Thursday, June 6, 2019 | 2 a.m.
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Regarding the May 30 guest column from state Sen. Pat Spearman (“Gender pay gap must be addressed”), I hope she is implying that it is for the exact same job title within a single organization, comparing those who have the same education, experience,performance and/or seniority. The 1963 Equal Pay Act already mandates this.
The problem? Aggregate statistics from those with an agenda — the article cites an 83% gender pay ratio in Nevada — don’t follow this same guideline. They pool together many data points to create false averages. In statistics, it’s known as Simpson’s Paradox, which says that you will get very different and meaningless info when you mix data of groups that don’t share the same characteristics.
For example, if you blend a casino’s 40 vice presidents with its 500 housekeepers, you might get the kind of gender and race disparities cited in the column. However, this would occur even if the casino paid their vice presidents exactly the same rate and their housekeepers exactly the same rate. The casino is doing everything required from a fair pay standpoint, but its overall gender pay “gap” would be false.
Organizations by their nature tend to not allow wide disparities because they are in such a competition for talent. It’s pretty simple to assume that if an organization could save 17-46% on their labor costs — because women, African-Americans and Latinas could be hired for the exact same job at far lower rates — that no white male would ever be hired again.
