Tuesday, March 14, 2006

I'm In the Money

Turns out my occupation is one of 38 identified by an author where women make more than men. Mine is actually the occupation with the second largest pay gap (I'm a Statistician), where the median salary for a woman is 35% higher than the median salary for a man. The occupation with the largest gap, Sales Engineer.

As I look through these occupations I'm finding two distinct catagorizations I would make, without any actual data to back me up, so this is merely conjecture. I see jobs like, statistician, Aerospace engineers, financial Analysts, Tool and Die Makers. These jobs, not jobs one really expects to see a lot of women in. And then I see the reverse Library technicians, Library assistants, clerical, Telephone operators, jobs were one might expect to see a lot of women.

This makes sense, as we're looking at jobs where women make more money, so in jobs where women are rare, they might pay women higher salaries to attract them. (like mine, I make 10K more than the median male in my job, I don't know if that is awesome or disgusting, maybe the men are just mostly government employees ;-) )And in feilds with more women women may move up faster due to bias or their may just be more women at higher levels in the feild.

The information that I want to have about this chart is the percentage of men versus women in each group. And maybe even the mean salary for each gender, to see how it compares to the median. The median is probably a good idea in this instance, because the data is probably skewed. But at the same time it could be affected heavily by sample size. So I'd want to see more information about this analysis because I don't completely trust it given the agenda of the author.

On a more political and less analytical note, while part of me is glad that women are might be getting more recognition in some fields, another part of me is not glad that we are getting MORE recognition than men. The of the game is Equality, I don't want to make more than men (okay, I want to make more than everyone, but still) I want to be payed the same amount for the same job. We're hiring at my company for another one of me, and I sureif we hire a guy he'll get payed the exact same as I did starting, or whatever is fair considering his experience.

4 comments:

Shinobi said...

Good Call hrun, If I get around to finding this data and trying to recreate his analysis (unlikely) I will definetly look at that as well.

Pyrrho said...

I'M BEIN OPPRESSED!!!

as a man.

Shinobi said...

Well it's not women's fault men just aren't as good at earning money as we are. You'll just have to accept that the genders are different and that your skills are in other places pyrrho.

Anonymous said...

have to? I'm searching out my sugar momma and getting ready to explore my "other skills" full time...

-pyrrho