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From: nrh@inmet.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: Orphaned Response
Message-ID: <1988@inmet.UUCP>
Date: Fri, 22-Feb-85 01:46:43 EST
Article-I.D.: inmet.1988
Posted: Fri Feb 22 01:46:43 1985
Date-Received: Tue, 26-Feb-85 07:50:35 EST
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Nf-ID: #R:ttidcc:-23900:inmet:7800310:000:2574
Nf-From: inmet!nrh    Feb 20 14:16:00 1985

>***** inmet:net.politics / mazur / 10:26 pm  Feb 19, 1985
>> What, by the way, are the relative salaries for male and female nurses
>
>Here are some cases of "Same Job, Different Pay".  This is taken from the
>January issue of Working Woman.  They cite their source as the Bureau of
>Labor Statistics, 1983 annual median averages.

AHEM!  The question I asked was:
   What, by the way, are the relative salaries for male and female nurses
   of equal experience?

The table you give has two interesting points: first, male and female
nurses are reported as having approximately the same salaries, which
certainly seems to undermine ttidcc!regard's notion that nursing
represents some sort of special hotbed of prejudice against women,
although I concede that the forces of evil may underpay nurses
as a way of getting at the 99% who are women, and ignore the
problem of the 1% who are men.

The second interesting thing about it is that, as I understand it, women have
begun recently entering the professions in greater numbers, which
would mean men already in those professions would  be over-represented
in the ranks of the more-experienced, and (normally) higher paid.

The interesting thing about trying to find out statistically
why one person is paid more than another is that we don't know how
to do it:

	Clearly, neither feminist fund raisers nor the average
	well-informed citizen knows of this stunning fact: only 
	40 percent of the earnings of white men can be accounted for by
	measurable factors.  That is, if we look at a population of 
	white men, a full *60 percent* of the differences in earnings
	among them cannot be explained by anything we can measure.
	Conventional discrimination cannot possibly be an issue in 
	this particular population.  Yet the unexplained residual
	swamps the largest difference in male-female earnings that could
	possibly be due to discrimination.

	This is why we cannot rule out the possibility that the entire
	earnings gap between men and women is due to
	real personal productivity differences that cannot be measured.
	The upshot is that the *presence of discrimination can be
	neither proven nor disproven with statistical tests*.


						from 
						"The 59 cent Fallacy"
						Jennifer Roback
						Reason Magazine,
						September, 1984

The point I'm trying to make (and in which I think Ms. Roback and
I would agree) is that while discrimination certainly exists,
it is very hard to measure, and that statistics NOT corrected for
such things as we can measure (such as experience) merely muddle
the issue.