Is the gender pay gap sort of like a unicorn?

I ask because my macroeconomics professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, Michael Waugh, doesn't seem to think it exists. Maybe he's kidding, or maybe he's pretending he doesn't believe me so I can work harder to prove my ideas (I'm hoping this is the case), or maybe he's in deep denial, because our class discussions and after-class discussions go something like this:

Him: I don't believe the government should mandate equal pay for men and women.

Me: But women earn an average of 23% less for performing the same work as men.

Him: How do you know it's the same work?

Me: [Sputter in disbelief]

Him: Can you prove it? If women were really so much more productive, firms would hire them away from the companies that are underpaying them. The market would solve it.

I'm going to go ahead and take the not-very-radical step of asserting that the gender pay gap does, in fact, exist, and that its root cause is discrimination, and not that women are, across the board, 23% less productive and efficient than their male co-workers.

The longtime feminist economist blogger Echidne (with whom I hope to do a Shoulder Pads interview in the near future) has meticulously documented and explained not only its existence, but the myths surrounding it, here. She neatly does away with the rudimentary objections voiced by my professor, which Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber called "Stone Age labor economics," or rather, "Stone Age labour economics," because he's British.

I asked some finance people, wonks and feminists about this, and drew really excellent responses.  Since they said it way better than I could, I quote/excerpt them here [all emphases mine]:

From public policy whiz Kathleen Geier:

Even if there is no discrimination against young women, the fact that there still is a substantial pay gap among older workers, and that so few women make it to the top ranks of corporate America, politics, etc., is compelling prima facie evidence that a lot of discrimination is still going on.

The best studies on the gender gap in pay have all shown that such a gap definitely exists, *even when* you control for every observable factor like education, experience, hours worked, type of work, etc. Now, there are two ways you can explain that. One is simply that there is some discrimination going on. The other is that there is some difference in unobservable characteristics between men and women -- e.g., that men are harder working, or more motivated, or more intelligent or more able in ways that are not outwardly observable but which quickly reveal themselves on the job.

Which scenario seems more plausible to you? Many free market economist types have a bias toward believing that markets function efficiently almost all the time, so they're not going to think that discrimination is happening and that any group is getting paid less, or more, than it is worth. So they're going to go with the "unobservable skill differential" story. But "unobservable skill differential" is basically a polite way of saying, straight up, that women are innately inferior to men. That's basically what Larry Summers implied in his notorious remarks, when he mentioned biological differences as a possible explanation for women's underrepresentation in the hard sciences.

Biological differences, or "unobservable skill differential," or what have you, basically amounts to saying that women are biologically inferior. Aside from the fact that that's a profoundly ugly aspersion to be casting, there's not very much empirical evidence for it. Whereas there is literally mountains of evidence that women have been discriminated against -- tons of excellent, scientifically rigorous studies have shown this.

We know very well what equal work is, in a legal sense. (Oh yeah, the law!  That old thing! - ALS)

From Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber:

For some purposes (including, probably some macroeconomics) it makes sense to think of the labour market as a continuous spot auction in this way but a labour market like that has never really existed (the docks in Liverpool at the start of the 19th century probably closest). Economists really often need to take a step back and say "if I was a business, how would I actually do that?"  In any deep and realistic model of the labour market, search costs and recruitment costs would eat you alive if you tried to arbitrage away the gender pay gap.  In general, people in economics departments are much too quick to help themselves to arguments which assume that various versions of the law of one price will hold - I was inoculated against this at an early age when I sat next to a guy who spent all day trying to arb Royal Dutch against Shell.

From Katha Pollitt, feminist writer and thinker par excellence:

Anyone who's ever had a job knows the best person doesn't always get hired or promoted. I'm sure your prof can think of examples in his own department!   There's collegiality, nepotism, old boy networks, sexism and racism. People don't always like working with people who are 'different.'  Just ask a black guy. There are also huge assumptions about who is good at what, who the customers want to see, who suppliers can deal with easily --assumptions that usually favor white men. For example, if socializing with customers and clients includes visits to strip clubs and other male playgrounds, then being a man becomes an unacknowledged job qualification.

Katha also added this very important point:

etc! 

Thank you, everyone, for your contributions and readers -- please, please weigh in with thoughts and resources on this one.

Why takeout is a feminist issue

First of all, I apologize for the headline. The internet has a few rules one has to play by in order to get people to click, one of which is naming an article or a blog post "Why [this thing] is [actually something else that's counterintuitive]."  The other one, you may have noticed, is to title your story "[So and so's] [something] problem."  The former convention is not nearly as trendy or irritating to me as the latter. Moving on to why takeout is, in my experience, quite the gendered issue, I'll begin with a few data points, and follow up with how my own experience illustrates as much.

• Women, on average, still earn less than men.  How much less?  Around 23% less, unless you're a black woman, in which case you earn 38% less than the average white male, or a Hispanic woman, in which case you are taking home 54 cents for every dollar your white male colleague earns for doing substantially the same work, according to data from the Census Bureau and compiled by the National Women's Law Center.
• Men, on average, work longer hours than women.  The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported earlier this year that among full-time workers, men worked a longer day than women: 8.2 hours versus 7.8 hours.
• The same BLS report noted  that "on an average day, 20% of men did housework- such as cleaning or doing laundry - compared with 49% of women. Forty-one percent of men did food preparation or cleanup, compared with 68% of women.

Here's the pattern I'm picking up: men work more, make more money, cook less.  Women work less, make less, cook more.  The more valuable someone's time is, the bigger an opportunity cost it is for that person to spend it on non-revenue generating activities.  In other words, why cook when you make more than enough to pay someone to do it for you?   Getting takeout (or ordering delivery) is not the same as going to a restaurant, which is generally an event to be savored, an investment of time and resources in a meal with someone of some professional or personal significance.  No, takeout is what you get when you need to eat but you don't have time to cook.

It was only recently that I started regularly ordering takeout.  Until a few months ago, I was a full-time freelance writer, a precarious, anxiety-inducing financial situation if there ever was one.  (I should add that I also tutored students in writing to make the financial situation slightly less precarious.] I had very little free time on my hands, but I had even less disposable income.  So I cooked most of my own food.  I don't have a dishwasher, so I washed a lot of dishes.  And pots.  And pans.  In the end, I ate well (for which I owe a big shout out to my mom, a New York Times food writer and cookbook author and above all spectacular single mom, for teaching me how to cook and eat well).  But I also spent a lot of time in the kitchen -- time I was not spending taking my career further along.

I've spoken to an older family friend about this, and she believes strongly that women and men should be obliged to take home economics courses.  More women, she thinks, should know basic finance and accounting principles, and men should know how to cook.  My closest male friend can barely brew himself a cup of tea -- but he can make a fair amount of money (first as a day trader, and now working for an alternative energy company), call a deli, and have a cup of tea delivered to him.  It might cost $4 instead of 14 cents, but he gets his tea.  Spending $3.86 on someone else's labor was worth it to him.

I wonder if these messages start early: boys, be sure and make lots 'o' money so you can always outsource the drudgery to someone else.  Women, make sure you know how to cook since you'll always be paid 23% less than men.  That food - its growing, its preparation, and its consumption - is gendered is not a new insight; Harvard had a fantastic conference on the topic in 2007 that you can watch here. But I wonder how these ideas and expectations have changed and are changing.

My high school history teacher once told me that the tradition of Chinese takeout (and Chinese laundromats) took off during the Gold Rush in the mid-1800s, when a lot of men converged in California and needed someone - in this case, immigrants - to make them food and wash their clothes.  I don't know how true this is, but it's not far from the modern-day tradition of the wealthy paying others to do jobs they just don't feel like doing: cleaning the house, walking the dog, keeping track of appointments. Parents outsource childrearing, in varying degrees, to baby nurses, nannies and tutors.

Now that my income is a little bit more steady, and I don't always feel like I'm living on the precipice, getting takeout once a week - say, before or after a class that runs from 6 to 9 pm - is a relief, a welcome change from the obligation of cooking for myself, but most of all a privilege.  With the poverty rate among American women at a 17-year-high of 14.5%, finally having enough money to tip the scale in the direction of takeout is a luxury I don't take lightly.