Gender Gap and I'd rather be rich

This will be divided up into to 2 sections, the first section will touch base on “The gender pay gap” and the second section will touch base on “I’d rather be rich.
The author bases its figures off of “average hourly earnings of full-time workers” from data collected from the current population survey. The questions that are raised are, what role does gender discrimination play in determining today’s wage gap? And what other factors contribute to gender differences in wages? I feel as if the author did a mediocre job producing and analyzing the statistics. Especially when the raw data was taken and variables were controlled for, such as human capital, race, industry and occupation. To get a better understanding of the wage gap I believe instead of analyzing “full-time workers” the author needs to narrow it down more.


Please note this is for hypothetical purposes and these figures are not even remotely close to be correct. Say if in the U.S there were only 4 job categories nationwide: Doctor, Lawyer, Nurse, Teacher. Let’s also say that each job position had only 4 people holding a position. The doctor category had a 2 males working and 2 females working. The mean salary for males was 200,000 and the mean salary for females was 205,000. For the lawyer category there were 3 males and 1 female working, the males mean average was 150,000 and the female mean average was 145,000. The nurse category there was 3 females working and 1 male working. The females mean average was 40,000 and the males were 40,000. For the teacher category there were 2 males and 2 females working, the male average was 45,000 and the female average was 46,000.
By breaking it down like this, I believe a person can get a better understanding of the wage gap, technically in some areas the females make more than the men. But then the author could then control for those variables. Now for the above variables given, lets combine all job categories together for males and females separately. I will do this by multiplying the average by how many workers of that sex are working, then add them up and find the mean.
Males- Doctor-200,000 X2= 400,000, Lawyer- 150,000X3=450,000, Nurse-40,000, Teacher-90,000. Females- Doctor-400,000, Lawyer-150,000, Nurse-40,000=120,000, Teacher-92,000. The average for the males is 122,500 and for females it is 95,250. See now a larger disparity can be seen. So I could conclude the gender wage gap is 27250.
I believe that if the author really wanted to get a hold of the gender wage gap, he would break down the job categories; I understand that he limited the income in his stats, 2 dollars to 200 dollars, but I don’t think that was enough. Or spend time investigating the disparities on why maybe females are not working jobs that pay a lot of money, or even the glass ceiling, then maybe that will explain his “unexplained” wage gap.
Now for this next section “I’d rather be rich” I understand what he’s trying to get at. He does a great job showing the stats, with the net worth, who owns the top part of the wealth. But his kind of stuff really does not interest me one bit. I really don’t care if someone is super wealthy and owns a shit load of things. I just want a normal everyday life. Also in this article I really don’t know what the author is trying to get at, sure he states that “the distribution is extremely unequal,” but I feel like he is talking but not really doing the walking so to speak. I was hoping for an explanation or a punch line somewhere, but I felt deprived of that. He also went into racial inequality of wealth, but failed to tell why that happened too. Or maybe this article was strictly for statistics and not to come up with a theory, but either way I found this one plain and dry.