Why Women Make Less Part 3

I want to make it clear from the beginning, in no way shape form or fashion do I have the belief that no where are women discriminated against in the work place. With my years of studying history I know that women in our culture originally cooked, reared children and performed other domestic responsibilities. There is no doubt that there are radical men out there who every time they see a woman working beside them wish she was still home doing that. No doubt there are bosses and CEOs that are the same way. My point is simple. There is not NEAR the amount of discrimination that most people believe. And, much "discrimination" is not based on sexism but based on the idea that with women and men being different physically in more way than are possible to write about in this blog, men are preferred for some jobs over women. And men prefer some jobs more often than women as we will soon see.

3.) Working hours: Little doubt that women are busier than men in domestic chores. Women are responsible for birth, and in most households cook, clean, and most importantly raise the children. There are families where these roles are switched today but most by far are still men spending more time than women on their professional career and women spending more time on the domestic responsibilities than men. The fact is that many women today are studying law. I think this is a good thing. Lawyers make good money but some make more than others. Women who want to be attorneys tend to be a civil service attorney with regular hours. Whereas more men will work for the high-pressure law firm where week hours could average between 60-70 hours a week and at unpredictable times depending on the client's case. Some large firms are stationed in several cities. If you are a high price well qualified experienced lawyer, a client might choose to have you fly in to defend him. This flying off to some distant place could be asked on short notice with unknown lengths of stay. Men are more likely to do this work than women due to their domestic responsibilities. This could hurts women who are single in that men might look at those women and put them in the general category of women when in fact they are trying to make a career for themselves. We will show later where evidence shows this mindset does not effect women's pay in fact. With most women getting married and having children the Harvard Business Review survey might be of importance. A survey of the people in top 6 percent of earnings showed that 62 percent worked more than 50 hours a week and 35 percent worked more than 60 hours. Of those jobs that were considered "extreme" meaning high in hours and stress, less than 1/5 were women. Even more surprising was that of the people who held these extreme jobs, women were only half as likely to want to still be working this job 5 years down the road. This means that "The Economist" magazine is right in that "The main reason why women still get paid less on average than men is not that they are paid less for the same jobs but that they tend not to climb so far up the career ladder, or they choose lower-paid occupations, such as nursing and teaching. In fact these are the jobs in which women with college degrees earn as much as men: computer engineer, petroleum engineer, other engineering occupations, journalist, portfolio managers, and medical technologies. But in most of these jobs, there are far FEWER women than men. Thus women make less not due to being paid less to do the same thing, but because there are fewer women than men doing the high paying jobs.

"Among college-educated, never married individuals with no children who work full-time and were from 40 to 64 years old- that is, beyond the child-bearing years- men average $40,000 a year in income while women average $47,000." This is according to Thomas Sowell and the University of Chicago. According to the New York Times, Of Yale alumni in their forties, only 56 percent of women still worked and 90 percent of men did. In a 2001 survey by Harvard Business School graduates, 31% of women from the classes of 1981, 85, and 91, worked only part time or on contract, and another 31% did not work at all.

Those who want to reach the highest echelons in their profession had better work not only long hours but continuously throughout their long career to reach those heights. Thomas Sowell writes "while those women are the best judges of what suits their own individual circumstances, priorities, and sense of well-being, third parties looking at statistical date see only the artifacts of disparities based on paychecks." The point is that statistics of paychecks can show disparities that when looking at life-style, choices, and other statistics, those disparities are understandable.