Wealth Inequality in America

That like almost everything else the answer is complicated. Is there a systemic gender wage gap perpetrated by evil men? No, that’s patently absurd.

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Looking at averages across all doctors is meaningless. Most of that gap is due to choice of specialties. Things like family medicine pay far less and tend to be where women choose to practice. But even beyond that women tend to work fewer hours and take more time off work. They also tend to not negotiate for more money as often as men do. Things that can’t be accounted for and aren’t the result of sexism.

It is pertinent to note that even if there is a gap in earnings it isn’t a bad thing as long as the gap is the result of free choice.

I always find it ironic that the people who generally push the narrative of the sexist wage gap are the same ones that think all corporations are evil greedy entities that will do anything to make more money. These 2 views are directly contradictory. If companies are greedy and they can hire women to do the same quality and quantity of work for substantially less than men, they’d hire all women and cut their payroll 20-30%. They fact that they don’t means that either they don’t really care about profit or they can’t really pay women significantly less.

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Pretty much verbatim what I said to this guy on facebook. He was convinced because the graph showed women are payed less, that meant inequality and that I was just refusing to accept the statistics. He literally argued with his own article that I used against him in saying, " a huge factor why women physicians are payed less than men are because women tend to flock towards the lower paying specialty jobs." Not only that but I pointed to out it is illegal to pay women less than men for the same job.

Any one else have opposing views on wage gap between men and women?

With all due respect, usmc, I’m not sure why you posted only the snippet of the image that you posted (the “Importance” section, which is merely stating the reason for undertaking the study). If your post was meant to state that somehow there is NOT adequate data to address this issue, please note that this is a new study which notes these factors as reasons for its particular undertaking. The “Conclusion” of the study states:

“Among physicians with faculty appointments at 24 US public medical schools, significant sex differences in salary exist even after accounting for age, experience, specialty, faculty rank, and measures of research productivity and clinical revenue.”

With respect, DoubleDuce, this flies directly in the face of…

…and this…

While you are correct that the “unadjusted” graph which merely shows that women are paid less does not account for all of these factors, this paper performed a statistical analysis which accounted for all of these things - specialty, faculty rank, measures of research productivity and clinical revenue (which would be affected by the “women tend to work fewer hours and take more time off work” that DD mentioned above). The multivariable-adjusted analysis showed about a $20,000 gap between men and women after adjusting for the remaining variables.

I grant DD’s point that perhaps “men are more aggressive in negotiating salary than women” is a thing that cannot be accounted for in here. But yes, even when you account for the gender difference in specialties, faculty ranks, work performed, etc…female physicians in this study were paid less than male physicians after controlling for all of the above.

The first paragraph of the paper’s Discussion reads as follows:

“We analyzed sex differences in salary between male and female academic physicians at 24 US public medical schools using contemporary administrative salary data of state employees made publicly available online by state governments. After adjusting these analyses for physician age, years of experience, specialty, faculty rank, several measures of research productivity, and payments by Medicare (information obtained from a comprehensive database of US physicians), we found that annual salaries of female academic physicians were 8.0% ($19 879) lower than those of male physicians.”

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Ridiculous. Do you really think wimmenz can make decisions for themselves? Like all groups other than white men, they needs certain white mens to make decisions for them. This “free choice” you speak of sounds like code for some type(possibly multiple types) of -ism.

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This study doesn’t provide adequate data to address the issue raised by @norse84 either. The portion I posted simply highlights the typical problem, ie, there isn’t enough reliable data.

This study looked specifically at doctors at public medical schools, right? They only looked at data from 24 schools. Quick google search tells me there are at least 100 public medical schools in the country. I also can’t think of a group I would use to make an economy-wide generalization from less.

And, sure, it accounts for age, experience, specialty, rank and research productivity. How about time off for a pregnancy? How about negotiation ability? How about where they got their degree from? What their starting salary way? Total skill-set?

Like I said, it’s a complex issue, but some fat bald dude isn’t sitting in a corner office making sure women are paid less. Plus, I can’t read the actual article nor do I know anything about JAMA (wtf that is).

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How did they “adjust these analyses for physician age, years of experience, specialty, faculty rank, several measures of research productivity, and payments by Medicare…”?

Wtf is a faculty rank anyway and how do you account for research productivity?

Which of my statements do you think this contradicts? It seems to indicate that most of the gap is in specialty and that, no they didn’t and can’t account for many possible non-sexist differences.

I mean, even without everything taken into account, the 8% quoted here is quite a bit different that the 30 or so percent that we always hear about. And the final point about greedy corporations still stands. If this is true, hiring women would be like printing free money.

Faculty rank is where they are in the professorship pecking order.

University hospitals sell and use the intellectual property and technology that they develop through research, and can be measured in dollars.

No snark intended, just my understanding of it gleaned from a guy with more initials after his last name than he has name.

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Luckily for you, I’m a professional.

JAMA is the Journal of the American Medical Association. It is not an exaggeration to say that this is one of the most prestigious medical journals in the world. Our field is, sadly, starting to become saturated with a pile of second-rate journals, but this isn’t one of them. This was published in JAMA Internal Medicine, so it’s one of the subspecialty JAMA journals, but still, it’s a legitimate source.

Multivariable regression analysis. I can give a more detailed explanation if you want, but I can vouch that this is an appropriate technique, assuming that you trust my judgement. Here’s a very rough explanation of what multivariable regression looks like:

“Time off for a pregnancy” would be baked into the measures of productivity. They included a measure of the clinical volume handled by each physician and their research productivity - if you’re off for a pregnancy, those things will be lower.

“Negotiation ability” - as noted above, is not something that can be measured or accounted for. And please note that the paper is not here to say that there are evil men sitting in dark corners conspiring to pay female physicians less; the purpose of publishing a paper like this is to draw attention (among physicians) to the fact that in certain contexts these differences may exist, and that female physicians should be aware of them. If you have no idea that you’re probably being offered less than the male candidate, you may not bother driving a hard bargain. If you’re a female candidate and you read this paper before going into your interview, you’ll be more cognizant of the fact that perhaps your negotiating ability will be a factor.

“Where they got their degree from” is loosely accounted for; they included a variable for whether the physician graduated from a medical school ranked among the top 20 by USNWR.

“Total skill-set” is a red herring in this particular context. That should be mostly accounted for by specialty; admittedly, there are some physicians who may offer something WAY novel (like they’re trained in a new surgical technique that they are bringing to a program) but for the most part that is not going to factor into a salary negotiation unless that person is adding an entirely new dimension, like “adding this surgeon means our hospital is opening a new mitral valve clinic which will bring in boatloads of cash.”

Faculty rank means whether they are currently an “assistant professor” (usually the starting rank for a new hire) or “associate professor” (next rank up) or if they have risen to full tenured professor.

Research productivity was accounted for by the number of papers published and the number of NIH grants received. This is an imperfect way of measuring true “research productivity” but it does show that they were TRYING to control for the fact that people who are more active in research have potential to be paid more (some professors get paid an additional salary for their research activities or have extra incentives, etc).

An over-arching theme here: the reason all of these confounders are “adjusted” for in the model was/is an attempt to determine whether the gender gap is a real “all things being equal, men paid more than women” or if it was actually due to one or more of the factors named here. That is the purpose of the multivariable regression analysis: if the difference in male/female salaries observed in the “raw” data was driven mostly through one of the aforementioned confounding variables, when we “adjusted” for that variable as part of a multivariable regression the estimated male/female difference in the multivariable model would dramatically decrease. The purpose of a multivariable analysis is to give an estimate of the true magnitude of a single effect when smoothing over all of the other confounding variables in the model: the regression coefficient for the gender difference in this context can be interpreted as

“In this dataset, the estimated mean difference between a male and female physician who is the same age, faculty rank, number of years since residency, specialty, research productivity, and clinical volume is…”

The “unadjusted” or “crude” difference - before adjusting for any confounding factors was $51,000. After adjustment for the named factors, the “adjusted” estimate of the male/female difference was $19,879. This means the differences in specialty, productivity, clinical volume etc accounted for some but not all of the gap, and that there is “statistically significant” difference between males and females with “a whole bunch of other things being equal” if not “all things being equal.”

Please note, guys, that I have no especially strong dog in this fight of whether a “gender gap” exists. I am merely trying to explain the findings in the article. You are more than likely correct the unmeasured variables like “negotiating ability” account for the remaining gap in salary between male and female physicians at these institutions. I am merely pointing out that many of the things that are commonly tossed out as explanation for the gender gap were taken into account as part of this analysis, and that after controlling for those things, the difference between male and female physicians was not entirely explained by the named factors.

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Thanks for the write up, @ActivitiesGuy.

I’ll stick with what I originally wrote, lol. [quote=“anon50325502, post:81, topic:225475”]
That like almost everything else the answer is complicated.
[/quote]

I may be splitting hairs, but I think the study contradicts this at least somewhat:

Please read my detailed reply above. They accounted for specialty, faculty rank, research productivity and clinical volume (which would account for something like the “women work fewer hours and take more time off work” line of thinking), whether or not they attended a top medical school, etc and still found there was a $19,879 difference between males and females after adjusting for those things. The only thing you’ve mentioned here that is not accounted for is “negotiating” which cannot be measured and likely is the source of at least some of the differences. I will note that you qualified by saying “most” of the difference is due to specialty, so I don’t think that statement is wrong, only that I think you’re ignoring that a noticeable gap does still exist after controlling for that factor.

Please also note that I am not suggesting, yet again, that this is some nefarious plot against women. I am merely stating that the data are suggesting that female physicians at these 24 public medical schools are paid less than male counterparts (this is a fact; they are paid less) and that differences in specialty, rank, productivity, and the prestige of their medical school did not fully explain said differences (this is a more qualitative statement that statistical modeling suggests that even if all of these things were/are equal - two hypothetical physicians of the same age, rank, productivity, etc with the only difference being gender - the male would be paid more).

My argument came from the article I posted, to be fair and that point still stands. Women tend to flock towards the lower paying specialty physician jobs. The one USMC posted seemed to be a littler more in depth, though.

Thanks for the analysis on it. One question, though. Does the research cover the “relative value units” which is pay based on performance, not necessarily how many visits they see. I didn’t quite see that in there but may have missed it. Since men statistically see more clients, isn’t it possible that the type of care provided by males for each individual is a higher profile visit and not just a routine checkup, hence higher pay?

I am an academic, having risen through the ranks of assistant, associate with tenure, and now full professor and department chair. Here’s how you get raises beyond your peers in academia: you get an offer from another institution. The offer will be more than you’re making by about 20% in order to lure you, and your University will match it (or exceed it). This happens to only the top people.

So, there are two reasons why men are more likely to have this happen to them. 1) They tend to be the very top scholars in a department and more known in their field. or 2) They are more likely to seek out positions at other institutions. In my experience, #2 is certainly true. I’d say that #1 is also true, if nothing else because women tend to take on more administrative and service duties as they climb the ranks, while men often keep a narrower focus on scholarship.

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Right wingers missing the point as usual and saying essentially that anyone can do anything, if they choose engineering instead of women studies, if they save all their pennies, that you are just envious of the rich, etc

The point is some people have more than millions of others who are struggling right now. Really I wish everyone could have anything, but that’s not the case.

But hey everyone is going to make it, etc.

The supposed way to fix it is to continue to import thousands, or even millions, of unskilled, illiterate, low-IQ, shiftless, and above all, poor people. That’s the solution! :grinning::+1:t2:

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How to fix/change human nature, now there’s a whopper of a topic.

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Well, another way to fix it is to do like we do in NYC: unduly provide “affordable housing” in which people irresponsibly and unduly multiply and then later wonder why there are god knows how many homeless people! :grinning::+1:

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Again, there are a million things that may or may not play a role and are unaccountable. The pay gap is far smaller than the normal crap numbers quoted by the left. Even with thorough analysis, there are a number of non-sexist intangibles that you can’t really account for. There is also no direct evidence that any possible remaining gap is the result of sexism instead of free choice. There is a great amount of circumstantial evidence that the gap is due to intangibles and not sexism if you look at actual hiring and accept that companies are greedy.

You can even make the argument that even if some gap is due to differences in marketability rising from sexist population views, the actual company in following marketability isn’t doing anything sexist. A good example of this (which is also strong evidence that sexism in pay doesn’t exist the way the left claims) is modeling where the pay gap is somewhere around 75%. Only men are on the short end.

If we accept the narrative of the left, it means that the industry is about as sexist as it gets. Does anyone really believe that? No, because female models are just plain more marketable. The industry just follows the whims of the public. Even if it’s sexist to like looking at women more than men, individuals have that right and the industry has the right to cater.

Might it also be true that people prefer male doctors? If the public generally does prefer to see male doctors, is it then sexist for the industry to cater?

Again, the notion that a company can get exactly the quality and quantity of labor and hence gross the same while paying less for the work and yet they all choose to pay more than they have to is nonsense. There would just need to be 1 non-sexist company to hire all the underpaid women doctors (or underpaid male models) and dominate the market.

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