How to have a career that helps a lot of people: "Scale"

This Wall Street Journal piece is called "Advice to New Grads," though it would be more relevant to someone starting college (from 2018):

If you’re volunteering at shelters or working for most nonprofits, that’s all very nice, but it’s one-off. You’re one of the privileged few who have the education to create lasting change. It may feel good to ladle soup to the hungry, but you’re wasting valuable brain waves that could be spent ushering in a future in which no one is hungry to begin with.

There’s a word that was probably never mentioned by your professors: Scale.… It’s the concept of taking a small idea and finding ways to implement it for thousands, or millions, or even billions. Without scale, ideas are no more than hot air. Stop doing the one-off two-step. It’s time to scale up.

I hear you talking about food deserts and the need for urban eco-farms to enable food justice. You certainly have the jargon down. You can hoe and sickle and grow rutabagas to feed a few hungry folks.… A better option: Find a way to revamp food distribution to lower prices. Or reinvent how food is grown and enriched to enable healthier diets.…

Don’t spend all your time caring for the sick. Prevent disease. Gene therapy, early detection and immunotherapy can change the trajectory of disease because they scale. Don’t build temporary shelters. Figure out how to 3-D print real homes quickly and cheaply. Why tutor a few students when you can capture lessons from best-of-breed teachers and deliver them electronically to millions? That’s scale.

Scale is about doing more with less.… It’s about the productivity increases that create wealth. There is too much talk of sustainability, the fight over slices of a pie, zero-sum games. That’s the wrong framework. You need sustainability only if you stick to one-off moves.…

Everyone asks, “What do you do?” If you’re employed in a business that scales—and most “boring” jobs are—tell people you’re solving global poverty.

Against "Follow your passion"

In the first year of this blog, I posted Penelope Trunk's argument against the career advice to "Do what you love."

Now Scott Galloway, who founded a company he recently sold for over $100 million and is also a marketing professor at NYU, says something similar:

"People often come to NYU and say, 'Follow your passion' — which is total bulls---, especially because the individual telling you to follow your passion usually became magnificently wealthy selling software as a service for the scheduling of health care maintenance workers. And I refuse to believe that that was his or her passion," he says.…

“What they were passionate about was being great at something, and then the accoutrements of being great at something — the recognition from colleagues, the money, the status will make you passionate about whatever it is,” Galloway says.

Do you need to go college?

Peter Thiel writes:

Perhaps the least controversial thing that President Obama ever said was that “in the coming decades, a high school diploma is not going to be enough. Folks need a college degree.” This vision is commonplace, but it implies a bleak future where everyone must work harder just to stay in place, and it’s just not true. Nothing forces us to funnel students into a tournament that bankrupts the losers and turns the winners into conformists. But that’s what will happen until we start questioning whether college is our only option. . . .

If a college degree always means higher wages, then everyone should get a college degree: That’s the conventional wisdom encapsulated by Obama. But how can everyone win a zero-sum tournament? No single path can work for everyone, and the promise of such an easy path is a sign of a bubble.

Of course, you can’t become successful just by dropping out of college. But you can’t become successful just by going to college, either, or by following any formula. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg aren’t famous because of the similar ways in which they left school. We know their names because of what each of them did differently from everybody else.

Learning from dropouts doesn’t require closing colleges but rather questioning them carefully. Higher education holds itself out as a kind of universal church, outside of which there is no salvation. Critics are cast as heretics or schismatics endangering the flock. But our greatest danger comes from the herd instinct that drives us to competition and crowds out difference.

A Reformation is coming, and its message will be the same as it was 500 years ago: Don’t outsource your future to a big institution. You need to figure it out for yourself.

The whole article is worth reading.

When should you stay at your job?

"Stop Telling Women To Do Startups"

That's the headline of this piece, in which Penelope Trunk (who's founded three startups) argues:

If you are worried that women don’t feel capable of doing whatever they want, you can stop worrying. Women outperform men in school at such a huge rate that it’s easier to get into college as a male than a female. And women take that to the bank by earning more than men in their 20s. Women would probably continue out-earning men except that when men and women have kids, women choose to downshift way more often than men do.

Clearly, women have a choice. There are plenty of opportunities out there for women if the women would just continue working in their 30s the same way they did in their 20s. So clearly, women don’t want to. Women are choosing children over startups.

So it seems that women are making decisions for themselves just fine. It’s just that they are not the decisions that men make. This should not surprise anyone. Men and women are different. So what?

On top of that there is evidence that the members of the VC community go out of their way to attract women. Of course, this makes sense. VCs look for underserved markets. Women are likely to address different markets than men, and since there are so few women founders compared to men founders, it’s likely that women are addressing an underserved market. So VCs want to talk to women.

So VCs are definitely giving women a fair shake, it’s just that women don’t pitch. And women are definitely feeling that they can do whatever they want, it’s just that women aren’t choosing to create tech startups. . . .

I have an idea: How about giving some respect to women who grew up in the 1970s, with feminist revolution baby boomer moms, and are still brave enough to say “I don’t want to work full time. I can work full time. But I don’t want to.“

The whole thing is worth reading. Of course, the real point is much broader than just startups and venture capital.

When thinking about immigration, remember the migrants.

So says economist Tim Harford. The whole post is worth reading, but the take-away point is:

A recent survey by the economist Michael Clemens, of the Center for Global Development, points out that although the question is largely ignored, any reasonable estimate of the economic gains from freer migration would dwarf that of the gains from, say, freer trade – if we include the welfare of the migrants themselves.

This paper by Clemens argues that by placing "tightly binding constraints on emigration from poor countries," we're walking by "trillion-dollar bills on the sidewalk." He sums up the paper in this article in the Guardian, saying:

The reason migration packs such economic punch is both simple and mysterious: a worker's economic productivity depends much more on location than skill. A taxi driver in Ethiopia's capital, no matter how talented and industrious, cannot earn more than a few thousand dollars a year. The same person doing the same job in New York City can easily earn $35,000 a year. The reason people will pay him that much is that his driving adds more than $35,000 of value to the New York economy, more value than his actions can add to the Ethiopian economy.

Do we mislead college students about how to pursue their careers and lives?

David Brooks says we do, in this excellent column.

The whole thing is worth reading, but here's a sample:

[T]heir lives have been perversely structured. This year’s graduates are members of the most supervised generation in American history. Through their childhoods and teenage years, they have been monitored, tutored, coached and honed to an unprecedented degree.

Yet upon graduation they will enter a world that is unprecedentedly wide open and unstructured. Most of them will not quickly get married, buy a home and have kids, as previous generations did. Instead, they will confront amazingly diverse job markets, social landscapes and lifestyle niches. Most will spend a decade wandering from job to job and clique to clique, searching for a role.

No one would design a system of extreme supervision to prepare people for a decade of extreme openness. But this is exactly what has emerged in modern America. College students are raised in an environment that demands one set of navigational skills, and they are then cast out into a different environment requiring a different set of skills, which they have to figure out on their own.

Worst of all, they are sent off into this world with the whole baby-boomer theology ringing in their ears. If you sample some of the commencement addresses being broadcast on C-Span these days, you see that many graduates are told to: Follow your passion, chart your own course, march to the beat of your own drummer, follow your dreams and find yourself. . . .

College grads are often sent out into the world amid rapturous talk of limitless possibilities. But this talk is of no help to the central business of adulthood, finding serious things to tie yourself down to.

Similarly, Eliezer Yudkowsky (who writes the blog called Less Wrong) has observed "how completely ridiculous it is to ask high school students to decide what they want to do with the rest of their lives and give them nearly no support in doing so." What kind of "support"? For example, "spending a day apiece watching twenty different jobs and then another week at their top three choices, with salary charts and projections and probabilities of graduating that subject given their test scores."

Why do we give such bad advice to people who look up to us? It's not that hard to stop and notice what's wrong with the advice. After all, Brooks's column probably didn't take long write, and it certainly isn't difficult to read. If you feed students the "find yourself"/"limitless possibilities" message because it projects an appealing image of yourself — as someone who's encouraging and inspiring to young people — you may be helping yourself more than you're helping them.

RELATED: Don't "do what you love."

ALSO: Advice to prospective undergraduates who want to make the world a better place.

If Obama is an introvert, how big a problem is that?

John McWhorter — who just last month was still making the case that Obama has done a "good job" as president — says he's finally become "truly unhappy for the first time" with Obama as President:



Here's my own partial transcription of McWhorter's points:

I'm beginning to realize that there really are some serious problems here. . . .

This was something I didn't realize was going to matter as much as it has: he's not really a people person. . . . He hasn't developed the chummy, cordial relationships with key people in Congress that really is part of getting past gridlock. Personal relationships are not everything, but they matter. . . .

He kind of keeps to himself. He is a cerebral person. He is somewhat detached. In that, I've always kind of liked him, probably because I am that. But I'm not President, and never will be. And I think that his personal quality means that he is disliked by people like John Boehner. . . .

And, you know, that can't change. You can't fake being somebody who likes to press the flesh.

Do you also notice that you're hearing that he doesn't like being President, which is one of the saddest things I've ever heard? I mean, who would want that job? Part of the reason you like it is because you like the pressing of flesh and the having some Scotch in the office, talking to Tip O'Neill, etc. That is not him. And if you're not going to like it, that's going to "tell on you" after a while. . . . He's not personally up for the job.

Glenn Loury refers to this Politico article, which gives a list of anecdotes like this:

The president invited Senate chairmen and ranking members over for dinner in March 2009 but came in after they were seated and went back to the residence without shaking hands or visiting each table.

One well-known Democrat summed up the cost of the slights and the seeming indifference to basic political courtesies this way: “These are little things that are not going to affect public perceptions. But it affects the infrastructure of how you put together a campaign. These are the people that you need to raise money, to give money, to organize, to show up, to speak out.”

Unemployed vs. single

If you don't have a job and would prefer to have one, it seems that you're not supposed to describe yourself with the most straightforward adjective for this situation: "unemployed." It's considered better to say, "I'm between jobs."

So why is it that if you're not married or in a relationship, the socially accepted way to describe yourself is with the straightforward adjective: "single"? The situations are similar: unemployed people and single people are often very interested in finding a job or a relationship, respectively. Both types will often hope they're in a short, transitional stage. But why are you not allowed to say, "I'm between girlfriends," "I'm between boyfriends," or "I'm between relationships"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Theories.

Men and women earn more money if they're tall and attractive — especially men.

"I thought looks mattered more in women," says Dr. Helen. "Apparently, not at work."

Here's a summary of the study to which she's referring:

A London Guildhall University survey of 11,000 33-year-olds found that unattractive men earned 15 percent less than those deemed attractive, while plain women earned 11 percent less than their prettier counterparts. In their report "Beauty, Productivity and Discrimination: Lawyers', Looks and Lucre," Hamermesh and Biddle found that the probability of a male attorney attaining early partnership directly correlates with how handsome he is.

That's from this list of "7 Ways to Boost Your Pay." That title by CBS is rather misleading, since some of them aren't things you necessarily have any control over: women can't grow mustaches, and people can't change whether they're right-handed or left-handed.

One of the "7 Ways to Boost Your Pay" is "Walk taller," which is based on this research on height:

When it comes to height, every inch counts--in fact, in the workplace, each inch above average may be worth $789 more per year, according to a study in the Journal of Applied Psychology (Vol. 89, No. 3).

The findings suggest that someone who is 6 feet tall earns, on average, nearly $166,000 more during a 30-year career than someone who is 5 feet 5 inches--even when controlling for gender, age and weight.

The height-salary link was found by psychologist Timothy A. Judge, PhD, of the University of Florida, and researcher Daniel M. Cable, PhD, of the University of North Carolina. They analyzed data from four American and British longitudinal studies that followed about 8,500 participants from adolescence to adulthood and recorded personal characteristics, salaries and occupations. Judge and Cable also performed a meta-analysis of 45 previous studies on the relationship between height and workplace success.

Judge offers a possible explanation for the height bias: Tall people may have greater self-esteem and social confidence than shorter people. In turn, others may view tall people as more leader-like and authoritative.

"The process of literally 'looking down on others' may cause one to be more confident," Judge says. "Similarly, having others 'looking up to us' may instill in tall people more self-confidence."

As such, the biggest correlation between height and salary appeared in sales and management positions--careers in which customer perception has a major impact on success. If customers believe a tall salesperson is more commanding, for example, they may be more likely to follow the salesperson's wishes, Judge says.

Accordingly, height was most predictive of earnings in jobs that require social interaction, which include sales, management, service and technical careers. The height effect also mattered--though to a lesser degree--in other jobs such as crafts and blue-collar and clerical positions, researchers found.

As with attractiveness, though less surprisingly, height matters more for men than for women:

The study also found that shorter men are slightly more likely to encounter height bias in the workplace than are shorter women. . . .

Since men and women tend to differ in height, researchers controlled for gender by using the average height of 5 feet 9 inches for an American man and 5 feet 3 inches for a woman. They also controlled for age because people tend to lose 1 to 3 inches of their height during a lifetime.

Despite CBS's advice to "Walk taller," you don't have much control over how tall you are. You might be able to affect how tall you appear (which is presumably what matters in this context) by choosing your shoes. If you're under 18, you can eat a nutritious diet and not smoke. But your genes are the main factor.

When I was visiting family (including my three brothers) earlier this summer, we were talking about how height affect's one's life -- more in the context of dating/relationships than careers/money. I was asked how tall I'd like to be. I said 6'1" or 6'2". You get the main advantages of tallness without being so tall as to be potentially awkward or conspicuous, nor are you as likely to have people use "You're so tall!" or "How tall are you?" as a conversation-starter.

One of my favorite parts of the trip was when my 3 brothers and I had our heights measured (down to the quarter of an inch) by standing against my dad's kitchen wall and marking it with a pencil. As I thought (but it was nice to have it confirmed), I'm exactly 5'10". My brothers are 5'9 1/2", 5'9 1/4", and 5'3 1/2". (Respectively, we're 29, 27, 15, and 13 years old.) The 15-year-old will probably be taller than me the next time I see him. The 13-year-old kept changing the names next to the markings to make himself taller.

20/20 reported on an experiment that showed the profound effect of male height in dating:

Women will take just about any shortcoming in a man, except in the height department, according to Andrea McGinty, who founded the San Diego-based dating service It's Just Lunch.

McGinty helped ABCNEWS put together an experiment to test just how willing women are to date shorter men. We brought together several short men and asked them to stand next to taller men. We invited groups of women to look at the men and choose a date.

To see if the women would go for short guys who were successful, ABCNEWS' Lynn Sherr created extraordinary resumes for the shorter men. She told the women that the shorter men included a doctor, a best-selling author, a champion skier, a venture capitalist who'd made millions by the age of 25.

Nothing worked. The women always chose the tall men. Sherr asked whether there'd be anything she could say that would make the shortest of the men, who was 5 feet, irresistible. One of the women replied, "Maybe the only thing you could say is that the other four are murderers." Another backed her up, saying that had the taller men had a criminal record she might have been swayed to choose a shorter man. Another said she'd have considered the shorter men, if the taller men had been described as "child molesters."

This was an insightful response to an AskMetafilter question about a 5'8" woman who was dating a shorter man and had misgivings about it. The woman who asked the question said she had "a hard time feeling physically attracted to someone shorter than me, largely because of how awkward I feel standing next to them in public . . . . Mostly I feel like a big hulking lump." The response:

This really stood out to me. As a fellow tall woman (I've actually got three inches on you!), I can relate to the self-consciousness about being tall, especially because "feminine" is so often coded as petite, small, and cute. I totally get how being taller than a dude can make you feel unsexy, because there's a [lot] of cultural programming that tells us how wonderful it is to be swept up in the embrace of a big, tall man, to be safe in his arms, blah blah blah. It can feel like a strange inversion of feminine and masculine, almost, to be taller than your honey. . . .

It might also be worth thinking about the fact that you're conflating "being attracted to a dude" and "feeling attractive while I'm with a dude." Those two things aren't the same, and a big part of my personal journey of accepting and lovin' my body was rejecting the idea that sexy was something I performed (that is, I felt sexy when other people looked at me like I was sexy), rather than something I felt.

Can we close the gender gap in some sciences? Should we?

I've been critical of the New York Times in the past for its gender bias (I even have a tag for it), but I found this NYT article on the gender gap in the "math-oriented sciences" by John Tierney to be admirably balanced and well-reasoned (via).

This explanation for the gap strikes me as very plausible:

[M]en are more interested in working with things, while women are more interested in working with people. There's ample evidence — most recently in an analysis of surveys of more than 500,000 people — that boys and men, on average, are more interested in inanimate objects and "inorganic" subjects like math and physics and engineering, while girls and women are more drawn to life sciences, social sciences and other "organic" careers that involve people and seem to have direct social usefulness.

You can argue how much of this difference is due to biology and how much to society, but could you really affect it by sending scientists and engineers off to the workshops mandated by the bill now in Congress?

(The article has more info on the pending bill, if you're interested.)

In addition to those studies on male vs. female preferences, there's also evidence in the form of gender percentages in other scientific fields:

Aided by . . . continuing federal grants, researchers and advocates have developed theories that women are being held back from pursuing careers in engineering and physics by “stereotype threat,” by “implicit bias” and by a shortage of female role models and mentors. Yet none of these theorized barriers prevented girls and women from dominating the fields that most interested them.

The life sciences and social sciences were once male bastions, yet today women make up a majority of working biological scientists, and they earn nearly three-quarters of the doctorates in psychology. Now that women are earning a majority of all undergraduate and graduate degrees, it’s odd to assume they’re the gender that needs special help on campus. If more women prefer to study psychology and medicine than physics and engineering, why is that a problem for Washington to fix?

As I've said, quoting William Hazlitt, "It is essential for the triumph of reform that it shall never succeed."

I’d love to see more girls pursuing careers in science (and more women reading science columns), but I wish we’d encourage their individual aspirations instead of obsessing about group disparities. I can’t see how we’re helping them with scare stories about the awful discrimination they’ll face.

That last point is a very sensible one but also one that's sure to be ignored. There's a certain mindset that thrives on exposing discrimination, and this naturally leads to plenty of false positives. There are innumerable disparities in the world; some of them result from discrimination, but the mere existence of a disparity doesn't prove there's discrimination. But leaping to the discrimination conclusion can feel so energizingly righteous that you can be blinded to the downsides of false positives. Pointing out real discrimination is a noble thing, of course, but I think it's wrong (in the moral and factual sense of the word) to tell a group of people that they're being discriminated against to a greater extent than they are. I don't see how this is any less wrong than telling an individual that he or she is despised or being conspired against by people around him or her, unless this is actually true.

Getting back to Tierney's point about the "things"/"people" gender difference, does anyone really believe it should be off limits to posit that men and women are simply, ineradicably different in some ways? I hope not. We have to be open to this possibility in order to have an intellectually honest discussion of any kind of gender gap. A gender gap isn't necessarily a problem that needs to be solved; it could be just life.

(I've focused on only some of the article's data about, and possible explanations for, the gap, so I recommend reading the whole thing.)

Filler: articles on higher education, Jews, "public service," etc.

I might not be posting much this week. For one thing, I have an unusually heavy workload between my job and job applications. And I haven't been feeling very inspired to blog lately. I'll write something up, planning to post it, but then stop and think it's not ready to be posted for one reason or another. In fact, I've been seriously toying (isn't that an oxymoron?) with the idea of going on a longer hiatus. If and when I need to move to a new city and start a new job -- which I hope will be by the end of this summer, though it's impossible to say -- I expect that I'd go on hiatus for who-knows-how-long.

But for the sake of having something current on top, here are several articles and blog posts that are worth thinking about:

1. "Where I'm coming from." — Mickey Kaus (of particular interest to readers in California, as Kaus is on the ballot today, running for the Senate against Barbara Boxer)

2. "Higher education's bubble is about to burst." — Glenn Reynolds

3. Jews aren't particularly smarter than the human race as a whole. — Michael Chabon in the New York Times

4. Why the Jews couldn't "go home" to Europe after World War II. — Richard Cohen

5. Why going into "public service" is a better description of working in the private sector than in the public sector. — Thomas Sowell

Why are red states' workforces more dominated by public workers than blue states?

Here's a chart of state and local public employees as a percentage of the population in each state.

It's not surprising that Washington, DC, as the seat of the federal government, has a lower percentage than any of the 50 states, since we're not counting federal employees.

What is surprising is that the states with the largest such percentages are overwhelmingly Republican-leaning. The 10 states whose workforces are most dominated by state/local public employees have 8 solidly Republican states, with only 1 swing state (New Mexico) and 1 Democratic state (New York, whose percentage is still far from the highest).

The 10 states with the proportionately smallest state/local public workforces are a mixed bag of red, blue, and purple states, including the deep-blue Massachusetts.

Catherine Rampell, the author of that New York Times blog post, crunches the numbers and finds that, indeed, "the more dominated a state is by [state/local] public-sector workers, the less likely that state was to vote for the Democratic presidential candidate."

The state with the highest percentage is Wyoming. You might think this is an anomaly because it has the smallest population; therefore, basic services and infrastructure require a higher percentage of its workers. Similarly, a commenter on the Times post says:

The results are largely explained by geography and demographics. With respect to geography, for example, most state and local employees are employed in the educational sector. States that are not densely populated, such as Wyoming, tend to have a lower teacher-to-student ratio (Wyoming has an average ratio of 1 teacher to 13.1 students and the average national ratio is about 1 to 24 as reported here on Economix). Also, low population states such as Wyoming and Alaska require relatively higher ratio of employee to general population to deal with basic governmental functions (each state has the same number of governors, etc)[.] Econom[ies] of scale play[] a role here.

That wouldn't seem to gibe with Rhode Island, which has one of the smallest populations and the 6th-lowest percentage of state/local public workers. But that commenter has an explanation: the states with the highest percentages have a large area, so they need lots of government for things like highway maintenance.

Rampell observes:

[I]t is not such a big contradiction for states to be hostile to candidates perceived to be expanding the size of the federal government, and to still employ lots of workers at the state and local levels.

Maybe we should stop equating "red states" with opposition to "government." They merely tend to be against the federal government having a major role in their lives. And isn't that natural? They have relatively little need for it -- they already enjoy so much help from state and local government.

Are gender norms more of a hindrance to women's or men's careers?

Rachel Kranton and Will Wilkinson (with the latter interviewing the former about a new book she co-authored, Identity Economics: How Our Identities Shape Our Work, Wages, and Well-Being) say . . . it's complicated:

"An Open Letter to My Artistic Potential"

"Dear Potential,

"Don't act surprised. You had to know this was coming. You were my first love and I'll always treasure what we had, but I'm getting older and it's time to be honest: this isn't going anywhere. . . . "

Resigning by Twitter haiku, or senryu

A CEO resigns with quirky dignity by posting this on Twitter:

Today's my last day at Sun. I'll miss it. Seems only fitting to end on a #haiku.

Financial crisis
Stalled too many customers
CEO no more

That was all one tweet, but I've added the line breaks so it's in proper haiku form. The CEO is Jonathan Schwartz, and he resigned from Sun Microsystems.

I sent this to my dad, and he responded with (1) a correction:

These poems are senryu, not haiku. Same structure, but haiku are about nature and include a seasonal reference, while senryu are about human experience.

. . . and (2) a senryu of his own:

CEO only
of myself, if I resigned
who would take over?

Everything either causes or prevents cancer.

Read all about it in the Daily Mail. (Via Metafilter.)

Some of the carcinogens are awfully bad news for some people:

being black causes cancer

height causes cancer

left-handedness cause cancer

working causes cancer

My favorites are the things that both cause and prevent cancer. A few examples:

coffee both causes and prevents cancer

beer both causes and prevents cancer

wine both causes and prevents cancer

being female causes cancer ... but being male causes cancer

(The site is very rough -- many of its sources don't support its assertions. But the site developers admit that it's a work in progress and invite you to flag the mistaken links.)

How to succeed in life -- the Venn diagram

(By Bud Caddell, via Ben Wikler.)

Do women earn less money than men for equal work?

Economics professor Nancy Folbre says they do, in this blog post that the New York Times' website published yesterday. At the top of her post, she claims:

Tuesday is the day on which women’s wages catch up to men’s wages from the preceding week. On average, female workers have to put in more than six days of paid work to earn what men earn in five.

Among those who usually worked full time during the first quarter of 2009, women’s median weekly earnings were 79 percent those of men. That implies that the catch-up clock for them rings at about 10:38 a.m. on Tuesdays (assuming a standard five-day week and eight-hour day starting at 8 a.m.).

Some women earn less than men because they choose less lucrative occupations or take more time out from employment. But a 2003 Government Accountability Office study controlling statistically for these factors showed that women’s average pay between 1983 and 2000 flat-lined at about 80 percent of men’s over the entire period.

You'll notice that her link on the word "study" goes to this PDF of the 2003 U.S. government report. Well, if you actually click the link and read the report, you'll find that her summary is literally correct but misleading. The authors conceded that while they tried to control for confounding factors, they might have failed to adequately consider others:

[W]omen have fewer years of work experience, work fewer hours per year, are less likely to work a full-time schedule, and leave the labor force for longer periods of time than men. Other factors that account for earnings differences include industry, occupation, race, marital status, and job tenure....

Even after accounting for key factors that affect earnings, our model could not explain all of the difference in earnings between men and women. Due to inherent limitations in the survey data and in statistical analysis, we cannot determine whether this remaining difference is due to discrimination or other factors that may affect earnings. For example, some experts said that some women trade off career advancement or higher earnings for a job that offers flexibility to manage work and family responsibilities.

In conclusion, while we were able to account for much of the difference in earnings between men and women, we were not able to explain the remaining earnings difference. It is difficult to evaluate this remaining portion without a full understanding of what contributes to this difference. Specifically, an earnings difference that results from individuals’ decisions about how to manage work and family responsibilities may not necessarily indicate a problem unless these decisions are not freely made. On the other hand, an earnings difference may result from discrimination in the workplace or subtler discrimination about what types of career or job choices women can make. Nonetheless, it is difficult, and in some cases, may be impossible, to precisely measure and quantify individual decisions and possible discrimination. Because these factors are not readily measurable, interpreting any remaining earnings difference is problematic.

Now, maybe you think 80% is such a huge discrepancy that it couldn't plausibly be explained by unmeasured factors.

But that's an old report -- it only looked at data up to 2000. The GAO released a new report yesterday that looks at data from as recently as 2007 and suggests that we should be much more optimistic:

GAO used data from the Office of Personnel Management's (OPM) Central Personnel Data File (CPDF)--a database that contains salary and employment data for the majority of employees in the executive branch. GAO used these data to analyze (1) "snapshots" of the workforce as a whole at three points in time (1988, 1998, and 2007) to show changes over a 20-year period, and (2) the group, or cohort, of employees who began their federal careers in 1988 to track their pay over a 20-year period and examine the effects of breaks in service and use of unpaid leave....

The gender pay gap--the difference between men's and women's average salaries--declined significantly in the federal workforce between 1988 and 2007. Specifically, the gap declined from 28 cents on the dollar in 1988 to 19 cents in 1998 and further to 11 cents in 2007. For the 3 years we examined, all but about 7 cents of the gap can be explained by differences in measurable factors such as the occupations of men and women and, to a lesser extent, other factors such as education levels and years of federal experience. The pay gap narrowed as men and women in the federal workforce increasingly shared similar characteristics in terms of the jobs they held, their educational attainment, and their levels of experience. For example, the professional, administrative, and clerical occupations--which accounted for 68 percent of all federal jobs in 2007--have become more integrated by gender since 1988. Some or all of the remaining 7 cent gap might be explained by factors for which we lacked data or are difficult to measure, such as work experience outside the federal government. Finally, it is important to note that this analysis neither confirms nor refutes the presence of discriminatory practices.

GAO's case study analysis of workers who entered the workforce in 1988 found that the pay gap between men and women in this group grew overall from 22 to 25 cents on the dollar between 1988 and 2007. As with the overall federal workforce, differences between men and women that can affect pay explained a significant portion of the pay gap over the 20-year period. In particular, differences in occupations explained from 11 to 19 cents of the gap over this period.

Prof. Folbre acknowledges this study and blandly recites a few of its findings, but she buries it under her sweeping, sensationalistic announcement that women need to work till "10:38 a.m." on Tuesday of a second week to catch up to what men make in one week.

She also asserts that "the pay gap is narrower among federal employees than in the work force as a whole." Her theory for why this is the case: "Job descriptions are more standardized in government employment, and salaries are a matter of public record."

But is that what's really going on? Is federal government hiring more enlightened than hiring in America as a whole?

Or is it simply easier to effectively control for variables when you're looking at a narrower slice of the whole job market?

A commenter on her post ("Milton Recht") gives some specific reasons to think so:

[T]he reason that non-government job studies show a greater gender wage difference that the government sector is that the statistics on private sector wages do not include the employer cost of benefits as part of the wage. All government jobs provide about equal benefits.

Studies are published that show women on average will choose a job with better benefits over higher salary and men on average choose jobs with higher salaries over better benefits. The same studies show that men on average will choose a job without health benefits for higher salaries and women on average will not.

When private sector benefits are adjusted to include employer cost of benefits, the private sector difference shrinks to about the same seven percent difference as government wages....

[T]here are probably valid non-observed, non-discriminatory variables for the pay gap. Otherwise, any employer would be foolish not to hire the cheaper labor if it were comparable in every other aspect except gender.

I realize he's referring to "studies" without mentioning or linking to them, so I'm skeptical of his specific claims. But his theory seems more plausible to me than Prof. Folbre's conclusions, even though she links to several empirical studies.

[UPDATE: Since I wrote that, Milton Recht dropped by in the comments of this post and added details: "A January 2009 Department of Labor study (link below) that studies of gender wage discrimination do not include total compensation." He quotes from the study:

Specifically, CONSAD’s model and much of the literature, including the Bureau of Labor Statistics Highlights of Women’s Earnings, focus on wages rather than total compensation. Research indicates that women may value non-wage benefits more than men do, and as a result prefer to take a greater portion of their compensation in the form of health insurance and other fringe benefits.]

More citations, links, and figures don't necessarily add up to a better analysis. For instance, Prof. Folbre's link to support her claim that women overall catch up on Tuesday at 10:38 a.m. doesn't seem to make any attempt to control for confounding factors. The report she links to simply says:

Women who usually worked full time had median earnings of $649 per week, or 78.9 percent of the $823 median for men.

That's essentially meaningless if we don't know a lot more details about what kinds of jobs they had, what their credentials were, and how much they worked. (Perhaps the study secretly controlled for these factors, but if so, it's not apparent from the link.) Of course, Prof. Folbre emphasizes these findings over the GAO reports.

It's nice to link to multiple studies and invoke the principle of controlling for variables. But if you ultimately cherry-pick the gloomiest-sounding figures you can find, and -- whoops! -- by the way, forget about those pesky variables, context, and alternate explanations based on factors other than sexism ... then you've given up any pretense to empirical validity.


UPDATE: Comments over here.

Bertrand Russell's thoughts on professionals, boredom, and breaking convention

I've blogged Bertrand Russell's book The Conquest of Happiness (1930) twice before:

1. Two kinds of careers.

2. The strawberry theory of good taste.

Here's some more:

3. Judging professionals — "[N]o outsider can tell whether a doctor really knows much medicine, or whether a lawyer really knows much law, and it is therefore easier to judge of [sic] their merit by the income to be inferred from their standard of life." (43-44)

4. Modern boredom — "[T]he machine age has enormously diminished the sum of boredom in the world. . . . We are less bored than our ancestors were, but we are more afraid of boredom. We have come to know, or rather to believe, that boredom is not part of the natural lot of man, but can be avoided by a sufficiently vigorous pursuit of excitement." (49-50)

5. Where to break convention — "Conventional people are roused to fury by departures from convention, largely because they regard such departures as a criticism of themselves. They will pardon much unconventionality in a man who has enough jollity and friendliness to make it clear . . . that he is not engaged in criticizing them. This method of escaping censure is, however, impossible to many of those whose tastes or opinions cause them to be out of sympathy with the herd. Their lack of sympathy makes them uncomfortable and causes them to have a pugnacious attitude, even if outwardly they conform or manage to avoid any sharp issue. People who are not in harmony with the conventions of their own set tend therefore to be prickly and uncomfortable and lacking in expansive good humor. These same people transported into another set, where their outlook is not thought strange, will seem to change their character entirely. From being serious, shy and retiring they may become gay and self-confident; from being angular they may become smooth and easy; from being self-centered they may become sociable and extrovert [sic]." (104-05)

(Photo by Fred Armitage.)