The Economics of Women And Work. Some Snippets.

1.  Can we prove that sex discrimination exists in the labor markets?  I got asked that question once and this post gives my answer*.  There have been further studies since, but the basic arguments have not changed, which means that reading that post will be good for your weapons arsenal.

2.  Christina Hoff Sommers has argued, most recently on Twitter, that if women really want to close the gender gap in earnings they should change their college major from feminist dance therapy (heh) to electrical engineering.  That it wouldn't work quite like that is something I describe in this post.  And while you are there, read the rest of that series.

3.  I still haven't been able to find a good regression analysis which would allow us to study the interaction effects of sex and race on earnings and so on.  I'm sure that such studies exist, and if you know of one, please leave the link in the comments.  The reason why we need such a study is to see what the relative percentage effects of being black and being female might be on black women's earnings etc (to quantify the effects of intersectionality, if you like).  One study, on the increasing racial inequality on earnings,  suggests that the effect of being female is greater than the effect of being black, though both serve to reduce the earnings of black women, but it doesn't quite do the kinds of analyses I'd like to see.

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*  Similar proof exists for racial discrimination, as this meta-analysis of audit studies shows.  Some of its analyses control for gender and find it non-significant, but I'm not quite sure what that means in the context of comparing different studies, some of which had both male and female fictional applicants and some of which did not.  For a shorter summary, see here.