I have a question and I'm especially aiming it at people in the medical type fields but I'd like to hear from whomever wants to add their .02 and if it gets moved to P&R that's fine too. I've been in there before and had some fun so I'm not scared.
I'm taking a Gender and Society class and we're up to discussing the gender-wage gap. (We're just talking about men and women and not about intersectionality which I think is a shame but I don't run the circus.) The Current Population survey on the BLS.gov website shows lots of different occupations and how many women and how many men are in them and the median weekly wage for each gender. There are like three occupations in which women earn more per week than men. (Sex worker is not on the list of occupations.) I expected that men would make more because of how the statistics are usually presented but a few of the jobs with gaps surprised me. Male cashiers earn $11 more per week. LoP suggested maybe they worked in casinos and that's why which makes some sense. Male RNs earn $39 more per week. But don't they all have about the same education and job duties and that isn't enough difference to suggest it's because of a scarcity of talent so what? I read in a few places that men are more likely to work at an in-patient facility, they're more often in urban rather than rural areas, and they negotiate their wages rather than taking what's offered. Do you think this is true? What about other jobs in the medical field? Are male cashiers also negotiating a better deal?