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Forbes claims that gender and age discrimination compound more for women as they age, to the point where it can be difficult for older women to get jobs. The gender gap is pretty well-known, but I have heard less about the gender gap as it relates to age. So I have these questions:

  1. Is the pay gap between women and men explained better by age discrimination compounded with gender discrimination than by other factors? (ie, older women being out of the workplace longer, or having less experience)
  2. Aside from a pay gap, is their an "employment gap" where older women are less likely to get jobs than their male or younger colleges?
TheEnigmaMachine
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  • it's not a gender gap, but an age gap that makes it harder for older people to get jobs. In IT for example, if you're >35 you're considered old and will find it very hard to get employment, >45 and it may well be impossible (even >25 it gets progressively harder). – jwenting Sep 16 '11 at 07:22
  • And of course there's no pay gap either. Hourly rates for women are identical if not higher than those for men doing the same work. If women are more prone to working part time (thus, fewer hours) than men and end up having a lower monthly pay as a result, that's not because of discrimination but because of choices they made themselves. – jwenting Sep 16 '11 at 07:24
  • @jwe funnily enough I'm 40 and not only I have no problem getting an IT/coding job, but also I am paid *signifincanly more* than younger coders. – Sklivvz Sep 16 '11 at 08:54
  • might be regional, Sklivvz... Here you're going to find it hard to get employment >35 because you "don't fit in our young and dynamic team", unless maybe the people who're interviewing you have a few grey hairs themselves. – jwenting Sep 16 '11 at 11:54
  • @Sklivvz - it varies. In my company it's hard to be an older worker simply because the baseline expectation is to be working 13-18 hour days. CONSTANTLY. That doesn't mesh with having family and children (unless you're a senior manager and can afford hired help at home and apartment in the middle of Manghattan close to work), and definitely starts being hard to do once you're in mid-30s as far as sleep/rest amounts needed. It's not so much discrimination as younger workers having better advantages given the requirements. – user5341 Sep 16 '11 at 14:22

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Much of the pay gap is explained by motherhood, in that working mothers earn much less on average than working fathers, and the average gap is less between childless working men and women. Because people are more likely to be parents as they get older, this has an effect on the relationship between pay, gender and age. You can see some UK numbers on page 8 here: women's median pay is 95% of men's for 22-29 year olds but 76% for 50-59 year olds. A harder question is how much of this involves a choice (with many mothers often choosing more flexible work which happens to be lower paid).

In the UK, women are less likely to work than men at each age group, but unemployment rates (i.e. those looking for work who cannot find it) are similar at each age group up to about 50. After 50, women are dramatically less likely to be looking for work than men of the same age. Part of this may be due to lower formal retirement ages, though there may also be women who want to stop work at the same time as their (on average) older husbands. Some UK numbers can be found on tab 2(2) here showing unemployment rates of 8.2% for men and 7.3% for 25-34 year olds, compared with 5.8% for men and 3.4% for women for 50-65 year olds. Not working looks likely to be voluntary for many older women.

Henry
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  • you forgot to mention that the "studies" finding pay discrimination for women don't take the actual work into account. They compare monthly or yearly income of women in average to that of men, without considering that a higher percentage of low pay jobs (secretaries, nurses, teachers) are filled by women as compared to men, by choice of the women (this goes back to education where men are more represented in courses leading to eventually higher paying jobs). – jwenting Sep 16 '11 at 07:26
  • @jwenting: It is extremely complicated. There is something to what you say where women are more likely to work in the lower paying public sector. On the other hand, women are less likely than men to do manual work, which is on average lower paid. To make things more complicated still, the sector with the biggest internal gender pay gap, finance, is also the highest paying sector for women, so if more women moved into finance then discrimination would increase but the overall pay gap would fall. – Henry Sep 16 '11 at 13:09
  • @Henry - "discrimination would increase" - bullshit. Finance types can't afford to NOT pay a qualified person less, because (1) good talent is pretty scarce - I've actually BEEN part of the hiring process so I know ; and (2) They have a LOT more to loose from discrimination suits. Unless you can show me a specific woman who performed EXACTLY as well doing THE SAME job as a man, and that man was paid more, ANY claiming "discrimination" is, to put it mildly, a lie. Yeah, on average women are paid less. They also, on average, put in less overtime + less aggressive (which can impact productivity) – user5341 Sep 16 '11 at 14:28
  • @jwenting That information is simply incorrect. Modern studies use proper stratification and compare pay gaps in groups that *are* comparable. Even so there is a noticeable (though of course much smaller) pay gap. – Konrad Rudolph Sep 16 '11 at 14:30
  • @Konrad - Do any of those studies walk around the office and compare %ge of women who are still working at 9pm? And then compare salaries between THEM and the men who're still there at 9pm? Do any of those studies compare risky high-payoff decisions made by employees (which result in higher pay when they work - e.g. starting a risky project). There are MANY MANY variables that go into pay, and a statistical study can't stratify MOST of them since they are so individual – user5341 Sep 16 '11 at 14:32
  • @Konrad - also, do those studies adjust for the fact that extremely productive (often uber-high-IQ) employees often make disproportionately more money, and while average male/female IQ is the same, studies show that extreme right tail of the distribution is very tilted towards males? The average pay won't be impacted by extreme left tail where males are also outweighing women. – user5341 Sep 16 '11 at 14:36
  • @DVK I have no idea, but even if I said yes, where would you shift the goalpost next? There *are* simple yet effective techniques of random selection which minimise such artifacts. Your attempting to a priori discredit any study on the subject is a bit suspicious. Your claim in the previous comment to Henry that the only way to measure this would be to perform exact, one-to-one comparisons is disingenuous, unless you agree that *every* observational study on any subject ever undertaken is invalid. – Konrad Rudolph Sep 16 '11 at 14:37
  • @Konrad - that may have something to do with the fact that there's a very simple rule - if a manager can make more money for the company by hiring lower-average-paid SAME-productivity workers, they would ONLY hire such workers. Meaning women would be an overwhelming MAJORITY of employees. It's called Econ 101. Any study which contradicts basic laws of economics better explain WHY (and generic "male priviledge" bullshit in 2011 doesn't work anymore). – user5341 Sep 16 '11 at 14:39
  • @DVK We have no common basis to discuss on. If you really think that every decision is only motivated by economy and that there are no prejudices, no * privileges any more, then I suggest you wake up and take a look outside. Does the world really look like you suggest it’s looking? – Konrad Rudolph Sep 16 '11 at 15:05
  • @Konrad - I dislike magical woo explanations not backed up by facts in economics as much as I (or anyone else on this site) in other scientific fields. Do you have any PROOF that discrepancy is due to payer's gender preferences and not a multitude of other factors)? If not, all you have is a magical force field called "priviledge" that somehow works contrary to any laws of economics but can't be actually proven. – user5341 Sep 16 '11 at 17:02
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    @DVK Your understanding of economics is simplistic and naive, and furthermore you forget that reality is often counter-intuitive. You refuse to take into account psychology (and more). Furthermore, your capital-letter “PROOF” and your belief in some mythical “laws” of economy show that you’re not really amenable to arguments, even though this (often subconscious) gender bias is extremely well documented, reproducible, and firmly established and supported by modern statistical methods *designed* to distinguish influencing factors (cf. ANOVA). You are arguing in a factual void against evidence. – Konrad Rudolph Sep 16 '11 at 21:22
  • @KonradRudolph You mentioned the use of random selection techniques to minimise artifacts. Are you referring to those artifacts inherent in using non-interventionist studies? In other words, we're still limited to controlling for known confounders. I thought that can only tell us things like "X % of the variance cannot be explained by known factors". How do we get from there to "X% of the variance is due to discrimination"? – KonradG Sep 19 '11 at 22:28
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    @KonradG The same way you get to “X% of the variation is due to smoking”, “X% of the variation is due to fertiliser” or … you get the idea. In none of these kinds of studies can you prove causation but if you carefully control for confounding factors then there is nothing else left to explain the variation. That said, even some of the explainable factors relate to discrimination, as is quite clearly stated in the EU reports on this subject. – Konrad Rudolph Sep 20 '11 at 07:23
  • @KonradRudolph What's left is variation due to gender, not specifically to gender discrimination. Equating one with the other assumes that the the possibility of any other confounding factors is so remote that the results can only be explained by bias. I think that was what DVK found difficult to believe, not the mere existence of a wage disparity. – KonradG Sep 22 '11 at 18:03