Tag: sex differences

A Four-Day Workweek Will Benefit Everyone, But Especially Women

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://jacobin.com/2022/03/four-day-workweek-trial-gender-pension-gap

Excerpt:

A four-day week would make it easier to balance life and work responsibilities. This would decrease the pressure on women to drop out of full-time employment and make it easier for others to rejoin full-time employment if they wish. It would also decrease underemployment, lessen the costs of paid childcare, and help level the playing field for unpaid care work by keeping men at home longer.

A recent policy paper published by the Women’s Budget Group comments in regard to a four-day week: “As the marginal worker is usually female, this effect could reduce gender gaps in both employment and income.” As the definition of full-time employment is decreased, more women will surpass the £10,000 a year threshold for autoenrollment and also have higher sustained pension contributions throughout their working life.

Belmont Packaging in Wigan, a company that practices a four-day week, asked its employees how they spend their three-day weekend. One employee said, “It’s like a bank holiday every week. Not exactly like one, because the wife has me doing chores every Friday.” During the early months of the pandemic, when many workers were kept at home, research showed that men took on a greater share of housework and women’s disproportionate burden decreased.

Author(s): James Derry

Publication Date: 25 March 2022

Publication Site: Jacobin

When Harry Fired Sally: The Double Standard in Punishing Misconduct

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/718964

Abstract:

We examine gender differences in misconduct punishment in the financial advisory industry. There is a “gender punishment gap”: following an incident of misconduct, female advisers are 20% more likely to lose their jobs and 30% less likely to find new jobs, relative to male advisers. The gender punishment gap is not driven by gender differences in occupation, productivity, nature of misconduct, or recidivism. The gap in hiring and firing dissipates at firms with a greater percentage of female managers and executives. We also explore the differential treatment of ethnic minority men and find similar patterns of “in-group” tolerance.

Author(s): Mark Egan, Gregor Matvos, and Amit Seru

Publication Date: May 2022

Publication Site: Journal of Political Economy; Volume 130, Number 5

Looking Beyond Sex

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://theactuarymagazine.org/looking-beyond-sex/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

With nonbinary genders recognized on legal documents, customers are beginning to ask for forms and applications to include nonbinary options as well—so they’re not forced into a false selection. Even so, a person still could make an inaccurate selection. A customer falsely selecting a nonbinary gender is slightly less risky for the insurance company than selecting a false binary gender, as nonbinary rates are likely to fall somewhere between male and female to ensure they’re not discriminatory.

In the end, providing false information on an insurance application is fraudulent activity regardless of the question. Many of the states that include nonbinary gender markers on birth certificates and/or driver’s licenses already require the individual to sign an affidavit stating that they are not changing their gender marker for a fraudulent purpose. The benefits of including options for nonbinary customers and the potential for more accurate risk evaluations hopefully will outweigh a possible increase in fraudulent activity.

Author(s): Erin Sheriff

Publication Date: July 2020

Publication Site: The Actuary, SOA

COVID-19 pandemic causes ‘broken heart’ syndrome cases to surge: researchers

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.foxnews.com/health/broken-heart-cases-surge-covid-pandemic-especially-women-researchers?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=twitter

Excerpt:

Research has reportedly identified a spike in cases of Takotsubo cardiomyopathy, or “broken heart syndrome,” over the course of the coronavirus pandemic. 

Experts said the potentially fatal stress-induced heart condition is disproportionately affecting women.

“I don’t know how much we can really blame COVID, or how much of this is that we’re just recognizing more of it,” Dr. Noel Bairey Merz, director of the Barbra Streisand Heart Center at Cedars-Sinai in Los Angeles, told “Good Morning America” on Monday. “But, heart disease is the leading killer of women and all ages, including teenagers, midlife women and older women. This is just a component of that major killer. So, it’s really something that needs to be addressed.”

Merz said one in five of those who suffer from the heart-brain disorder will have another attack within a decade.

In an October news release, Cedars-Sinai shared Smidt Heart Institute research published in the Journal of the American Heart Association, which suggests that middle-aged and older women are being diagnosed up to 10 times more often than younger women or men of any age.

The study suggested that the condition has become more common, with incidences rising since well before coronavirus swept the globe. 

Author(s): Julia Musto

Publication Date: 8 Feb 2022

Publication Site: Fox News

Swiss man changes gender to retire and receive his pension a year earlier

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://rmx.news/switzerland/swiss-man-changes-gender-to-retire-and-receive-his-pension-a-year-earlier/

Excerpt:

A man in Switzerland has exploited an administrative loophole and formally changed his gender in order to retire a year earlier, it has emerged.

New rules introduced on Jan. 1 enable any Swiss resident with the “intimate conviction” that they do not belong to the sex they are registered as in the civil status register can apply to change their gender, in addition to their first name, for just 75 Swiss francs (€72).

And it took just four days for the system to be taken advantage of with Swiss daily Luzerner Zeitung reporting that a man from Lucerne applied to change his gender so that he could receive his state pension at the Swiss retirement age for women of 64, a year earlier than men.

While there are regulations supposedly in place to prevent individuals from making “manifestly abusive” applications, there is in reality “no obligation” on the part of civil servants to “verify the intimate conviction of the persons concerned” and the sincerity of the applicant is presumed in accordance with the principle of good faith.

Author(s): John Cody

Publication Date: 30 Jan 2022

Publication Site: Remix News

Men left behind

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://allisonschrager.substack.com/p/known-unknowns-27b

Excerpt:

The economy is still short 4.2 million jobs, but as the virus (hopefully) recedes and remaining restrictions are lifted, these trends should continue. The labor market is on the road to recovery—or the cyclical piece of it is, anyway. But during each recession we see many prime-age men leave the labor force and never come back. This was the case during the last recession, too. Prime male labor force participation is still down nearly 1 percentage point from pre-pandemic levels, and this poses huge costs to the economy because a large number of productive workers are simply sitting out. This is terrible for social reasons as well, because work is important to feeling productive, for increasing stability, for marriage, and being fully productive members of society.

This is a difficult economic problem that falls under the category of “structural,” which means that the Fed’s tools are not well-equipped to deal with it. Even with a tight labor market and rising wages, men are simply not working.

Instead, we need to think more creatively and just fix what’s broken. The common answer is that some of this is driven by a skill mismatch and that there just aren’t many good jobs for men without a college degree. I’m not sure that’s true, it’s very hard to find a good plumber or electrician, which are very well-paying jobs that don’t require a college degree. But they do require skills and training. Community college is often the answer we are given, but it has a terrible track record, primarily because it’s trying to paper over a bigger problem, namely the terrible quality of secondary school, which often fails to properly educate our teenagers. It seems like if we really wanted to keep men from leaving the labor market, this is the low-hanging fruit. Many people drop out of community college, but high school graduation rates are at record highs (or at least they were pre-pandemic). We can raise standards and accountability and fund more vocational high schools. However, tech education has become less popular from the 1980s to 2013, even if the skills are still in quite high demand.

Author(s): Allison Schrager

Publication Date: 7 Feb 2022

Publication Site: Known unknowns

Women Consistently Earn Less Than Men

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/01/gender-pay-gap-widens-as-women-age.html

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Women are over-represented in lower paying jobs and, as they age, the pay gap widens even more.

The U.S. Census Bureau’s Quarterly Workforce Indicators (QWI) shows the pay and age dynamic of women and men. Here, we looked at workers ages 35-44.

According to the QWI data based on unemployment insurance wage records for the third quarter of 2020 (the most recent national data), women in the United States earned 30% less than men and that pay gap increased with age.

….

QWI Explorer provides easy access to national data on earnings of women and men. Figure 1 shows a gap in monthly wages of almost $4,000 for women compared to men with a bachelor’s or advanced degree.

Author(s):EARLENE K.P. DOWELL

Publication Date: 27 Jan 2022

Publication Site: U.S. Census Bureau

Movember Fundraising: Men and Suicide

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://marypatcampbell.substack.com/p/movember-fundraising-men-and-suicide

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Let’s look at the rate trend for those over age 55 — the suicide death rates in 2019 are lower than they were in 1968. There has been an improvement.

But under age 55, we have a different story.

Indeed, from age 25 to 64, we see a flattening of the suicide death rate, as we have a rate in 1968 which was fairly low rising up to a level similar to that of much older men.

As I’ve said about other mortality trends — in many cases, I can’t tell you why this is happening. I don’t know. I can just see that it is happening. And I would like to do something about it.

Author(s):Mary Pat Campbell

Publication Date: 30 Nov 2021

Publication Site: STUMP at substack

An Unsolved Mystery: Why Do More Men Die of Covid-19?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/02/opinion/men-covid-19-deaths.html

Excerpt:

Men are much more likely than women to die of Covid-19 and are more likely to be intubated and have long hospitalizations. This disparity in Covid-related deaths has existed since early in the pandemic, before there were any vaccines. Men are also more likely to develop certain rare complications from some Covid-19 vaccines and to experience a faster decline in measures of immunity once vaccinated. The reasons remain unclear.

Historically, women have been largely excluded from medical studies, and health issues that predominantly affect women have been underresearched. This is both morally wrong and medically foolish because it limits physicians’ ability to deliver optimal care. Rather than ignore sex differences in Covid-19 outcomes, scientists should pay attention to them to better understand the disease and how to treat it.

Data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in the United States, women account for 45.6 percent of Covid-19 deaths so far and men account for 54.4 percent. (Men make up slightly less than half the U.S. population.) Among Americans ages 65 to 84 — the group at highest risk for severe Covid-19 — the gap is even larger: 57.9 percent of deaths have occurred among men and 42.1 percent among women. According to the Brookings Institution, at least 65,000 more men than women have died of Covid-19 in the United States. Globally, the death rate has been about 50 percent higher for men.

A July 2021 study found that compared to women, men with Covid-19 had an almost 50 percent higher rate of respiratory intubation and a 22 percent longer hospital stay.

Author(s): Ezekiel Emanuel

Publication Date: 2 Nov 2021

Publication Site: New York Times

Details in BLS report suggest that the ‘gender earnings gap’ can be explained by age, marital status, children, hours worked, etc.

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/details-in-bls-report-suggest-that-the-gender-earnings-gap-can-be-explained-by-age-marital-status-children-hours-worked-etc/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Let’s investigate the claim that the gender pay gap is a result of discrimination by looking at some of the data on wages and hours worked by gender and by marital status and age in the BLS report for 2020:

….

Comment: Because men work more hours on average than women, some of the raw earnings gap naturally disappears just by simply controlling for the number of hours worked per week, an important factor not even mentioned by groups like the National Committee on Pay Equity. For example, women earned 82.3% of median male earnings for all workers working 35 hours per week or more in 2020, for a raw, unadjusted pay gap of 17.7% for all full-time workers. But for those workers with a 40-hour workweek (more than three-quarters of all full-time female workers), women earned 87.4% of median male earnings, for a smaller pay gap of only 12.6% (see chart and Table 1). Therefore, once we control only for one variable – hours worked – and compare men and women both working 40-hours per week in 2020, almost one-third (5.1 percentage points) of the raw 17.7% pay gap reported by the BLS for full-time workers disappears.

….

Bottom Line: When the BLS reports that women working full-time in 2020 earned 82.3% of what men earned working full-time, that is very much different from saying that women earned 82.3% of what men earned for doing exactly the same work while working the exact same number of hours in the same occupation, with exactly the same educational background and exactly the same years of continuous, uninterrupted work experience, and with exactly the same marital and family (e.g., number of children) status. As shown above, once we start controlling individually for the many relevant factors that affect earnings, e.g., hours worked, age, marital status, and having children, most of the raw earnings differential disappears. In a more comprehensive study that controlled for all of the relevant variables simultaneously, we would likely find that those variables would account for nearly 100% of the unadjusted, raw earnings differential of 17.7% for women’s earnings compared to men as reported by the BLS. Discrimination, to the extent that it does exist, would likely account for a very small portion of the raw 17.7% gender earnings gap.

Author(s): Mark J. Perry

Publication Date: 22 Oct 2021

Publication Site: AEI

Here’s the Gender Pay Gap at 10,000 U.K. Employers

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-uk-gender-pay-gap/

Graphic:

Excerpt:

Women in finance in the U.K. still make significantly less than men. While the gender pay gap at financial firms in the country narrowed slightly last year, overall the industry continues to have the biggest disparity.

Men working in finance and insurance made 25% more than women last year, down from 28% in 2019, a Bloomberg News analysis of government data shows. The pay gap is especially wide in investment banking, where some of the highest-paid employees work.

It is the fourth straight year that finance has led the industry rankings, showing that executives are finding it difficult to shrink the gap. Mining and quarrying had the second-biggest pay gap at 23% as the commodity boom boosted the income of workers, who are largely male.

Author(s): Neil Callahan

Publication Date: 6 Oct 2021

Publication Site: Bloomberg