I am going to get some response if it kills me.

I know I normally don't write to provoke, and though a few of my posts have drawn critics, mostly those on the biological origins of homosexuality, on gay marriage (both the original and the followup), my defense of Israel, and my attacks on Ron Paul and Pat Buchanan, I never intentionally write to provoke negative responses. And, in this case I am not really doing so either. I simply know that it will. And so, as I know I am going to tick someone off, I figure I will avoid my usual efforts to balance my wording well enough to avoid needless provocation, and instead just speak my mind, the negative reactions be damned.

You see, I am going to talk about differences between the sexes¹.

Now, let me start by repeating a discussion my wife and I had, as it puts one question off limits from the start. You see, there is simply no way to tell if a sex difference is inherited or a learned trait common among all cultures, at least not without invasive medical tests. The reason being sex is immediately obvious. So we cannot take a girl and raise her as a boy as it will be immediately obvious she is not a boy. And so she will be exposed to both cultural and biological influences in any circumstance. The only conceivable way to avoid cultural influences would be to raise her in absolute isolation, without even language, so as to avoid sex roles implicit in language. Unfortunately, that is a recipe for raising a creature unable to communicate, and so we would be unable to ask her if she still had the same attitudes as a woman reared in a traditional culture.

So, unless we are willing to tinker with the genes or meddle with the hormones of infants, we are not going to be able to tell if sexual differences are biological or learned. In fact, even then we might not be sure, just as we can't be sure through epidemiological studies of those with certain hormonal defects.The reason being that genetic and hormonal aberrations also cause other behavioral changes which could obscure learned behaviors, meaning we would mistake a learned behavior for a biological trait simply because the abnormal hormones or genetics caused a learned behavior to never be learned.

Which is why I really don't care about the largely futile disputes about whether sex differences are biological or cultural.

Of course, the people having such arguments make some silly assumptions, as we see in the Larry Summers debacle. Does it matter if women choose fields other than hard science because of genetics or learned behavior? I know feminists think that if it is learned they can "unteach" that preference, but that is arrogance of the first order. Do they really think they can so minutely restructure every aspect of our culture that they can unmake a behavior that is programmed into every culture on earth? And, on the other hand, does anyone really believe that just because something is "biological" that it cannot be overcome by will? (Well, yes, the homosexual is genetic arguments seem to say that "biological" means "impossible to overcome", but they are wrong.) Let us just look at humans. We have a biological drive to procreate, yet that does not mean we knock down and rape every attractive female we see, out willpower and conditioning overcomes our biology. So even if girls are biologically disinclined to pursue physics as a profession, clearly that behavior could be changed through learning.

In other words, both sides make much more of this difference than they need to². Whether biology or learned, sex differences exist, and they can be changed. In fact, whether biological or learned, the means to change them are identical as well. So the whole question seems to be of only academic interest, of that³.

Having said all that, I am endlessly amused by those who assume there are no differences between the sexes, or that all differences are simple learned behaviors which can be easily removed through simple cultural changes. Anyone who has spent a long period of time with young children can tell you, even before they have learned sex roles, even before they really notice there is a difference between sexes (for example, while my son was still having trouble deciding when to use "boy" or "girl" and used "him" for everyone) there are still clear differences between the sexes. Boys and girls simply interact differently. Girls speak earlier and speak more, for example. Considering the supposedly submissive role feminists ascribe to women, one would think our culture would encourage the opposite, teaching young girls to be quiet, yet I have never once seen a girl who spoke later than boys, or a girl who spoke less than boys of a similar age. I suppose there is a chance this is a learned behavior and not a biological one (not that it matters), but it is clear that if it is learned, it is based on much more complex cultural forces than your average feminist theorist postulates.

So, why am I bringing all this up? Simple, because Obama has started reviving the absurd theories of "equal pay" and even some older ERA-era nonsense.

Let us make this clear. In a competitive labor market, there will exist equal pay⁴. If women are being paid $1 per hour less than they generate for an enterprise, a creative employer will offer women a $0.25 per  hour raise, poach all the best employees and still be $0.75 to the good each hour. And another will offer another quarter as it still pays him to do so, and so on and so on, until the women are earning what a man would. To do otherwise is to leave unrealized profit, and no sexism is strong enough to universally beat out greed. At least one man will exist who is greedy enough to offer real wages. And if not, women can own businesses, so wouldn't a fellow female raise their pay?

But the truth is, there are reasons women earn less.

First, women have babies. I know some men take off when a baby is born, but even then, men rarely quit their jobs to become full time daddies, while women have been known to do so, which means that after hiring a tempt to fill in for a pregnant woman, the company now faces the cost of hiring a replacement as well. Not just that, but women also tend to make decisions in favor of family and free time, rather than sacrificing all in favor of the job as men do. That does make a difference in terms of earnings and promotions. Women also select different fields than men. Though studies try to balance this out with that "equivalent jobs" nonsense (see footnote 3), the truth is that it is impossible for academics to realistically say whether two jobs are equivalent or not. The market decides that and, as the shifting pay of various jobs show, that decision is constantly reevaluated, meaning no two jobs are equivalent all the time, unless they are the same job.

Nor are those the only concerns. Thanks to many state and federal laws, women, like minorities, the disabled and other categories, are law suit magnets. White males by and large do not file employment suits at the rate of any other group, making them the safest hires. (Actually, it would be interesting to see if lawyers hired in non-legal positions earn less due to the threat of lawsuits. I have yet to see anyone conducting such a study, but the results would be telling.)  And thanks tot he very vague definition of "hostile workplace' in terms fo sex, as opposed to race, it is very hard to avoid legal problems. An employer can tell there is a problem if one of his employees is using racial slurs. But what if one employee tells another her dress looks nice? Or if two employees are dating? It could be safe, or it could be creating a hostile workplace. By criminalizing normal human behavior based entirely on the perception of the woman, the law has made it inherently risky to hire women, which means there is an innate cost to each female hired.

Finally, in certain fields, there is one last legal concern. A mother cannot sign away the rights of her children to sue. Should she work with chemicals, and if there is even the most remote risk her future children could suffer, or even think they might have suffered, hiring a woman can create the risk of endless lawsuits form all of her children, their children and so on. So, unless a woman is clearly past child bearing age, the risk of lawsuits from descendants is always a possibility in any industrial setting. A threat which, given our current "liability lottery" legal system, cannot fairly be approximated. And so employers have to simply guess at liability and deduct it from salaries.

All of which makes me laugh when academics claim to have "adjusted for all factors" and find a remaining disparity. It is impossible to do so. Even employers often of not know all the factors. They simply know that their industry has universally declared an hour of labor at a specific post to be worth X and that they can hire all they want at that wage. It includes all these considerations, as to not do so would be to court bankruptcy, and maybe a few firms did think all this through, but for many employers, it is not that well thought out, many just hire at "the prevailing wage", without understanding all the factors going into it.

But, my point is, there is no way academics have factored out everything. They may have factored out maternity leave. A few honest ones have possibly excluded the potential for a mother to choose to stay home after giving birth. One or two also factor in the obsolescence of skills after such a choice. And one or two factor in some part of the liability for harassment suits. Not one could factor out every possible factor, as it is simply impossible. Often, no one has consciously considered all these risks⁵.
 
But, let me say they have. Let us say these academics really did find an unfair underpayment of women in some field. If so, why has no one taken advantage of this? If women really are paid $0.22 less per hour than they deserve, why has no greedy businessman offered $0.11 per hour more, taken all the best workers and still made $0.11 per hour in savings while getting his pick of workers? Why not? Because they know the value of academic studies.

Unfortunately, the occupant of the Office of the President Elect appears to not understand what businessmen do. And so I expect to see a series of silly discrimination suits in the future. Which, ironically, will do nothing but farther raise the cost of employing anyone, which will do nothing to raise women's salaries, but will help to depress everyone's wages.

Then again, impoverishing everyone is one way to make pay disparities disappear. If he can sue companies tot he point where we all make minimum wage, at least pay equality will be achieved.

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1. Just to start this one off offending someone, I don't believe the word "gender" applies to humans. Gender is a linguistic construct, while sex is related to living beings. Some fields have tried to use "gender" to apply to sex difference where they do not involve procreation, to "remove the charge" using the word "sex" provokes. I think such usage is pointless, and obscures the fact that sexual matters, matters relating to procreation, can be at the root of many "gender difference". By using "gender" they try to pretend any differences are purely social constructs, without any rationale. In other words, "gender" represents a subtle effort to beg the feminist question and declare from the outset that there is no practical reason for "gender differences".

2. A similar argument always puzzled me about mental illness. You will hear for supposedly "knowledgeable" laymen things such as  "OCD is a chemical change in the brain, so you must treat it with drugs." However, that statement ignores that thoughts themselves are "chemical" or "electrochemical" changes in the brain. If I am happy it is a chemical change in the brain. So why must I use drugs to treat these problems? I can change from being happy to sad (or the reverse) without chemicals, though it changes the chemical composition of my brain, why should I need drugs to change some other chemical state? It seems to be giving inordinate power to chemistry and very little to volition to argue that way. It also seems to show a lack of knowledge about the nature of thought, and the way the brain functions.

3. Actually, academics are sometimes confused by this question themselves. While they are ardently against the idea of genetic or biological sex differences in the context of differences between men and women, they sometimes slip and proclaim just such differences in other contexts.

4. This term may need some clarification. Academics often use "equivalent jobs", and base it on educational needs or other non-economic criteria. That is wrong. The same education does not get the same pay. A guy with a high school diploma can earn $20 million per year in pro baseball, and a man with postdoctoral work in Chaucer can earn $7 per hour working at Hot Topic. Pay is based solely on expect value to the enterprise, so this "equivalent job" nonsense is meaningless. The only fair measure is the return expected per employee hour, and that is never used in these studies.

5. A few very large companies, and perhaps a few astute smaller firms, may actually have actuaries who figure out all these costs. Far more likely, the industry as a whole simply reacts to events, and the prevailing wage is the sum total of these reactions. As sexual harassment suits make the news, women's wages drop 2 cents, as maternity leave is mandated by law, wages drop 3 cents. As maternity leave extends to 6 weeks by law wages drop another 3 cents, and so on. And thus all these factors are incorporated without anyone being aware they are there. And yet academic researchers without any background int he industry expect to come form the outside and understand immediately all the factors which could account for wage disparities between the sexes? Seems a bit arrogant to me.

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UPDATE 01/11/2008 8:40 PM Eastern: Sorry to those who read this post, I just realized I did not include one link I intended to in this post. I am going back now and finding all the articles I intended to link. It should be corrected shortly.