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I've always wondered why companies don't overhire women to save on labor costs.

The only explanations I can rationalize is that management isnt aware of the pay difference, or they are aware but they're more sexist than they are greedy.



Because the reality is that when you adjust for type of job, experience, and hours worked the wage disparity effectively disappears: https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2017/08/01/are-wome...


That is from 2017 and focuses on 3 European countries only.


From Wikipedia: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gender_pay_gap#:~:text=In%20....

> In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79–83% of the average man's salary, compared to 95–99% for the adjusted average salary

It's the same in essentially every western developed country. Discrimination on the basis of gender is no longer accepted, the disparities that persist are due to different choices.

If women were paid less for the same work companies would benefit from staffing mostly women.


> I've always wondered why companies don't overhire women to save on labor costs.

And you should, as any selfish greedy company would do exactly that.

The beauty of the free market is it relies on selfish, greedy behavior to produce prosperity, rather than hopelessly trying to crush such behavior.


One explanation I've heard is that companies don't extract the same value from women as they do from men because society's sexism causes managers and peers to assign "low value tasks" disproportionately to women even when they have the same job description as their male counterparts.


Same reason Republicans voted more heavily against Jim Crowe laws/for the civil rights act. Green is the only color that matters.


In that era republicans were the more liberal party and the north voted for them.


I think that today is very interesting in that a lot of the R neocons of yesteryear have shifted to D neolibs today. It's really weird in a lot of ways.

Note: I've been pretty heavily libertarian minded for a long time, so this observation has mostly been an outside perspective even though I'm currently more inclined to move R as a secondary/pragmatic position. There are some aspects of R and D I'm inclined to support.




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