>At 05:27 PM 6/5/2002 -0400, Doug wrote:
>
>>Right. Women choose to have babies, and men choose to let them take
>>care of them. Is it too identarian to wonder about this notion of
>>"choice"?
>
>
>This is one of the possible reasons of the wage gap I cited. Its
>purpose was to demonstrate that wage gap does not have to be a
>result of discrimination by employer. It can result from a wide of
>factors, such as societal expectations and gender roles which shape
>individual job choices (cf. Reskin & Roos, _Job cues, Gender cues_).
>The point is to account for that complexity instead of using
>out-of-context information to promote an intellectual commodity or
>an ideology. The "human capital" approach is ideology-driven crap,
>but so is much of the "discrimination" claims.
Yup. I've read quite a few discrim studies, and I know that you have to take all kinds of factors into account - job titles, education, experience, industry, etc. etc. You're right that just using raw numbers like that is misleading. But accounting for differences in education, experience, job titles, etc. assumes away a lot of the "pre-market" discrim that tracks people into occupations by gender (e.g., voc ed classes that encourage men to be plumbers and women beauticians), or the lack of child care options that hit women much harder than men, etc. That's discrim too, but of a harder to measure sort.
Doug