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Old 04-20-2017, 09:53 PM   #692
xoxoxoBruce
The future is unwritten
 
Join Date: Oct 2002
Posts: 71,105
Question on Quora...
What will it take to close the gender wage gap?

Todd Miller, former Marine Corps jet pilot
Written Mar 14

Stop hiring women
Don’t allow women to take company offered time off
Force women to upgrade to higher paying positions as soon as they become available

Here’s the explanation of how women Airline Pilots are paid less and why, despite the pay scales being gender neutral.
Wages measured are average aggregate wages by gender.
Since women are entering the workforce at the highest rate in history, they are entering at the bottom of most company pay rates. Which pay the least. So they drag down the average aggregate pay.
This is especially true with Airline Pilots.

So how can Airline pilots, who are solely paid based on type of airplane flown, and position (i.e. Captain or FO), pay women less?
Well for starters, an airline like Skywest, a regional feeder airline pays less than an airline like United, a global airline.
Regional airlines fly Regional Jets. Major airlines fly 777s.
If airlines (and other businesses) completely stopped hiring women, they would only be hiring men.
Those men would be hired at the lowest payrate. Which means that those men being hired would be paid less than all women currently working there.
Since pilots entering the workforce do so at regionals, they are paid less than experienced pilots at major airlines.
In time, the gender pay rates would be the same, until women would start being paid more because only men are being hired, so the lowest paid employees would be only men.

Also, when employees want to take time off, you’d have to restrict that choice for women.
Right now at airlines, female pilots voluntarily take three times as much time off as male pilots do.
In a recent company offering of monthly leaves of absence by a major airline, roughly 20% of all leaves requested were by women, despite women only representing 6% of that airlines pilots force.

Additionally, women pilots are far less likely to voluntarily upgrade to a higher paid position, but choose to stay in a lower paying position to have better seniority.
A recent analysis showed that in narrowbody and widebody First Officer positions at a major airline, 15% of those positions were held by women who could bid Captain, but chose to stay in those seats for the benefits of controlling their schedule. In many bases the #1 First Officers were women. Despite being only 6% of the pilot force. Those women could choose to upgrade to Captain at any time, but have chosen to forego the higher pay of that position for the benefits of better schedules, better vacation selection, and ensuring they could have weekends off, while their male counterparts overwhelmingly chose to upgrade, flying weekends, and getting paid more money.
If we removed the choice of women to take time off, and forced them to upgrade, the gender wage gap would disappear.
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