Yet more Roberts news

More news regarding the assorted documents released from the National Archives the other day. This one is going to get alot of press and knowledgeable Republicans are going to scream bloody murder about the leftist nature of that press. The problem is that without having a good grasp of economics it's very tough to understand the situation fully.

We often hear statistics about women only earning 60 cents on the dollar or 80 cents on the dollar for what men earn. The problem is that those are generally very raw statistics that don't take into account all of the variations important to job work. I'll go into all of those differences in a moment but let me suggest one thing. If there was this huge gender gap in pay scale then wouldn't you expect some enterprising young entrepeneur to start a company with all female workers? If women employees usually only get 60 cents on the dollar then they'll be happy to earn 70 cents on the dollar at your new company and you'll make a killing with all of these hyper efficient workers. We don't see that happening though.

The truth is that women generally get paid appropriately based on their experience and education (actually, recent studies seem to indicate that when you adjust for job "danger" women actually get paid a little better). That's the thing Dems don't like to hear. The thing Republicans don't like to hear is that there is still some discrimination in the workplace that results from passed over promotional opportunities. You can't directly address the 2nd by looking at the first, however.

Honestly, I've rarely seen blatant cases of sex discrimination. I worked at a small bank that had 7 board members (4 professional men, 2 house wives and 1 working widow) in addition to the female president. Senior management consisted of 2 women and 2 men. Women had roughly the same number of middle management positions as men and our loan officers were fairly evenly split between men and women. Some of this was attribitutable to the female president but the equity continued even after she took a big step back from the company. I'm not naive enough to think that my one small company experience extends to the entire country. I do think, however, that sexism is a dying breed that will continue to decline as younger generations enter the work force. The advent of computers has helped to level the playing field while also creating vague anonymity that helps the workplace to be gender and race neutral.