The economic cost of not being a white male

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

It's impossible to separate variables in the manner described by DC Al Fine. The choices made by women are influenced by the reality of gender-based discrimination, ranging from outright misogyny to the seemingly benign reproduction of gender roles. As a result, even if choices made by women cohere with their free will, that will is bounded by constraints imposed upon them by society. It's hard for a man to imagine the limits that women face when making economic decisions because we don't face similar limits. For instance, if I wanted to be engineer, for some reason, that would be a plausible choice. If I wanted to be a HR person, that would be a plausible choice as well. Due to the baggage of history, there are very few professions, outside of nursuing and a few other select professions, that men cannot imagine themselves in. The same cannot be said for women.

Radically re-arranging our society so that it's congruent with gender equality is a demand of justice/fairness. This doesn't mean forcing anything upon anyone, really, it simply means expanding the social safety net so that maternity leave, paid childcare, a universal basic income and the like are all easily accessible for women. Theoretically, giving women more economic power would be sufficient to remedy, in the long-run, the most pervasive aspects of sexism that occur outside of economic life because the household/the family is largely a product of economic considerations.

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

Vivienne Ming  should also analyze compensation patterns  in the NBA to discern economic cost (both in opportunity and direct compensation costs) to derive the economic cost of not being a Black male.

I'm not sure what point you're trying to get at.  But, in so far as the recent two time league MVP was the  non Black Steve Nash, I think you're going to have to actually show some evidence that black players have an easier time of it in the NBA, if that's the point you are trying to get at.

However, whatever point you are trying to make, it is a distraction from the point brought up in the research that I've posted on.

I guess the point I am trying to make is that Vivienne Ming should really consider the fact that compensation are set by market forces which is determined the economic value of the labor produced.  If she believes that being of a certain race gender or sexual orientation leads to lower compensation then she is really saying is the the market is mis-pricing the labor value of these certain demographic categories, in this case in the IT field.  If so the best way Vivienne Ming should react is not to produce such a report but to form a company that will hire these programmers or would be programmers whose labor value are mis-priced in the market which would include women URM and LGBT developers or would be developers .  While such a IT firm would not be another google or yahoo it would be quite profitable given the much lower labor costs it will pay relative to its peers.  I do not know much about Vivienne Ming but she seems quite a capable person and should be able to pull this off.  In fact I think she is a fool for producing this report. If anyone found a certain asset be if financial, or in this case labor value, to be under priced, the first logical reaction should to be scoop up said asset as the below fair market value before anyone else find out about it.  It is quite foolish of her to publish such a survey alerting others to such a possible under-pricing of said labor value.  

Of course if we are talking about IT I do not know why Vivienne Ming is so focused on White Males.  Asian Males are even more over-represented than White Males in the IT industry.  Even if Asian Males are less over-represented in IT upper management roles which are even higher paying (I myself would be an exception here) they are still well over-represented in IT upper management roles relative to their share of the population.  So I do not know why she focus so much no the "cost" of not being a straight White Man and instead talk about the "cost" of not being a straight Asian Man.

Are you a robot?

[TheDeadFlagBlues]

To be blunt, the reason why economists are wrong about discrimination is that they either see discrimination as the result of an information problem or the result of some kind of preference. In either case, there is a incorrect evaluation that ought to be corrected by market forces. In reality, discrimination has little to do with some economic agent not recognizing an employee's "true" value in the workforce: discrimination is the result of social forces acting upon individuals and making them less capable than others or making them believe that they are less capable than others. In this regard, SAT scores are virtually useless: yes, Asians perform much better on SAT scores than other racial groups but there are reasons why this is the case and it's not due to some immutable genetic factor or cultural superiority. East Asian households tend to be more stable than White households, migrants from east Asia tend to have higher levels of educational attainment than immigrants from other countries and there are cultural reasons that dispose them towards excelling at standardized tests and mathematics. Russians tend to be much better at math because most bright Soviets, who would have been social scientists or historians elsewhere, were shoved into mathematics and physics so their math pedagogy is stronger. Why am I referencing these rough explanations? Because they serve as evidence that the differences that exist between ethnicities are the result of social forces that are mutable. If we know that could reduce levels of racial inequality or economic inequality and fail to act on this knowledge, I'd argue that this constitutes a kind of discrimination.

I don't know if this is a clear or coherent point but, based on what I can tell, economics is effectively useless on this subject because the determinants of discrimination lie outside of the purview of economics. There are trade-offs in every social science: economists have become very adept at working with quantitative data but, as a result, they're increasingly out of touch with the empirical underpinnings of social science. There are assumptions behind the assumptions that economists employ and they're painfully unaware of those assumptions.