Julio wrote:
> Doug wrote:
>
>> Black man vs. white woman Hillary Clinton contends with gender
>> stereotypes, and Barack Obama with racial ones. Which bias runs
>> deeper in the American psyche? The answer does not bode well for
>> Clinton.
>
> Complicated issue. Income differences are only *one* element in these
> asymmetries. And there are many possible ways to slice and dice the
> data. The picture that emerges will depend somewhat on how you slice
> it and dice it. I've looked at these things a lot. And this piece of
> information seems robust to me and it may be useful in pondering these
> issues.
>
> Take the latest U.S. Census data on the *family* income of White vs.
> Black individuals (adults). The White-Black ratio is 1.6 to 1. Now
> take the *family* income of men vs. women (adults). The male-female
> ratio is 1.1 to 1. These are national averages (geometric or log
> averages).
>
> Now let me warn against a simplistic reading of this. For the most
> part, Whites and Blacks don't share the same *family*. (Mixed
> families are still rare in the U.S.) But women and men do. Most
> families have females and males in them. How is power distributed
> inside a family between males and females?
>
> The *individual* income of males and females may be some sort of a
> proxy for the relative power that men and women have in their
> families. The *individual* income ratio between males and females is
> 1.8 to 1: for every $1.8 a man makes, a woman makes $1.
>
> But I don't know how good this is as a proxy of the relative power of
> men and women in the family. With the Census data one cannot know how
> income -- and other rights and obligations -- are distributed within
> the family. That's really tricky. (Let alone the issue of single
> parent families.)
>
> Even though as a guy (and Mexican) my perception must be distorted by
> my vested interest, I can admit that my wife takes a bigger
> responsibility (as if by default) in planning and executing a host of
> tedious domestic chores, child care, etc. -- and we both have
> full-time jobs. I'm talking about a low-stress "equilibrium" between
> us. I can always slack off, but then the stress will increase
> accordingly. Anyway, the division of labor (and fun) in the family is
> crucial in understanding the social-power dynamics between men and
> women.
>
> Still, it seems to me that altogether, on average, intra-family
> politics doesn't amplify but actually reduces the power asymmetry that
> individual income reflects. Why? It's not only that women have
> longer lives and claim (in all sorts of surveys) to be happier than
> men with what they do. What tips me is that, the richer and more
> educated women and men are in a given family, the higher the
> *relative* (and, of course, absolute) gap between their individual
> incomes.
>
> A narrative of this would be: Imagine a young couple with above
> college education making rather similar annual incomes. Once one
> member (typically the man) makes over $100K (in his mid 30s at this
> point), the other member (the woman, in her early 30s) will go part
> time, unemployed, or drop out of the labor market. But isn't it true
> that this coincides with couples having their first or second child?
> Well, actually, if you control for presence of children, you still get
> a substantial increase in the gap about these same age points. Its
> total family income that makes the difference. Children just make it
> slightly greater.
>
> It still puzzles me, but without some coercive mechanism, it's not
> clear to me why more educated women would accept relationships with
> men that would put them at a much greater *relative* disadvantage
> compared to poorer women in relation to poorer men. If highly
> educated women are willing to give up such high individual incomes for
> more family work/life/leisure, then what they get out of this tradeoff
> cannot be that terribly bad. The dilemmas may be agonizing to them in
> some sense, but it's not like they are cornered to make them. That's
> why, to me, the income gap between men and women in families appears
> like a "superior" good: a luxury.
>
> FWIW.
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