Let’s face it, they’re just better at everything
by digby
The good news today is that the Supreme Court ruled that UPS has an obligation not to treat pregnant workers like crap. (Or something like that.)
The bad news continues to be this:
Even though nine out of 10 nurses are women, men in the profession earn higher salaries, and the pay gap has remained constant over the past quarter century, a study finds.
The typical salary gap has consistently been about $5,000 even after adjusting for factors such as experience, education, work hours, clinical specialty, and marital and parental status, according to a report in JAMA, the journal of the American Medical Association.
“Nursing is the largest female dominated profession so you would think that if any profession could have women achieve equal pay, it would be nursing,” said lead study author Ulrike Muench from the University of California, San Francisco.
Muench and colleagues used two large U.S. data sets to examine earnings over time. One, the National Sample Survey of Registered Nurses, provided responses from nearly 88,000 participants from 1988 to 2008. The other, the American Community Survey, offered responses from nearly 206,000 registered nurses from 2001 to 2013.
Every year, each of the data sets found men earned more than women; the unadjusted pay gap ranged from $10,243 to $11,306 in one survey and from $9,163 to $9,961 in the other.
There was a gap for hospital nurses, $3,783, and an even bigger one, $7,678, for nurses in outpatient settings.
Men out-earned women in every specialty except orthopedics, with the gap ranging from $3,792 in chronic care to $17,290 for nurse anesthetists.
The standard explanation, and also offered in the article, is that women don’t deserve the same pay because they insist on slacking off when they give birth. Either that or they’re just bad at getting what they want. (And who’s fault is that, amirite?)
This is obviously wrong. Sure nursing may have been an exclusively female profession for years and is still dominated by women. But clearly, it wasn’t until men joined the profession that it started getting done properly. Just as all those Wall Street traders are harder and smarter workers than nuclear physicists, so too men are harder and smarter workers than women. It’s called meritocracy. And lord knows our meritocratic system works perfectly.
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