Letters to the Editor
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Field disparity
Hey, no one would be more thrilled than me about closing the wage gap between the hard sciences/tech fields and humanities. But I'm afraid the reason for it is simply that people buy more computers, software, and medical services than books on Lacan, though I wish it weren't so.
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Few new grads, male or female, are getting quite what they want right now
Speaking as a recruiter who has a good amount of contact with recent college grads, anyone graduating in May 2008 will have a hard time living up to their hopes. They'll be lucky to get jobs at all, in most cities/industries. This is especially true of the folks graduating from places like NYU's Stern School of Business. There you have a student body that's made up of fewer double-X chromosomes than XYs, and anyone looking to go into the financial markets for their first job right now... well... whether they're male OR female, I wish them luck making anything over $40K, where two or three years ago they might have started at $60K. (That's if they find a job at all, and don't get laid off in the first two months...)
Just a depressing thought from me to you.
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Why some fields make more money than others
Field that obviously lead to making or saving money in the short term make more money. If a screwup might cost you $100,000, you don't might spending some extra coin to ensure it doesn't happen.
People who work with money make more money, as the monetary value of they deliver is often quite obvious.
But helping people or working with children is not obviously tied to monetary value. Low skill jobs, or those for which there is a huge surplus of people with those skill? Easily replaced means low paid.
Academics tend not to make a lot of money, including scientists, despite their skill and scarcity, as there is product or money on the line. But working for a for-profit company to invent something that makes money? Well, those scientists make far more money.
Produce something that will be sold and make your employers a lot of money, you are more likely to be paid well, especially if you can uniquely contribute to its production or it is hard to find someone to replace you.
It is not simply matter of sexism. If you want to make money, the best way to do that is to help others make money in a way that you can really get credit for. However important your work might be, if it is not making someone money, you are not likely to make much money yourself.
(Except, of course, for saving lives. Save right people's lives and you can make lots of money, too.)
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Maybe it's self fulfilling?
The point is, women said they EXPECTED to earn less. No that they did or would. It's a bit like taking up heavy smoking once you discover you have Lou Gehrig's Disease.
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Pink collar ghetto is just mind state!
Obvious, people with low salary expectation never read The Secret where can learn about power of write check for self for $3 million.
Serious, think Svutlana that low expectations lead to behavior that results in low reality and also, thankfully, low disappointment.
Write Svutlana check for Svutlana for $3 million and think and think and think about and place check under pillow, but still wait for money arrival. Extreme disappoint me this.
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Wasted efforts
Maybe the authors of the study should have spent their time looking for solutions rather than confirming whats already known.
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What they EXPECT to earn and what they ACTUALLY earn are 2 very different things
Every year lots of students face a harsh dose of reality when they realize employers don't really want to pay unexperienced nobodies a huge wad of cash. In the past, kids sucked it up and took what they could find. Nowadays, they live with mom and dad till they're 30, perfectly happy to work at Starbucks 20 hours a week, while kids from Asia and the Middle East take the real jobs.
I continue to be amazed at the whole 77 cents on the dollar statistic though. It doesn't seem to have changed at all in the last 20 years, and I sometimes question the math and techniques behind it.
I find it hard to believe that the vast majority of people running businesses PURPOSELY pay women less, just because they think they can get away with it. Obviously there are plenty of men that WOULD do that, but I can't believe that THAT many would still do so. I very well could be wrong though...
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re: retrograde causal analysis
...perhaps we should be wondering why the fields college-educated women dominate are so devalued in the first place.
Maybe the reason is that such fields were always devalued (was their ever a golden age for English literature majors?)or that by concentrating their chosen majors in certain areas, women collectively depress their own income earning potential. We can do an easy thought experiment. If there weren't so many wouldbe mommies wanting to become teachers so they can have vacation time with their children, do we not think that wages might rise as the labor pool were thinned out?
But this all is all a tediously academic smokescreen. Women as a cohort want to demand lifetime wage parity while simultaneously selecting mates who earn more than they. In fact, the more that women earn, (at least in a survey of Chinese, urban women)the more significantly greater they expect the earning power of a male partner. Wages for men and women will equalize naturally as women select mates for other than their greater income earning potential. And the last time I checked the basis of evolutionary biology, that is not about to happen any time soon.
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Male with a liberal arts degree here
Yes, my classes were predominantly female (not a complaint :) ).
I felt like I got a really broad education that challenged my preconceived notions and taught me to look at things from as many angles as possible. I am definitely a better person for having studied what I did, no matter how "worthless" my degree may be.
That said, I earned minimum wage at a hardware store's loading dock for over a year after I graduated. I eventually moved on to a soul-crushing sales job. Long story short, through the course of my work a few people noticed that I could write OK, compliments of my liberal arts education. Now I'm getting paid to blog from home on a topic I feel very strongly about (environmental issues). While far from being rich, I do make enough to classify as "middle-class" for whatever that's worth.
So yeah, liberal arts students may not be as marketable right out of school as the engineering kids, but that's not to say we can't make a good living from what we learned in school if we stick to our guns. It just may take a few years of paying the dues (i.e. a few years of utter misery until you find your break).
Take heart, fellow liberal arts grads! What we learned is of value, it just takes a little imagination (something I believe we have in spades)!
/History
//Linguistics
///DUTCH! (not kidding. haha).