> men increasingly want women who are more equal (in
> education, social status)

Amy, I don't think I've seen you say this before. Do you have a reference? It seems strange to me that a man would turn down a hot model for a high status or well educated plain Jane. It also seems strange that what has evolved over hundreds of thousands or even millions of years would change significantly.

You left out the fact that women don't choose high-value or dangerous jobs at a rate anywhere near that as men.

A woman may have a bogus M.A. in Human Resources Management, and a guy with an undergrad physics degree may be running your R&D effort on a critical new product. HR girl is overhead, physics guy holds a significant percentage of your company's future in his hands. Gee, who is worth more?

In the above example, and speaking from experience, it's next to impossible to find a woman qualified to even supervise *documentation* on a complex, science-based product -- because they're not just non-scientists, they're junk major enthusiasts who don't do science and can't even write well.

Also, didgya know that more than half of female Harvard MBAs are retired or part-time by age 40? (Trust me, I was married to one; parties were grand with all the other retired, semi-retired, or furious-because-they-were-not-retired females.) They could tell you -- and some would -- their ovulation cycles, since they waited too long, but they couldn't tell you want they wanted to be doing at age 50. Employers know this, even though they stay out of trouble by hiring some short-timers with the correct anatomy.

Assortative mating -- men preferring brainy peers over hot, nurturing helpmeets -- is a phenomenon of the 1% (maybe the top 5%, but I doubt it). That cohort may be the blog's target audience, so fine.

Men in relationships with those alpha females tend to be totally beta and totally stretched out on the rack by their non-working WonderWomen. It's all plain at the competitive Christmas parties that they throw.

According t the BLS full time women only work 66% of the hours men work to earn that 80%

80/66=1.21

for the same HOURS WORKED women earn 21% MORE THAN men do

Want to end the wage gap?

Pay MEN more money

In the STEM world, a big part of it starts in college. Women who have a leaning towards science or mathematics, but are undecided about their major when they enter school, take a look at how the STEM guys are working in the lab until after midnight every night, and how most of the rest of the campus regards them. And they realize that if they go into STEM, they won't have a social life in college. And in general, I think having a social life in college is more important to women than it is to men. Plus most of the guys in STEM in school realize that they have no shot with college women, so not having a social life isn't important to them. But it is to the women, so the ones who might be science or math inclined go into accounting, or business, or finance, or social sciences -- majors where you don't have to put in as many hours, and you don't suffer the indignity of being labeled a "nerd" by most of the rest of the campus. Only the handful of women who are absolutely passionate about STEM, to the point of obsession, go into those majors. This all happens in spite of any efforts the schools make to get more women in STEM.

So what happens in the typical engineering organization is that the hard-core engineers are mostly men. The women on the tech side are mostly in jobs like quality assurance or configuration control or drawing checking, where it's mostly process management. Those are important jobs, but they don't require as much knowledge or education, so they don't pay as well. And they don't always require full-time work, so mothers with children are attracted to those jobs, so they can work part time. It all adds up to the average salary for the men being higher than the average salary for the women, but that's not based on discrimination -- it's based on the jobs that men and women choose.

Snoopy,

She is right and she has mentioned that before. Part of it seems to be seeking those with similar cultural values. We are such a mixed society in the US that most people probably don't have the same values or culture as their neighbors and coworkers. Part of it is men being more selective as having a relationship becomes increasingly more expensive for them.

The instinctual is still the same but the environment has changed enough that men have adapted their behavior somewhat.

J. Peterson discusses explicitly the high-performance female -- and how by age 30 or so (I would say 35, but whatever) her priority is procreation, quality of life, good health. So she dials back the work effort or leaves the workforce while her husband carries on at the usual 70-80 hours a week. Oddly, these choices result in different salary levels.

He's also extremely accurate about the emotional and psychological costs of being that male ceo, and how the emotional utility function of such work (no matter the pay) begins to decline from its apex in the late 30's or so.

He notes, which I have never heard anyone note, that in those roles you may never, basically, ever make a mistake. Or you're out. One pays a price for that, too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj7VgBnQNUc

Thanks Ben!

The assortative mating thing (of men preferring women more like them) is research I've read but I don't know whether I can immediately access it. Deadline day (first of two), plus I'm on KPCC.

Found something quickly from NYT piece:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/23/upshot/rise-in-marriages-of-equals-and-in-division-by-class.html

Assortative mating is the idea that people marry people like themselves, with similar education and earnings potential and the values and lifestyle that come with them. It was common in the early 20th century, dipped in the middle of the century and has sharply risen in recent years — a pattern that roughly mirrors income inequality in the United States, according to research by Robert Mare, a sociologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. People are now more likely to marry people with similar educational attainment — even after controlling for differences between men and women, like the fact that women were once less likely to attend college.

Even though the typical husband still makes more than his wife, the marital pay gap among opposite-sex couples has shrunk significantly in the decades since women started entering the work force en masse. Today, wives over all make 78 percent of what their husbands make, according to an Upshot analysis of annual survey data from the Census Bureau. That’s up from 52 percent in 1970.

"We believe in equal pay for equal work."

And what do you mean by "equal work?"

I worked in back office of a unionized grocery chain. Unionized cashiers were paid $18/hour while non-unionized cashiers at other chains were paid an average of $9/hour. How did the company arrive at $18? The union (UFCW) mandated it.

The cashier's job was compared with other unionized industrial jobs and determined to be "equal" to a machinist job, whose salary and benefits it had to match. That was in the 1940s, when a cashier was operating a heavy adding machine, had to memorize the prices of every item in the store (including sale prices), and had to calculate change without assistance. In contrast, a machinist was also operating a heavy machine and memorizing information, but the machinist was facing possible maiming if not diligent.

Today, bar codes and computers make the cashier's job much simpler. The scanner and belt do most of the heavy lifting, the bar codes and computers provide the prices, and change is calculated by the computer if at all since most people use debit cards to pay. Even SNAP- and WIC-eligible items are handled by the computer instead of the cashier's brainpower.

Is the job still equal to a machinist? No, but the union requires it to be paid that way since it was once determined to be "equal" work. The union refused to allow the pay equalization standard to be downgraded once the jobs significantly diverged.

"Equal pay for equal work" is a great slogan, but a meaningless one. The problem with equal pay for equal work is the standard by which equal work is determined. Do you think a machinist feels the work is equal to that of a grocery cashier?

Thanks Amy - will look into it more. Good luck on KPCC!

Ah Elisabeth Warren paying women less, I was just using that as an example of bias over at Snopes. Snopes who I just cannot find a reference to the male female wage gap in general. However they do have specific pages explaining why when Warren and other left leaning people do it, it is because of the above listed reasons and not sexism. http://www.snopes.com/elizabeth-warren-staff-pay/

Other women who do what I do ask me how to get clients to pay more money. I tell them to raise their day rates. Women often undervalue their work.