’t, not for white men who are already making “too much”. OTOH, there is nothing wrong with giving merit raises to women and minorities. They are so full of merit that their merits don’t even have to be described. From the point of view of the advocates, this is not a bug but a feature.
All of affirmative action is based on the fallacy of “positive discrimination”. In any zero sum game (and ultimately the pool of $ available for paying employees is limited – if nothing else it cannot exceed 100% of revenues) if I “positively” discriminate in favor of someone, there is someone else that I am discriminating against (which we all know is a bad thing). But AA is a magical sleight of hand where we only shine the spotlight on the person who is the beneficiary of the game and pretend that the victims don’t exist (at least for the rubes). The magician full well knows what is going on, but they don’t care as long as they can sell the trick to the rubes.
Reminds me of fearless girl, that little tin girl with her hands on her hips blocking that angry bull from thundering up Broadway. Fearless girl was financed by State Street Bank which used it as an opportunity to make some statements about how women should be paid more or something like that. Turned out that the highest paid woman at State Street Bank was the woman dishing out green beans in the State Street cafeteria & she was making 18.50 p/hr. + benefits. Or something like that. But nonetheless the tourists line up in front of fearless girl to take selfiesand that little tin girl is thought to be a symbol of something or other.
Jack:
State Street was found to be paying women employees less than equally qualified men — true (http://fortune.com/2017/10/05/fearless-girl-state-street-pay-discrimination/)
“the highest paid woman at State Street Bank was the woman dishing out green beans” — obviously nonsense, how can you fall for such BS?
Stavros: If State Street was able to get equally qualified and productive women for less money than it cost to employ men, why did they waste shareholder money by hiring any men at all? State Street is supposed to be expert when it comes to managing money, right? Why would they be overpaying thousands of employees (those who identified as “men”)?
Classic do as I say not as I do. A timeless phenomenon.
philg: Homo economicus is the ideal particle of economics, useful for theorizing, less useful for explaining reality. It’s a fool’s errand to try to explain all of a corporation’s decisions by assuming perfect economic rationality and working backward. Most of 20th century economics was about understanding how economic actors do *not* optimize (cf. for example Simon’s satisficing) and how irrational we all our (behavioral economics — (wasn’t all economics supposed to behavioral?)).
By the way, reality check: State Street’s biggest business is actually not in managing money at all, but providing “custodial services” for mutual funds and others.
Stavros: I think you’re right. http://newsroom.statestreet.com/press-release/corporate/state-street-reports-fourth-quarter-2017-gaap-basis-eps-089-roe-69-and-reven shows “servicing fees” of $1.4 billion (in just one quarter!) and “management fees” of $418 million.
So if all that they do to offer is a simple “keep track of which fund owns what security” that’s an even better argument for not wasting money by overpaying so-called “men”. Why does a person need to have a particular gender ID to record that Fund A now owns 1 million shares of Facebook (what could be more virtuous than that, since Facebook executives, such as Sheryl Sandberg, are able to lecture the rabble on proper thinking?).
Hpw do we know if Hillary Clinton is actually a woman?
When exactly did she self-identify as such?
Could she be just a sexist, vile white male trying to cement his privilege?
Stavros: “It’s a fool’s errand to try to explain all of a corporation’s decisions by assuming perfect economic rationality and working backward.”
It’s a rather weaselly answer to a simple question.
Cost of labor saving is as basic and simple measure as one could imagine, there is no need to appeal to “perfect economic rationality”, common sense would suffice plenty. State Street for example outsources/replaces with cheap H1 labor its IT peons. The replacement is presumably as qualified as the previously employed locals. By the same token, they could replace costly investment male bankers with less costly female equivalents. Why overpay ? Especially if State Street could score some brownie points for being progressive in addition to future windfall profits: a win-win.
Ivan: “Weaselly”, really?
philg:
I provide references to research showing what I think we all know from personal experience, that no large organization actually operates in a supposedly rational profit-maximizing way; and all you have is invisible-hand hand-waving?
Are either of you aware of the history of hiring women for symphony orchestras, for example? Candidates audition blind (behind a curtain), so in theory the musician’s sex and appearance don’t matter. Yet more men than women are chosen. Does that prove that the men are better musicians? Well, it turns out that if you carpet the audition area so the evaluators can’t hear the difference between women’s shoes (heels) and men’s, the difference goes away.
Stavros: I don’t speak for Ivan, but I see why he would say “Weaselly”.
We all understand that real humans are not entirely rational. But real humans are also not completely irrational. When it comes to making simple decisions that make a person large amounts of money for almost no effort, most people make the rational choice.
Suppose the average manager at a large company can cut employee costs by 23% by hiring women. Their bonus depends on what they get done with the underlings they have, and their salary budget is fixed. Hiring only women means the same budget for salary gets significantly more work done. I have known some irrational managers. I don’t think any of them were too dumb to understand the rational choice in this case.
I know Herb Simon showed that people are irrational on math problems involving birds flying between trains, lily pads growing on ponds, estimating the odds a person has a particular job, etc. Does it follow that every manager at a large company is too stupid to hire the people who will do the same work for less money? Making the rational choice gets them a seven figure bonus, and you think they can’t spend five minutes thinking it through? That is an extraordinary claim. Dismissing the need for evidence on the grounds that people are irrational in completely different cases is “Weaselly”.
Stavros: I did a Google search for the symphony orchestra blind audition situation you mentioned. http://www.upworthy.com/this-orchestras-blind-audition-proves-bias-sneaks-in-when-you-least-expect-it says that it was in 1952, 66 years ago. Even if we accept that attitudes in 2018 are the same as in 1952, I’m not sure of the relevance. Union agreements force orchestras to pay people of all gender IDs the same. So it wouldn’t make economic sense to try to hire women at the 23 percent discount that Hillary Clinton and the NYT say applies.
philg:
Yes, the original study was done in 1952, but the practice of hiding shoe noise continued at least until 2000. Is it still necessary? I don’t know, but it seems plausible.
(https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/aer.90.4.715)
The relevance is simply that sex bias continues to exist.
Corindel:
The examples you give sound more like Kahneman and Twersky than Herb Simon. Both relevant, but I think you need to reread Simon on satisficing.
all:
Have you actually worked in large organizations? You have some strange ideas about how salaries are set and how managers are compensated. Typically, salaries are set by HR, not by the individual manager, for one thing, and headcounts are managed separately from payroll (otherwise, why not fire all the most senior employees who have accumulated raises over the years, which is of course illegal but probably still happens in more subtle ways). Divergence in compensation doesn’t necessarily happen by offering different amounts at hiring time (although that does happen, and basing offers on salary history is a typical way that biases are perpetuated). Often it happens in evaluating staff for raises and promotions, which is really not an objective process. One discrepancy Google discovered in its own practices was that women (for whatever reason) tend to self-nominate themselves for promotions less frequently than men, and so end up getting fewer promotions. From your narrow money optimization perspective, maybe that is a good thing, but it means that talented women are eventually unhappy with better-qualified men getting the promotions and raises.
Even if a manager intended to be perfectly money-optimizing and somehow didn’t have irrational preferences to his/her own sex, ethnic background, regional background, etc. (I think we all do), I don’t know how he or she would evaluate people objectively. Perhaps employee X only processes 3 files per hour, but helps train new employees. Perhaps employee Y actively seeks out difficult cases because of his/her expertise. Perhaps employee Z drags down others’ efficiency because of his/her attitude. etc. etc. Managers presumably try to take all that into account, but ….
Though I am very much in favor of gender equality, I don’t claim any special expertise in it, yet the above sorts of things seem to be well understood in corporate circles. What I wonder is how others on this thread are unaware of all this.
This will be my last post on the subject, so others can have fun picking apart my arguments.