My wife is an attorney. She makes more than twice what I make (and I do ok). She gets paid less than she should compared to her male counterparts, but it's because she chooses to. To be fair, men do it too when they can.
I agreed with you on when someone chooses to make less, as I wrote here.
I agree that women more than men stunt their own income by becoming content with their position and income, and it is a choice to either stay where you are or go for a higher salary.
Education, qualifications, and hours worked are meaningless - they should never have anything to do with pay. I have a good friend who thinks he should command a high salary just because he got his master's in engineering from MIT. I danced circles around him at work. PhDs are often times even worse. I think often times, especially in engineering, a PhD is an indication that you're not serious about actually making anything. To me, those guys get picked last. All of the people that I worked with who really busted their rears and made a difference didn't have one.
In most fields you can work your way up the ranks without having higher education, the harder you work the more productive you are the more valuable you are. The best mechanic in a shop may be someone who started sweeping the floor when they were 15 years old and was taught by hands on experience, that does not work in health care.....an orderly at the hospital is not putting down the broom and picking up a scalpel without an education.
I use nursing as an example because you can't work your way up the ladder without education and experience. I work with a few LPN's that out work and are as knowledgeable as some of our best RN's but, they have all the experience to know what to do they just can't because they do not have the proper education "on paper" to make it legal and ethical to do so.
Hours worked are often the highest with the people getting the least traction. Some of the busiest, most unavailable people I've ever worked with, who were constantly at work until midnight, were people who weren't effective at their jobs and were compensating by working longer. It took them twice as long to do the job, so they spent twice as long doing it.
I use nursing and health care as a good example because anyone who can't keep up gets let go very quickly, and usually ends up working at a doctors office. Those are the lowest paying and require the least education, the highly motivated nurses either find there niche and stay with it or move up through further education.
That is also why I wrote that the highest paying jobs still have a large gender pay gap.
Qualifications (like years of experience, for example) are often anti-correlated with value. Someone who has been doing what they've been doing for 20 years is often doing that because they can't go up to the next level. Not always, of course, some people just really like what they do. But often people get stuck not being able to move up because they aren't good enough, but they're not bad enough to get fired. So you have someone with 20 years of experience with no motivation doing less than someone with 5 years. Qualifications are meaningless.
So you've listed three things that you say should net equal pay that in reality should be completely divorced from pay. The only thing that should really correlate with pay is how much value you create. This is why my wife makes more than twice what I do while working similar hours. She's working on a project right now that can net tens of millions of dollars per year, she's working with about 4 people on this project in total, and she's doing most of the work. I'm working on something worth quite a bit less, that's all it comes down to.
I give you that I did not add how valuable an employee becomes by the work they do, a great majority of the people I work with are highly motivated and it is the norm for me. I listed the requirements needed to obtain the job and adding that the hours would be equal for the most part once you had the job. There are lazy workers in every industry, I understand that. Not disagreeing with you when it comes to the less motivated in society, It is just not nearly as prevalent in my field as it is in others. Qualifications are meaningful to lawyers when something goes wrong with a patient in health care, they don't seem to care if someone is a great employee of not, lol.
It seems to me that you are making your case based on motivation to chase the last dollar and job performance once both a man and woman have the same job, am I correct?
And if that is your point and '
if you believe the pay statistics in the upper levels of nursing' then you have given two choices as to the rather large gap in pay, either women once achieving the goal of reaching the top of their chosen field do not work as hard as their male counterparts or they lose their motivation to fight for money. Do you really believe that?
