The problem with anything written about this topic is that 99% of the time, ideology comes first and the goal of the writer is to either be pro-women, or anti-feminist. It's never a balanced view.
Pew's analysis seems pretty balanced. They looked only at young people who work full-time. Within this demographic:
16% - are in metro areas where women earn parity to men, or up to 20% more than men.
47% - are in metro areas where women earn 90-99% of what men earn.
37% - are in metro areas where women earn <90% of men.
It also notes that men work 4-5% longer hours than women.
What it doesn't dare to touch (I don't blame them) are gender roles and proclivities. Questions like: how much of this is due to men being on average more competitive, and valuing career/financial success more than women do? How much of it is due to women prioritizing family over work? How much of it is due to the professions each gender gravitates toward?
Those questions are all based on pretty well established observational data, but people find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that gender roles exist and men and women continue to have very different preferences about how to live their lives, despite over a century of feminism. I think it's because one camp fundamentally believes that these preferences should be eradicated and the other believes they are natural and acceptable.
I think your questions at the end are super important ones, and it's frustrating that they are far less commonly discussed; presumably because it's very easy for a person to be called sexist by even bringing up the idea.
> How much of it is due to the professions each gender gravitates toward
I think it is even more interesting and complicated than that, too. Assuming that "women tend to more commonly take roles that pay less", you can ask the followup question of whether those roles pay less _because_ women traditionally fill them. Is cause and effect one way, the other way, or both ways?
Overall, it is a REALLY interesting topic. It is also, however, one where it's very easy to start out having an innocent conversation and accidentally turn out being considered "the bad guy". So it's a hard conversation to have widely.
> Assuming that "women tend to more commonly take roles that pay less", you can ask the followup question of whether those roles pay less _because_ women traditionally fill them. Is cause and effect one way, the other way, or both ways?
Men have been seen to be more sensitive to changes in wages and to generally leave professions faster when wages are dropping. Men tend to also rush to professions when wages are suddenly rising. Since wages can change to external factors, there does seem to indicate the order of the cause and effect.
It would be interesting to know if the same could be said about work hours. If you extend work hours (overtime), do women tend to leave the profession, and if you reduce it (like 4 day work week) do women rush to that profession?
A broader question is to ask if it is really optimal to favour super-competitive workaholics. It is possible that for many organisations people who are more cooperative and want a good work life balance actually make more effective managers.
If a cat makes it into a den full of mice, those mice are going to die. There's no favoritism, it's just how reality works.
People who work harder have a strong tendency to be more successful at the thing they're working at. This is just as true for the high school athlete that puts in 4 extra hours on the weekend as it is for the person working 60-80 hours/week.
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And if I may, this is a major problem. Society has been built such that many people have been able to successfully exist without an innate acceptable of reality. They've been able to do this because they've never had to actually contend with what it means to poke a bear (hint: you'll get eaten) and over time its colored their view of everything as being negotiable (with little to no respect for reality).
But just as smoking crack for years on end has certain realities that you cannot get away with, people working harder than you also has certain realities (such as them giving up family time but making more money).
And very good point about the Overton window aspect of this issue. There's a large number of things in this world that might potentially be improved but people aren't allowed to discuss the problems or solutions freely.
> Those questions are all based on pretty well established observational data, but people find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that gender roles exist and men and women continue to have very different preferences about how to live their lives, despite over a century of feminism. I think it's because one camp fundamentally believes that these preferences should be eradicated and the other believes they are natural and acceptable.
You are forgetting there's no experiment controlling for culture. Naturally, laws and cultural habits don't change in lock step, the latter not even equally over all in a particular cultural zone. It is therefore to be expected that ingrained habits disappear only slowly over the generations. This should not be seen as validation of the existence of gender roles. Nor is it even about that (I know politicians try to make it about identity, it's the easiest way to rile up a base). It is about enabling all sorts of habits. Those gender roles you refer to are not and were not shared by all, and those people are thankful for change.
> but people find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that gender roles exist and men and women continue to have very different preferences about how to live their lives, despite over a century of feminism.
TBH I don't think anybody is uncomfortable acknowledging this as "a thing". The issues arise when there are people saying that it's biological and it is how it is because women and men are inherently different while others say it is due to society, beliefs and costumes.
There's absolutely a biological component and it's discussed openly and freely until politics are introduced, at which point mentioning it becomes taboo.
Without even getting into genetics, we have mountains of empirical evidence that sex hormones influence behavior. E.g. if you suppress or increase someone's testosterone, you'll tend to see their level of aggression change. If you administer cross-sex hormone therapy to a transgender person, their behavior will tend to change. Doctors are well aware of all this and tell their patients about it because doing so is important for the patient's well-being.
We've done brain scans of people who are exposed to changes in their sex hormone balance, and found that it physically changes the brain, some parts get bigger, some get smaller.
None of this is to suggest that you should be locked into a certain role in life because of your sex. But it's equally damaging to deny that biology has any role in your personality, because if you do, you're setting yourself up for a lifetime of internal conflict.
This polarity of masculine vs feminine behavior is real and biological. That doesn't mean there isn't a great deal of overlap - some women are predisposed to act more masculine, and some men are predisposed to act more feminine. Which is all fine, as a society we should never deny people access to opportunities because of their biological makeup.
But the poles are absolutely real and at least partially rooted in biology. The recent trend of trying to deny their existence, or claim that they're fabricated by patriarchal power structures or whatever, is anti-science.
The trouble with science around sex hormones is that people both in the past and present tend run with a conclusion even when science has proven the conclusion to be false. Sex hormones in generally do not do what people think it does.
People have done studies where they have increase someone's testosterone (within human levels) and observed if there was any changes in aggressive behavior. It was proven repeatably to not cause any change. This caused a bit of surprise among researchers and resulted in a new theory called challenge hypothesis, but popular opinion still believe the old theory that testosterone increase aggression. An even older theory thought estrogen to cause emotional hysteria, and a mountain of research illustrated how wrong that was.
To make a car comparison, how much oil is being pumped in a car has a direct relation to how fast it is going. If it has zero oil the speed of the car is likely to go to zero. Oil is required to reach high speeds (or rather high rpm), and oil has a correlation to speed. Oil has a direct effect on most part of the engine. Oil doesn't however cause high speed, and increasing the oil does not make the car go faster.
The challenge hypothesis still describes a relationship between testosterone and aggression that is exclusive to males; it just turned out to be a little more complex than "more T always equals more aggression."
It still proves my point. This is a biological feature exclusive to males which influences their behavior. Biological sex influences behavior.
It is not exclusive to males. It work just as effective on females. Since females start out with significant lower (but not zero) levels of testosterone, changes in levels actually have larger impact on females.
I don't disagree that biological sex influences behavior. What is important however is that what people think it does is generally not what it actually do. To take estrogen as an example, too much or too little do have a link to mental instability. It is very hard however to defined exactly what estrogen do as a biological influencer. As with testosterone and aggression, estrogen does not cause women to go crazy. When people believe that hormones has that kind of effect the outcome tend to be bad, as well as being anti-science.
Testosterone levels in males rises after gaining social status. High testosterone levels in turn increase calorie usages that goes towards behavior which correlated to maintaining and defending existing levels of social status. In some cultures there is a correlation between both gaining social status and maintaining social status with aggression. How should one then describe the biological relation between testosterone and aggression?
One could simplify and say that testosterone has a bias in our culture towards aggression and estrogen has a bias towards mental illness, but even that would likely not be helpful in explaining difference in behavior between men and women.
In the United States, for example, the non-adjusted average woman's annual salary is 79% of the average man's salary, compared to 95% for the adjusted average salary.
The word "reward" here is doing some heavy lifting, especially since the above comment don't include it.
Who is doing the rewarding and what is the reward? Is getting higher wages for doing longer hours at work a reward? Are vacation days rewards? Is it a reward to get higher paid if you do a night shift compared to a day shift?
You forgot “how much is it due to women in many households are forced to take more than their fair share of household work for which they do not get paid, which prevents them from having the ability to work as intensely or as long at their paid job”
Edit: Oof looks really bad on users of a predominantly male site that that factual observation is downvoted.
Okay, that confirms that the downvotes are out of denial because it’s undeniably and clearly relevant as a reply to the quoted major portion of the parent comment shown below
> “ What it doesn't dare to touch (I don't blame them) are gender roles and proclivities. Questions like: how much of this is due to men being on average more competitive, and valuing career/financial success more than women do? How much of it is due to women prioritizing family over work? How much of it is due to the professions each gender gravitates toward?”
Tangentially related, but I'm posting it here because it's an interesting phenomena in my country, so I'm wondering how is it in other countries:
You know how usually someone posts interesting job vacancy on LinkedIn, and many people comment or like it?
In some cases it's the other way around. Very attractive female fresh grads post on LinkedIn saying "Hey I need job", and the post got popular. The post itself usually is the cover letter (like "To HR:"), accompanied by her photo (it's typical in job application to attach portrait photo).
I think superficially, that statement might be true.
The caveat is that it's not an apples-to-apples comparison, and indeed the mistake a lot of people make is to imply (or outright say) that this means women are paid 30% less for the same work.
But strictly literal, what you call "superficial", truth is bad in itself. If someone were to publish "X, who's been called a paedophile by some" or "of Y origin, an ethnic group some claim has a reduced IQ/less hygiene/eats foetuses for breakfast", would you shrug and say "yeah, some would say that"?
In general, there's more to text than the literal meaning. Text suggests, and an institution like the BBC knows that.
I dont know, people are paid what they ask weighted down by what can be given for the same work on the market.
If women were accepting less pay, you d have entire corporations trying to get rid of men to make room for cheaper women.
The reality must be that women and men gravitate towards different jobs and different hours per week.
The good thing is that most men and women can unite and create a balance to average their revenue across a couple.
My wife is paid more than me but she's doing a job I cant do and she wouldnt even consider doing mine... like, is that bad ? Hard to say, we just balance it out.
I was about to say the writer doesn't seem to have been very careful with their words but then I checked the article and you have been very careless with your quoting because the entire next paragraph is very relevant the income of mothers.
Did you not read that far or did you choose to not include it for a reason?
You deliberately selectively quoted this article in order to advance your own personal agenda. That is the problem that causes misinformation to spread – not this article, where the statement you quoted is immediately followed by further discussion of that estimate and what might affect it.
This is a great example of why no article covering this topic can be discussed sensibly on this site – because of bad-faith comments like this.
The paragraph directly following reinforces the statement, doesn't discuss it, and implicitly widens it to all women. The rest of the text repeats the "x cents to the dollar" meme. I don't think that was bad faith.
The only personal agenda I have is pointing out staggering hypocrisy and when someone claims to be the arbiter of truth, it is my duty to hold them to it.
I would act in exactly the same way if they were claiming the reason they perceive women to be paid less is because they are less intelligent "by some estimates"[1], but I have a strong suspicion they wouldn't do that. In my view, it is the same principle being broken in both examples and all I desire is treating them consistently.
> But in 22 of the 250 metros examined in the analysis, women’s salaries are on par or better. Why do women out-earn men in highly specific areas of the US – and do promising figures in certain areas mean the wage gap could be slowly closing?
Which makes it clear that parent is trying to flame bait.
Also the GP is just a misunderstanding of what it means for the wage gap to close. It should be equally as likely that a woman makes more than a man in a given position than the reverse.
Finding cases where women out earn men is promising because if all things were equal that’s to be expected sometimes. If across location, time, and field about half the time women make more and vice versa then we’re doing great.
Closing the wage gap doesn’t mean “when you control for a bunch of stuff women make the same as men” that’s closing the unexplained gap. It means women as a as a whole make the same as men as a whole.
From my experience, young attractive women in sales jobs often do very well. A very common job in this case is waitress. Attractive women are able to vastly out earn the generally men working in the kitchen, by bringing food to a table and looking pretty.
Other sales roles have similar gender wage gaps.
And then there is Only Fans and sex work.
When it comes to some types of employment, most men just can't compete on looks with young attractive women.
Do you mean that sex is a product of a degenerate society? I'm not sure I can read your comment any other way, and it's interesting to see one comment say "it's amazing how quickly we've become accepting" and the reply being "we degenerated long before that".
You make it sound like most of the women making money on the site aren’t pretty thrilled they can print money by posting pictures on the internet?
Safe, legal, and easily monetizable sex work is a boon for young pretty women. Attractive men don’t generally have that avenue available to them, for example as a way to pay for college.
The sex work often is at the cost of other things. We might have something relatively safe and financially good for some women. However - this is taking lots of money from men who are unable to attract women. They’re taking money from men they’d never interact with.
I’m not really sure it’s a boon for society. It’s purely to placate lonely men who are unable to get a partner. I don’t know any men who pay for onlyfans content and have a partner.
I think widespread sex work is a failure of society and I’m pro-sex work. It usually means you’ve failed men and commoditized sex and relationships.
Is it really more widespread at this point in history than any other? Or just easier to measure the market size?
I wouldn’t lament that sex work being safe and profitable is bad for society. But I also don’t think OnlyFans is significantly inducing demand, and I wouldn’t describe this as “taking” money from lonely men, it seems like a fair economic exchange to me.
I don’t have the hard numbers but I think staying single, being alone (and lonely), are huge and growing issues in modern society.
The internet providing easy & cheap access to dopamine as a coping mechanism is probably better than increasing alcohol or drug use, but certainly isn’t a “good” thing. All of them of course have the potential for addictive and compulsive use.
I don’t see a problem with commoditizing sex when it’s outside the scope of a committed relationship. Not all sex is about meeting an emotional need, and that’s perfectly fine as long as it’s safe and consensual.
Young men are certainly being failed in many ways and seem to be quite lost in the culture wars. My unscientific opinion is that this is compounded by the many environmental toxins pushing down T levels, modern K-12 educational pedagogy catering heavily to girls, and societal change around masculinity and the increasing impossibility of celebrating male gender roles.
Very few men are going to sex work purely for the physical aspect. They’re going for an emotional component as well.
It’s a weird argument to say that the cure for incels is to socialize sex work. It’s not going to solve anything. Most men don’t want just sex - they want a relationship too.
The truth of the matter is that we’ve gone past women needing men - and in our current culture… most women don’t really want men regardless of their T levels or role models. They sometimes want the idea of a man (Instagram, TikTok, etc.) but they don’t want the reality.
I don’t think there’s any real cure for this except third spaces coming back and a deemphasis on our extremely commoditized and capitalistic ways. Neither of which will happen for the next 50 years.
It’s absolutely not a cure - it’s just a coping mechanism 100%.
I think most people do want a loving partner, if not more than one. Women definitely don’t “need a man” in the historical sense that they couldn’t really survive and be a respected part of the community without one.
Pregnancy, childbirth, and raising children in a nuclear family is still pretty essential for a lot of people, although it can happen a lot later in life now, so there’s a large window in their 20s for women now where they will often outearn and outperform males their age, which certainly makes those men less attractive.
In the context of prostitution, the bed should be seen as a sacrificial stone. People often 'choose' this work - sacrifice themselves - because they can care for aging, ill family in ways that would otherwise not be possible.
Sex work irreparably destroys one's ability to desire or enjoy intimacy. A core function of what it means to be human is completely erased.
Through first hand experience, I have gone from being completely pro-sex work to now viewing it as an evil industry.
Imagine government-run employment agency setting you up for a job interview at the brothel. And if you refuse that interview you lose your unemployment benefits, because you turned down perfectly legal job... That's reality for women in Germany, for example.
I'm not religious and I still find the notion that society has just accepted people selling OF like content as degenerate. Far more degenerate than pornography because what they're selling is a parasocial relationship that also keys into the sexual brain bait that pornography does.
It's not a stretch to observe society as degenerating when we have continuously normalized blatantly degenerate behavior with clear harm to younger members of society.
You'd need whole lot more prevention and education for that choice to be made. OF is full or barely legal teens who just see the "quick money printing" aspect of it but it obviously have a much broader impact, especially psychologically
It's no all black or white but let's not treat OF as the next best thing after running water, I wouldn't be surprised if it was, as many other websites (social medias cue), a net negative when you start looking at the broad/long term impact
As always with tech, what was once ok at a small scale doesn't necessarily stays ok when it becomes a world wide "1-click" away phenomenon accessible to virtually anyone over the age of 12 with half a brain
That may be, I admit I've never been on it. It's just a bit of a red flag to me when people stigmatize sex work, because sex workers have a hard enough time as it is.
The article clearly points out education being the common denominator in areas they are talking about with data. Your anecdote about attractive women earning more has less weight IMO compared to the data presented in the article
If both statements are true then that mean that women are choosing to not go into sales jobs despite being offered higher wages than men.
This should lead us to ask the two following questions. A) Why are men choosing to go into sales if they are offered less than women for the same work? B) Are there other intrinsic values that sale jobs include or is not included that influence the job decision?
I remember one salesman I talked to at an old job said he would team up with a woman he called "The Onion" because of the shape of her rear end, and he was able to close a lot of deals with her. So perhaps this is a place where a diverse team is more effective.
While attractive women get more tips (according to some research), I'm not convinced they necessarily bring in more money to the restaurant owner, in general. Certain types of bars are probably an exception though.
Either way I'm not really sure that counts as a sales job in a more general sense.
> women are able to vastly out earn the generally men working in the kitchen
This isn’t because women outsell men or because of the attractiveness of a waitress. It’s because waitstaff are tipped and back of house employees (generally) are not.
> young attractive women in sales jobs often do very well
There is lots of research showing that the more attractive the customers find waitress the more they get tipped. Even straight women seem to tip attractive waitresses more.
Much as I'd like to stay out of this thread, I can't resist - that average includes both male and female account owners (of unknown distribution) right? (You haven't said otherwise.) So what does that say about GP's argument?
I don't doubt this and I do reckon the average creator on OnlyFans makes a lot less than you'd think, especially from the outliers, but I'd be curious as to how this was calculated. I suspect there's a hell of a lot of inactive creators / ones with one or two followers for example.
Ironically, it’s probably the same problem that men faced in dating, a tiny percentage of the top get all the attention while the rest languishes.
Even more ironic, because I’m both cases it us about sex, and women control the sexual domain; women in both of these dynamics are squandering and running unrealized value.
These dynamics are at extreme civilization ending levels, as sooner of us will surely experience first hand, likely sooner than we may think, because the effects are extremely lagging because there are several phases that must be stepped through before the terminal state becomes apparent.
Those are common tropes in certain circles, but none of what you wrote is true as even a few moments of thinking about it analytically will confirm. For example, say that top 1% of attractive men are each maintaining 10 relationships - an absurdly high number - that might change things slightly for the top decile but does it really affect the median at all?
There are some people who push this for political or marketing reasons (think about how much money Andrew Tate or Jordan Petersen have made this way) but a lot of it depends on selectively ignoring the evidence. All of the men who I’ve heard talk like this have some combination of unrealistic expectations (Elon Musk can party with rock stars because his wealth is measured in hundreds of billions; J. Random IT Worker needs to bring more to the table) or, almost universally, being unwilling to accept that their attitudes and politics were the underlying cause. This can be tragic where you know women who are looking for men who won’t rape them or treat them like NPCs and men who are convinced that the problem is their lack of abs, and the latter spend all of their time hanging out with other men telling them to treat women as NPCs and only considering the hottest people they know.
That sounds much higher than I expected. I would expect the average OnlyFans account to make much much less than $150 over its lifetime. I wouldn't be surprised if the majority of users make less than $20 total.
The thing is, the males that succeed are like super, super talented - i suspect, much more so than their female counterpart, because otherwise, they cannot compete.
KaiCenat the guy is 21 and literally every time he let's music play it's overdriven.
He checks out tiktok profiles and plays popular games trolling all the time in a semi funny stereotypical black way on voice chat. I guess you either do or don't need talent for that.
That guy has over 85k subscribers. 85000×2.5=212500 so about 200 grand a month.
But all the biggest streamers are dudes? Like it’s not even close. You don’t hit a woman until #74. There’s definitely a market for PG-13 sex work in streaming and the most popular woman on Twitch is one of them but it’s definitely not more average viewers. She gets less than half the average viewers of the streamers close to her size, where she makes it up is that the people who do watch her watch her a lot.
Is that also considering hours streamed? I don't know how twitch works, but from what I can tell on the public video list, the top female streamer had like 100 hours streamed in the past 60 days, while the top male streamer did that much in the past week (don't ask me how ... is it a collective? multiple 23/24 hours streams?).
With 10x the streamed content, 7x the consumed content doesn't feel too crazy. The next male streamer has a similar profile, also doing pretty much daily streams.
But maybe amouranth just deletes the videos after they're streamed? Again, I don't know how Twitch works.
I was talking about the average on average. IRL twitch streams, Jinny 6k viewers, CookSux 2-3k viewers, jaystreazy 2k viewers, robcdee 4k viewers.
Bonnierabbit does one stream every now and then 10k. Amouranth literally does nothing, streams from home and lately "dating" streams, 7k low 16k usually. Japandyjones now that he's in Tokyo 1.5k viewers. Jakenbake in Tokyo 6k.
If you're a woman in a mostly younger male audience platform you get the viewers. All you need is an attractive body and a nice dress.
Ibabyrainbow 21 year old wearing braces showing off her body 1.5k viewers.
I'm not into ASMR but holy crap licking microphones for "the ASMR" where the girls are dressed in tight dresses with perfect make up, where you can guess that the microphone is really a penis replacement. 100% female domain.
How many want to see a guy licking a microphone? 5% most likely with the odd spike for curiosity.
I'm saying on average the females have it easier to attract viewers, that is also the traditional female field. You don't have to provide content, your body is content.
Idk if you have noticed that women mostly like to film themselves on stream because they know that the males watch them for their looks. Male cameras are mostly turned away from them filming their surroundings.
As a male streamer you need special equipment, at least so they think, so you can stream in 1920×1080 with redundant modem and sim card setup, while female streamers don't bother with the weight and just use a 720p smartphone.
There are of course always exceptions and I don't claim to be an expert. I've only been watching this field since this summer and those are my observations
Wenatchee doesn't have much going for it, so I wouldn't be surprised if waitresses and teachers are among the top earners. Caveat -> for those making 'reportable income'
Not just looks and sex, try to even find male babysitter. People just assume woman is the role to raise children so naturally babysitter should be female.
I would have assumed people think a woman has a lower probability of being a child abuser and/or higher probability of being able to provide the type of nurturing they want for their babies and toddlers, so they reject male caretakers.
The same applies in tech, to a lesser degree. See, for example, the career trajectories of male versus female developer advocates of broadly similar skill level.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/03/28/young-women...
The problem with anything written about this topic is that 99% of the time, ideology comes first and the goal of the writer is to either be pro-women, or anti-feminist. It's never a balanced view.
Pew's analysis seems pretty balanced. They looked only at young people who work full-time. Within this demographic:
16% - are in metro areas where women earn parity to men, or up to 20% more than men. 47% - are in metro areas where women earn 90-99% of what men earn. 37% - are in metro areas where women earn <90% of men.
It also notes that men work 4-5% longer hours than women.
What it doesn't dare to touch (I don't blame them) are gender roles and proclivities. Questions like: how much of this is due to men being on average more competitive, and valuing career/financial success more than women do? How much of it is due to women prioritizing family over work? How much of it is due to the professions each gender gravitates toward?
Those questions are all based on pretty well established observational data, but people find it very uncomfortable to acknowledge that gender roles exist and men and women continue to have very different preferences about how to live their lives, despite over a century of feminism. I think it's because one camp fundamentally believes that these preferences should be eradicated and the other believes they are natural and acceptable.