Tag: sex differences

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

Quantifying impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic through life-expectancy losses: a population-level study of 29 countries

Mary Pat Campbell

Link:https://academic.oup.com/ije/advance-article/doi/10.1093/ije/dyab207/6375510

Graphic:

Life expectancy at birth (age 0, left panel) and at age 60 years (right panel) by country and sex, in 2015, 2019 and 2020. Estimates for females (red), males (blue), 2015 (|), 2019 (+), 2020 (○). Countries are sorted from highest to lowest levels of female life expectancy at birth in 2019. *Estimates for Chile, Greece and Germany were available from 2016. All data points are provided in a table in Supplementary File 2, available as Supplementary data at IJE online. An interactive version of this visualization is available at https://covid19.demographicscience.ox.ac.uk/lifeexpectancy.

Abstract:

Background

Variations in the age patterns and magnitudes of excess deaths, as well as differences in population sizes and age structures, make cross-national comparisons of the cumulative mortality impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic challenging. Life expectancy is a widely used indicator that provides a clear and cross-nationally comparable picture of the population-level impacts of the pandemic on mortality.Methods

Life tables by sex were calculated for 29 countries, including most European countries, Chile and the USA, for 2015–2020. Life expectancy at birth and at age 60 years for 2020 were contextualized against recent trends between 2015 and 2019. Using decomposition techniques, we examined which specific age groups contributed to reductions in life expectancy in 2020 and to what extent reductions were attributable to official COVID-19 deaths.Results

Life expectancy at birth declined from 2019 to 2020 in 27 out of 29 countries. Males in the USA and Lithuania experienced the largest losses in life expectancy at birth during 2020 (2.2 and 1.7 years, respectively), but reductions of more than an entire year were documented in 11 countries for males and 8 among females. Reductions were mostly attributable to increased mortality above age 60 years and to official COVID-19 deaths.Conclusions

The COVID-19 pandemic triggered significant mortality increases in 2020 of a magnitude not witnessed since World War II in Western Europe or the breakup of the Soviet Union in Eastern Europe. Females from 15 countries and males from 10 ended up with lower life expectancy at birth in 2020 than in 2015.

Author(s): José Manuel Aburto, Jonas Schöley, Ilya Kashnitsky, Luyin Zhang, Charles Rahal, Trifon I Missov, Melinda C Mills, Jennifer B Dowd, Ridhi Kashyap

Publication Date: 26 Sept 2021

Publication Site: International Journal of Epidemiology

Vote to increase Swiss retirement age clears signature hurdle

Mary Pat Campbell
Vote to increase Swiss retirement age clears signature hurdle

Excerpt:

The youth chapter of the PLR (FDP) has successfully collected enough signatures for an initiative to raise the official retirement age in Switzerland to 66 years old, reported RTS.

On 16 July 2021, initiative organisers submitted 145,000 voter signatures as part of the formal process of launching a referendum in Switzerland. Under referendum rules a minimum of 100,000 valid signatures must be collected within 18 months.

The official retirement age in Switzerland is currently 65 for men and 64 for women, although the government recently passed laws to create a universal retirement age of 65 for both men and women. The federal government also agreed to increase VAT up to 8% to help improve pension system finances.

The perilous state of Switzerland’s state pension system is well known. People are living longer and the nation’s population is ageing, leaving fewer working-age tax payers to fund the pensions of a rising number of retirees. Without reform a funding shortfall of CHF 200 billion is forecast over the next 25 years.

Publication Date: 23 July 2021

Publication Site: Le News

Unions contest pension reform plans with Bern demonstration

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/unions-contest-pension-reform-plans-with-bern-demonstration/46959184

Excerpt:

Thousands marched in Bern on Saturday against a proposed reforms of the Swiss old-age pension scheme, notably the plan to raise the retirement age for women from 64 to 65.

The demonstration, which was authorised by Bern authorities, was attended by some 15,000 people, according to the trade unions who organised it; the police have not (yet) released estimates.

The protest took place under the slogan “hands off our pensions”, and was clearly aimed at parliamentarians currently discussing an overhaul of the country’s three-pillar system.

A press release by the Trade Union Federation said that the current pension system is “no longer enough to live on” and that politicians should be raising payments rather than trying to cut them; as for making women work a year longer, this is a non-runner, it says, given the years of part-time and unpaid work they do during their active lives.

Publication Date: 18 Sept 2021

Publication Site: Swiss Info

SYSTEMIC DISCRIMINATION AMONG LARGE U.S. EMPLOYERS

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://eml.berkeley.edu//~crwalters/papers/randres.pdf

Graphic:

Abstract:

We study the results of a massive nationwide correspondence experiment sending more than
83,000 fictitious applications with randomized characteristics to geographically dispersed jobs
posted by 108 of the largest U.S. employers. Distinctively Black names reduce the probability of
employer contact by 2.1 percentage points relative to distinctively white names. The magnitude
of this racial gap in contact rates differs substantially across firms, exhibiting a between-company
standard deviation of 1.9 percentage points. Despite an insignificant average gap in contact rates
between male and female applicants, we find a between-company standard deviation in gender
contact gaps of 2.7 percentage points, revealing that some firms favor male applicants while
others favor women. Company-specific racial contact gaps are temporally and spatially persistent,
and negatively correlated with firm profitability, federal contractor status, and a measure of
recruiting centralization. Discrimination exhibits little geographical dispersion, but two digit
industry explains roughly half of the cross-firm variation in both racial and gender contact gaps.
Contact gaps are highly concentrated in particular companies, with firms in the top quintile of
racial discrimination responsible for nearly half of lost contacts to Black applicants in the
experiment. Controlling false discovery rates to the 5% level, 23 individual companies are found
to discriminate against Black applicants. Our findings establish that systemic illegal
discrimination is concentrated among a select set of large employers, many of which can be
identified with high confidence using large scale inference methods.

Author(s): Patrick M. Kline, Evan K. Rose, and Christopher R. Walters

Publication Date: July 2021, Revised August 2021

Publication Site: NBER Working Papers, also Christopher R. Walters’s own webpages

What’s Keeping Women Out of the Workforce?

Mary Pat Campbell

Link: https://www.city-journal.org/government-policies-keeping-women-out-of-workforce

Excerpt:

Since last winter, 1.8 million women have left the labor force entirely—neither working nor looking for work. At first, closed schools and the high cost of child-care options seemed responsible. But economists who have crunched the numbers argue that closed schools can’t explain higher female unemployment. Women with young children make up only 12 percent of the labor force and were only slightly more likely to leave the labor force than were women without young children. The exception? Women with young children who don’t hold college degrees—they constitute only 6 percent of the labor force but saw the biggest drop in employment. Their employment rate has fallen by almost eight percentage points since the pandemic started.

This suggests that women aren’t working for various reasons. For most families, several factors—child-care options, how much a given job will pay, and their partner’s employment prospects—determine whether they will decide to return to work. Rarely in economics does a single cause explain a phenomenon; policies often affect behavior on the margins. If you’re struggling to find good, affordable child care and you are being paid more to stay at home, that extra factor can tip the scales.

Indeed, several current policies seem to be discouraging women from returning to work.

Author(s): Allison Schrager

Publication Date: 15 June 2021

Publication Site: City Journal