Sunday, April 21, 2013

Great article on the "gender wage gap" and other links

1. Great Time article on the wage gap.  Every person in America should read this article.  Then we'd stop having ignorant people running around quoting the "$0.77 on the dollar" line.  Here is my favorite part:

"Take 77 cents to the dollar: that figure is actually the annual median earnings of women to men for 2010, based on data collected by the U.S. Census Bureau. The other figure you often hear, 81 cents to the dollar, is the average median weekly earnings of women to men for 2012, based on data released by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. In both cases, the comparison is on an extremely broad level “that doesn’t account for differences in occupation, in experience level and a lot of other things that affect income,” says Tom Nardone, the associate commissioner for employment and unemployment statistics at the BLS, who makes a point of adding such a caveat in the second paragraph of a 91-page report on women’s earnings. ”We at statistical agencies try to be very careful about defining our data, but we can’t control how other people use the information.”

The weekly earnings data are for wage and salary workers only and do not include self-employed workers. That means most of them work more than 35 hours a week, which minimizes the difference in the number of hours men and women work in general. (Yes, men work more.) "

2. The government is protecting people from themselves, by shutting down a ride at Disneyland.  Between OSHA and Disney to keep me safe - I trust Disney more.

3. Nice Story about using media in economics courses. 

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