Equal Pay for Equal Risk
It is a well-known fact that women, on average, make less than men in the US work force. Whether that appalls you depends a bit on your political motivation, as well as your facility and honesty with data analysis. The raw numbers tend to show a large gap, while numbers corrected for things like years in the work force, education, and industry selection tend to show a smaller gap.
A big driver of gender wage disparities is the industry in which males and females tend to work. Male preference industries like construction and heavy manufacturing tend to pay more than female preference industries like health care and education (yes, I know we could argue all day as to whether these industries are truly a preference or the result of some implicit cultural direction, but I am not going to touch that today).
But one thing I have never thought about, or heard discussed, is the issue of risk. When we discuss securities and investments, we often talk about income in the context of risk — the more risk one takes on, the higher the average returns one typically gets. It may be, though, that we should talk about employment income in the context of risk as well. After all, if one were looking at two fairly similar jobs, except the chance of layoff or job loss were much higher in one than the other, then one would expect the job with more job loss risk to pay more.
In this context, recent job loss numbers by gender are interesting (a story, by the way, Mark Perry has been on for months but the MSM is only just now waddling in to notice).
