“Contrary to the theory of “compensatory differentials,” which holds that worse-paying jobs compensate workers with better benefits, evidence suggests that workers in female occupations are less likely to be offered employer health insurance or retirement plans”
The theory of compensating differentials would consider retirement and health benefits as compensation.
Non-compensatory things would be like workplace safety, flexible or predictable hours, working in a prestigious or meaningful field, etc.
Hi Allan! Fair point on the benefits framing — you're right that healthcare and retirement are not classic compensatory differentials, like a wage premium, and I've added a clarifying edit to the piece. That said, I think my challenge to the clean wage/benefits tradeoff, and the notion that women accept lower wages because of other non-wage things (including, but not limited to, benefits), still stands.
I don't dispute much of this article, but I think the implication that women's work in places like early childcare is poorly compensated because that work is "not valued" is counterproductive.
Work is compensated based on market factors. I don't mean that the market is fair or just or accurate. Quite the opposite. I mean that people get paid more when what they provide is scarce and in particular when they have unions or other means of blocking entry from competing laborers. This doesn't work in daycare very well.
There's also a difference between willingness to pay and ability to pay.
Early childcare is paid for by families with very limited resources. When you have a child, you are likely to be young, meaning you have a lower paying job and less money, if any, saved.
Framing the problem as being about "what is valued" obscures these dynamics. It implies that wages are granted by a considered judgement, sort of like a teacher's grade or audience applause. They don't. Wages are*extracted* via a negotiation, just as profit in business is an extraction.
Women's financial situation will improve when we start demanding policies that give the workers in fields where they work more power and access to more subsidies for those who pay for their services. Those subsidies have to be demanded and negotiated, with deals cut in backrooms if needed.
"Of course, these are bad times for everyone. Inflation has eroded most of the wage growth that occurred after the pandemic"
My God, nothing will stop these takes, will it? Real wages - meaning adjusted for inflation - have been steadily rising since the pandemic, continuing their upward trajectory from before the pandemic. Wages in the *bottom quintile* grew the fastest. Listing the nominal price increases in a bunch of cherry-picked goods does not change this.
The shock absorption has nothing to do with who pays more of the household expenses but that women tend to be in charge of how the money is managed. They are more aware of economic fluctuations from their day to day lived experience.
But your argument seems to me to be that women are objectively more precarious than men. If they're *reporting* more precarity because they spend more time thinking about the price of milk, then the explanation is affective: they're not really worse off than men, they just feel that way. And "economic shock absorbers" is a bit grandiose if that's all we mean.
The title of the article is Why do Women FEEL so Broke. There was empirical economic data to give you a fuller picture of the facts on the ground but how people perceive the economy was the point. Basically women pay closer attention so they worry about it more.
I would love to read an analysis on what causes something called occupational feminization: when women take over a job force and become the majority of its workers, the wages for that field stagnate. Pharmacy is an example.
I subscribe to The Argument because it promises evidence-based rigor. This piece doesn't deliver.
The claim that "the cost of housing, health care, and education made women's participation in the labor market an economic necessity" reverses the causal arrow of Warren's Two-Income Trap — which argues that dual-income households bidding on positional goods with inelastic supply is what drove those costs up in the first place. The article isn't unaware of the framework. It names Warren's exact trio of goods and flips the mechanism. That's not an oversight.
Similarly, the passage about childcare productivity — you can't make watching kids more efficient with smartphones — is Baumol's cost disease described without being named. Naming it would let readers discover that Baumol links wage pressure in low-productivity sectors to gains in high-productivity sectors, which complicates the "women's work is systematically undervalued" conclusion the piece wants to reach.
Two major economic frameworks, both present in degraded form, both stripped of the parts that would challenge the thesis. I expect this from Vox. I'm paying for something better.
No offense to Kyla Scanlon, who I really root for, but these numbers do not imply a "vibecession" to me. That is a huge number of people who don't feel like they can cover basic necessities.
“Contrary to the theory of “compensatory differentials,” which holds that worse-paying jobs compensate workers with better benefits, evidence suggests that workers in female occupations are less likely to be offered employer health insurance or retirement plans”
The theory of compensating differentials would consider retirement and health benefits as compensation.
Non-compensatory things would be like workplace safety, flexible or predictable hours, working in a prestigious or meaningful field, etc.
Hi Allan! Fair point on the benefits framing — you're right that healthcare and retirement are not classic compensatory differentials, like a wage premium, and I've added a clarifying edit to the piece. That said, I think my challenge to the clean wage/benefits tradeoff, and the notion that women accept lower wages because of other non-wage things (including, but not limited to, benefits), still stands.
I don't dispute much of this article, but I think the implication that women's work in places like early childcare is poorly compensated because that work is "not valued" is counterproductive.
Work is compensated based on market factors. I don't mean that the market is fair or just or accurate. Quite the opposite. I mean that people get paid more when what they provide is scarce and in particular when they have unions or other means of blocking entry from competing laborers. This doesn't work in daycare very well.
There's also a difference between willingness to pay and ability to pay.
Early childcare is paid for by families with very limited resources. When you have a child, you are likely to be young, meaning you have a lower paying job and less money, if any, saved.
Framing the problem as being about "what is valued" obscures these dynamics. It implies that wages are granted by a considered judgement, sort of like a teacher's grade or audience applause. They don't. Wages are*extracted* via a negotiation, just as profit in business is an extraction.
Women's financial situation will improve when we start demanding policies that give the workers in fields where they work more power and access to more subsidies for those who pay for their services. Those subsidies have to be demanded and negotiated, with deals cut in backrooms if needed.
Isn't valuing women's work what motivates people to demand such policies?
"Of course, these are bad times for everyone. Inflation has eroded most of the wage growth that occurred after the pandemic"
My God, nothing will stop these takes, will it? Real wages - meaning adjusted for inflation - have been steadily rising since the pandemic, continuing their upward trajectory from before the pandemic. Wages in the *bottom quintile* grew the fastest. Listing the nominal price increases in a bunch of cherry-picked goods does not change this.
By far the most likely explanation for the gender gap is the one you're dismissing: women tend to be more neurotic and anxious than men. This is the only explanation consistent with the fact that the gap persists in heterosexual couples. A description of women as economic "shock absorbers" is nonsense: men pay a higher share of household expenses than women. www.csmonitor.com/layout/set/amphtml/Business/Saving-Money/2014/0917/Who-pays-With-money-matters-traditional-gender-roles-stick
The shock absorption has nothing to do with who pays more of the household expenses but that women tend to be in charge of how the money is managed. They are more aware of economic fluctuations from their day to day lived experience.
But your argument seems to me to be that women are objectively more precarious than men. If they're *reporting* more precarity because they spend more time thinking about the price of milk, then the explanation is affective: they're not really worse off than men, they just feel that way. And "economic shock absorbers" is a bit grandiose if that's all we mean.
The title of the article is Why do Women FEEL so Broke. There was empirical economic data to give you a fuller picture of the facts on the ground but how people perceive the economy was the point. Basically women pay closer attention so they worry about it more.
I would love to read an analysis on what causes something called occupational feminization: when women take over a job force and become the majority of its workers, the wages for that field stagnate. Pharmacy is an example.
I would be interested in how closely tied these wage degradations are to the complete corporate take over of the pharmacy industry.
Articles like this would be more persuasive if the factual assertions were supported by footnotes or links.
I subscribe to The Argument because it promises evidence-based rigor. This piece doesn't deliver.
The claim that "the cost of housing, health care, and education made women's participation in the labor market an economic necessity" reverses the causal arrow of Warren's Two-Income Trap — which argues that dual-income households bidding on positional goods with inelastic supply is what drove those costs up in the first place. The article isn't unaware of the framework. It names Warren's exact trio of goods and flips the mechanism. That's not an oversight.
Similarly, the passage about childcare productivity — you can't make watching kids more efficient with smartphones — is Baumol's cost disease described without being named. Naming it would let readers discover that Baumol links wage pressure in low-productivity sectors to gains in high-productivity sectors, which complicates the "women's work is systematically undervalued" conclusion the piece wants to reach.
Two major economic frameworks, both present in degraded form, both stripped of the parts that would challenge the thesis. I expect this from Vox. I'm paying for something better.
No offense to Kyla Scanlon, who I really root for, but these numbers do not imply a "vibecession" to me. That is a huge number of people who don't feel like they can cover basic necessities.