Please stop with this narrative that the uncontrolled gender pay gap is meaningless. It is not. From the 2024 Gender Pay Gap Report:
“The uncontrolled gender pay gap is not less meaningful than the controlled gender pay gap. It reveals the overall economic power disparity between men and women in society and how wealth and power are gendered. Even if the controlled gender pay gap disappeared — meaning women and men with the same job title and qualifications were paid equally — the uncontrolled gap would demonstrate that higher-paying positions are still disproportionately accessible to men compared to women.”
The uncontrolled gender pay gap is hence an extremely succinct number at summarizing all forms of economic disparity. Yes, controlling for factors such as education and job titles - but the controlled pay gap is meaningless in a post equal pay for equal work environment. Everyone already knows that education and job titles determine most of your salary - hence these are called “bad controls” in the literature. The problem is now that women do not receive the same levels of access to education and higher level job titles, a phenomenon which is captured very well by the uncontrolled gap.
Please stop with this narrative that the uncontrolled gender pay gap is meaningless. It is not.
It very much is useless.
The uncontrolled gender pay gap is hence an extremely succinct number at summarizing all forms of economic disparity.
Succinct, as all good statistical analysis should be. It gives you no actionable information.
Yes, controlling for factors such as education and job titles - but the controlled pay gap is meaningless in a post equal pay for equal work environment.
What? Then stop talking about pay equity if you’re not interested in that issue.
The problem is now that women do not receive the same levels of access to education and higher level job titles, a phenomenon which is captured very well by the uncontrolled gap.
But access to education and higher level job titles are not the sole factors that are controlled for. Several studies have noted that women have different priorities in the workforce, and some women choose to be the primary caregiver to children or elderly parents.
So why would you use a statistic that doesn’t control for several variables, which I just mentioned, to better understand access to education or higher level job titles?
There are already statistics that deal with educational attainment by sex. If that’s your focus, why would you ignore a data set that directly addresses your area of study to instead focus on the effect caused by what you want to study? That would be analogous to studying covid by looking at a data set regarding fevers, while ignoring data sets specifically tailored to covid. Sure, undoubtedly some of those fevers were caused by covid, but many were not.
Also, if women’s access to education is caused by, or heavily correlated with, the uncontrolled gender pay gap, then why do more women than men have a bachelor’s degree or higher? Isn’t that antithetical to the uncontrolled gender pay gap that tells us that women make nearly 20% less than men?
In 2022, 39.0% of women age 25 and older, and 36.2% of men in the same age range, had completed a bachelor’s degree or more…
When you’re directly comparing the pay of a male executive against that of a female barista, it is very much meaningless.
Employment choices, priorities, and decisions factor very heavily into how much people get paid. Take those choices, priorities, and decisions into account, and the so-called “wage gap” almost completely disappears.
Unsurprising there hasn’t been much change when their survey methodology doesn’t capture most of the relevant data.
From interviews and citations by female academics and economists who study and write on it, the Freakonomics podcast hosts interview these experts on why the often quoted stat of national mean is an oversimplification of a complex issue. freakonomics.com/…/the-true-story-of-the-gender-p…
Just like the commonly quoted unemployment statistic is a poor measure of employment in the country, a simple national mean leaves out almost all meaningful analysis, and actual deliberate or systematic pay discrimination is much more rare than headlines would have you believe.
The funny thing is, you can remove a CEO, and the company will still keep running. Remove workers and the company can’t function. Looks like “compensation” is going to the wrong people.
In some cases (cough Twitter cough), you can skip the whole software thing and replace the pure silicone of a computer with any slab digged out from the ground.
A board is there to make decisions in their own best interest as key stakeholders. They’re not paid for services.
Similarly, no company of any real size can survive without a CEO because their job is to work with investors and execute a single vision.
Sometimes I feel like no one on this site actually works in a corporation. Like, these roles are defined. You can just look up what these roles exist for if you don’t know.
I think it’s not so much that people can’t look up the roles, but that most people grinding away in a wage-slave role don’t have context for what is actually done at the higher level. They are too insulated from the day to day of those roles which make it easier to write them off wholesale as useless. That being said, CEO compensation across the board is not in line with any actual productivity or effectiveness metrics, let’s be real, and certainly should not be anywhere near as high in comparison to the average employee. But that’s a separate and more nuanced conversation that can’t be solved with a simple “fire all CEOs hurdur” comments that you’ll see online.
CEOs often do real work for a company, people who sit on a board don’t. Board directors are often on the boards of several companies, because being on one board alone is not nearly hard enough to qualify being a job in and of itself.
These people rake in money as if each of those board seats were a super job, effectively equivalent to hundreds or thousands of workers, while it requiring no where near the level of effort or expertise that an actual job requires.
Capitalism isn’t meritocratic like pro-capitalists love to believe. Capitalism is a system designed for and by the owner class to protect said property owning class.
If you want a meritocracy, you want a market socialist system. It’ll still have some problems capitalism has by the nature of markets (externalized costs aren’t accounted for by markets), but it’s at least a proper meritocracy when renting humans is illegal like buying them already is.
I did say “most of the work of”. I did not say “replace the people of”. I meant only that most of the basic analysis and troubleshooting of a business’ fundamentals could easily be done with an appropriately tailored model.
Yeah worker owned coops still have ceos. They perform a useful role as coordinative support staff. The problem isn’t that you have bosses, it’s that they aren’t accountable to you. They’re treated as face to an oligopoly, but they could instead be the head of a democracy. They also really don’t need that level of compensation
I agree with your entire comment, though I will say that an important part of the democratic process is not only voting, but also debate and discussion. I think workers should regularly come together to have discussions about the direction and performance of the company, the performance of supervisors, and more, while also having the ability to effect change on those processes through democratic means. This ensures people stay engaged and informed, while empowering them I’ma way that furthers both their development, and the development of democratic consciousness within the company.
The CEO is the link between the company and the shareholders.
They get paid by the shareholders to extract as much value as they can from the company to the shareholders.
On the other hand, if the company needs more investment, the CEO is the one who has to attract that investment, too. Otherwise the company will stall or go bankrupt.
Year over year growth is completely unsustainable. They should be content with making healthy profits in good times, and making any profit at all during times of recession.
A company that makes a 0$ profit and 0$ loss should be considered a successful one. Such a company would manage to pay all its costs (including wages, r&d, etc.) and function at peak efficiency.
I disagree. Some profit is good. It allows you to keep a coffer so you can keep afloat in bad years, as well as to buy back stocks for the employees. Once employee owned any profit can be voted on to either be added to budgets or distributed out amongst the employees.
If you can’t keep your business afloat on its own, if you require injections of cash from investors to avoid bankruptcy, that business should fail. And there’s nothing wrong with a business stalling, in my view. There should be limits to growth.
In the US there’s a legal obligation to the shareholders, it’s not just as simple as a sick owner culture trumpeting platitudes. To fix this problem we need to address both the culture and the legal frameworks: …harvard.edu/…/towards-accountable-capitalism-rem…
The problem is these people in the top positions don't see anything wrong with this.
I remember telling my republican friend that companies could easily raise worker pay. He laughed said that hamburgers would cost $20. I said you don't need to raise the price of the product, the people at the top could make less money. He then said "Oh, they are NOT going to do that."
Well of course they don’t see anything wrong with this, they’re getting paid not to see anything wrong with it. They’re paid astronomical amounts of money to keep the status quo by people even richer than them.
They always say this, but when you mention the Nordic countries where wages are at least twice ours and fast food is pretty much the same cost, they start ranting about how any country that properly uses socialism doesn’t count.
And they almost always end up saying something racist
Right, but the hypothetical person this person is talking to fires back with “that Nordic country doesn’t count cause that’s socialism”
I’m a Florida native so I’ve had this conversation with someone, and they’re implying the reason why burgers aren’t $20 is because of some weird centralized control of prices while also conflating social programs with socialism (and not the economic system)
Well, helping those people realize that the government can do shit and it not be socialism, because words have actual meanings, is a great way to get them to stop voting against their own self interest, imo.
It’s why I constantly die on this hill on this site to people who think universal healthcare is socialism, and call themselves socialists as a result.
Cutting CEO pay would not affect worker pay that much.
Fortune 500 CEOs make, on average, about 17MM a year. The average Fortune 500 company has 52k employees.
If you split their entire paycheck among just the bottom 50% of employees you’re looking at like $3 per hour. That’s… okay. But now you don’t have a CEO, and this isn’t really sustainable with any sort of inflation.
If you instead raise prices one cent on whatever product or service, you almost certainly will have more money to divvy up among employees, and it’s sustainable.
Worth noting I’m for a federal cap on CEO pay but that’s more to address the runaway nature of the CEO market, and its downstream effects.
I think your decimal may be off. For full time work, looks like ~36 cents per hour, assuming full time. But, for many it would be even worse. For Walmart, completely eliminating the CEO pay could increase the bottom 50% earners annual income by a whopping $22.
I agree with the overall sentiment tho. More than what this article shows, I’d be interested to see the percentage and dollar amount increase in disposable income among various cohorts within the top 10 percent incomes.
compare to only 273% (and ~ six tenths) for the federal minimum wage since jan 1, 1978 (was $2.65, is $7.25). it would be ~ $39/hr if it increased at the same rate at CEO pay over that time frame.
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