David Čiháček
Thursday, October 30, 2025
U.S. Circumcision Lawsuit Advances as Doctors Behind Policy Backtrack
Two unrelated—but highly significant—developments concerning circumcision in the U.S. have largely escaped media notice.
Last week, a Multnomah County Circuit Court judge allowed a lawsuit challenging Oregon’s law banning female genital mutilation (FGM) to proceed. The plaintiffs—men circumcised as infants—argue that Oregon’s FGM statute violates the state’s constitutional guarantee of equal protection by shielding only females from non-consensual genital cutting. In their view, the law unlawfully discriminates on the basis of sex by failing to extend the same protection to boys.
At issue is whether gender-specific protections against genital cutting can withstand constitutional scrutiny in an era of increasing legal and ethical focus on bodily autonomy. Though the court has not yet ruled on the merits, the case represents the first time a U.S. judge has allowed a male circumcision–related equal protection claim to move forward.
Meanwhile, in the realm of medical ethics, a separate reckoning is unfolding. A new article in the Journal of Medical Ethics features newly reported interviews with two members of the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) 2012 Circumcision Task Force—both of whom now question the very policy they helped craft.
The Academy’s 2012 policy on newborn circumcision expired in 2017, yet remains widely cited. Its key phrase—“the health benefits of newborn male circumcision outweigh the risks”—still appears on hospital websites, in parental handouts, and in news coverage.
Douglas Diekema, M.D., MPH, the task force’s bioethicist and Andrew Freedman, M.D., its pediatric urologist, both now indicate the circumcision policy was shaped, in part, by legal and cultural concerns.
Diekema says that while he remained confident in the task force’s review of the scientific literature as it existed at the time, he was dissatisfied with the final recommendation. If the Academy were to ask him today, he says he would advise that, “I don’t think you can honestly say in a recommendation that the benefits outweigh the risks.”
Diekema says it was really a legal question for him. “My feeling was that there was not sufficient data to suggest that this procedure should be outlawed, particularly given that there were multiple religious communities for whom this was an important practice. But I also didn’t think pediatricians should be recommending it,” he says.
The AAP issued its 2012 policy statement just thirteen months after a high-profile legal battle in San Francisco over a proposed citywide ban on circumcision. The measure, which had gathered enough signatures to appear on the ballot, sought to prohibit circumcision of all minors without a religious exemption. In July 2011, the San Francisco Superior Court struck the initiative from the ballot, ruling that local governments lack authority to regulate medical procedures governed by state law. The AAP’s statement was crafted amid this heightened public scrutiny of circumcision’s legality.
Freedman now confirms that the policy’s language—which he says he coined—was a compromise among members divided over how far to go, and with legal considerations in mind.
“[T]he best analogy is that the AAP guidelines are a ‘permission slip’ for those who want to circumcise their children so that society cannot say they are bad parents or outlaw the practice,” he says. “It is a non-therapeutic procedure. If it can be called a preventative medicine, it is at the very weakest level. There is nothing wrong with the [uncircumcised] penis; you cannot recommend circumcision based on medical benefit alone. Nothing about the potential benefits is communicable, so I don’t see how it could be called a public health concern,” he says.
Freedman even goes so far as to opine: “Maybe the AAP should get out of the [circumcision] business since it’s not really a medical practice. It’s only a ‘medical procedure’ in the sense that medical professionals are performing it.”
The article containing these revelatory quotes, and a companion piece in the Journal of Medical Ethics Blog, go on to explain how that single “health benefits outweigh the risks” language—despite its ethical complexities—came to dominate U.S. discourse on circumcision. At the time, media outlets ran headlines like “Pediatricians Decide Boys Are Better Off Circumcised Than Not” and “Pediatrics Group Praises the Benefits of Circumcision.”
Moreover, the CDC and the American Medical Association both adopted—and still promulgate—versions of the same language. Even today, on HealthyChildren.org, the AAP’s official parent-facing site, families are still told that parents who decline circumcision often do so out of “fear” or “belief,” while those who choose it are guided by “data.”
While the AAP’s role is not to protect physician income, its policy language can have that effect. By characterizing circumcision as medically beneficial, the organization effectively helped preserve insurance coverage for the procedure.
The new lawsuit in Oregon, and the new insights of former AAP 2012 task force members, arrive as the landscape around U.S. circumcision appears to be shifting. In September, a JAMA Pediatrics research letter found that a small majority of baby boys born in U.S. hospitals are not circumcised before they go home from the hospital. This is the first time, since national data have been tracked, that the number has fallen below the 50% mark.
In much of the world, circumcision is treated as a private cultural or religious ritual; only in the U.S. does it remain a normalized, hospital-based procedure. By contrast, peer nations such as Canada, the United Kingdom, and Australia advise against routine circumcision. Despite its lack of medical endorsement and often more stringent regulation, no nation has enacted a blanket, nationwide ban that makes religious penile circumcision illegal across the board.
[Rebecca Wald's blog, The Times of Israel]
Wednesday, October 29, 2025
From April 2021...
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| Thomas Knights (photographer and creative director), Red Hot 2021 Calendar |
Celebrating beautiful redheaded Englishmen, and raising awareness of testicular cancer!
Thursday, October 23, 2025
Feminism's "strong women" problem
There's a perverse psychology of power that lurks behind feminism, which is a clue to its roots in Hobbesian materialism, if not out-and-out Marxism. And it can be found all along the modern American political spectrum.
Witness top MAGA bimbo Marjorie Taylor Greene:
'Greene’s sharpest attacks also reflect some disillusionment with how she and other conservative women in Congress have been treated in recent months. She said she sees a pattern of unfair treatment in which competent and tough women such as herself and Rep. Elise Stefanik (New York) have been punished or ignored while “weak” Republican men are rewarded.
...
"Whereas President Trump has a very strong, dominant style — he’s not weak at all — a lot of the men here in the House are weak,” Greene said. “There’s a lot of weak Republican men and they’re more afraid of strong Republican women. So they always try to marginalize the strong Republican women that actually want to do something and actually want to achieve.”
Jealousy may be part of the dynamic, she added. “They’re always intimidated by stronger Republican women because we mean it and we will do it and we will make them look bad,” she said.
[H/T: Mensactivism.org]For this absurd woman, politics is not about the common good. It's about power.
And feminists like J K Rowling can't understand where their problems with transsexuals came from.
Wednesday, October 15, 2025
7 Minutes Outside: The Collapse Of Childhood Play
Studies suggest that today’s kids get an average of 4–7 minutes of unstructured time outside a day, while they spend 7–8 hours a day in front of screens.
With a youth mental health crisis also sweeping the nation (rates of anxiety, depression, suicidal ideation, and diagnosed mental health disorders like ADHD are all at record highs), it’s not hard to imagine that the correlation between kids’ indoor confinement and their mental health struggles is more than a coincidence.
The mental health ramifications of too much screen time are easy to track, and are heavily studied. But the downstream effects of not enough time outside are equally startling. Free play and unstructured time are foundational to a child’s well-being, and in America, our kids aren’t getting it.
Seven minutes a day is barely enough time to begin to imagine the premise of a game or an imaginary adventure. Seven minutes a day is barely the amount of time it takes to walk back and forth from the bus stop. It’s not even long enough to go for a walk around the block.
Why Aren’t the Kids Outside?
The twenty-first century has provided us with a perfect storm of conditions keeping kids away from the outdoors: screens are alluring, the outside is “dangerous,” and parents encourage their kids towards sedentary “for your own good” activities (math olympiad! French tutoring! after school clubs!).
Parents fear the dangers of the outdoors. In the modern world, everything from crime statistics to urban design itself lead parents to keep their kids on a short leash. Urban settings don’t have much room for free play; parks and playgrounds and other child-centric outdoor spaces are strangely sparse, as if urban designers wanted a world without kids in it. More apartment complexes are built with dog-washing stations than playgrounds.
The modern world seems to have been built by people who forgot what childhood is, and fears of crime keep parents nervous about letting their kids freely use the spaces that do exist.
Parents fear the dangers of the outdoors. In the modern world, everything from crime statistics to urban design itself lead parents to keep their kids on a short leash. Urban settings don’t have much room for free play; parks and playgrounds and other child-centric outdoor spaces are strangely sparse, as if urban designers wanted a world without kids in it. More apartment complexes are built with dog-washing stations than playgrounds.
The modern world seems to have been built by people who forgot what childhood is, and fears of crime keep parents nervous about letting their kids freely use the spaces that do exist.
But separate from kid-centric space or the lack thereof, kids are busy. Their days are consumed by ever-expanding school requirements, structured extracurricular activities, and of course the ever-present lure of screen time—to the point that even in suburban neighborhoods with big backyards, kids are barely ever venturing outside.
Which is how we end up with kids getting seven to eight hours of screen time a day, but only four to seven minutes of unstructured free time outside—the latter of which people of our grandparents’ generations couldn’t have even imagined.
The “unstructured” part is important—“time outside” in a blanket sense isn’t enough. Spending an hour on the field for soccer practice gives kids the benefit of fresh air and sunshine and physical movement, but it isn’t giving them the psychological benefits of free play.
Unstructured means time and space away from the rules and instructions of an adult. It exists fully in the wild and whimsical world of the child: free, unimpeded, child-directed, and often tinged with a heavy dose of imagination. There are no set goals of the kind that exist in PE class or a sports club. It’s pure and unfettered, and it’s a biologically hardwired need for children’s development.
Mental Health Crisis in Childhood
Parents worry about the dangers of the outside world, but what about the dangers of the on-screen world, where grooming and exploitation are common occurrences, where adults behind screens pose as other children and talk to young people too naive to know what to watch out for? What about the physical dangers of a sedentary life?
Seventy-seven percent of American youth ages 17–24 are ineligible for military service. Thirty-three percent of 17–24 year olds are ineligible due to obesity. Of the young people who meet the weight requirements, another 25 percent don’t meet the physical fitness standards. Other physical conditions and mental health disorders are also leading causes of ineligibility.
The poor health of America’s youth has many factors—poor diet, exposure to environmental toxins, a rise in chronic conditions, and countless other variables. But with 30 percent of elementary schools no longer requiring daily recess, and 28 states without any requirements around recess at all, neither schools nor parents are consistently defending kids’ free outdoor time.
And what about the psychological dangers of not getting time outside to play?
Twenty percent of American adolescents ages 12–17 report experiencing symptoms of anxiety in the past two weeks, while 18 percent of adolescents report symptoms of depression. Forty percent of high schoolers report persistent feelings of sadness or hopelessness. In 2023, the CDC found that 9 percent of adolescents had attempted suicide.
Of course, not all of this traces back to time spent outside, nor lack of it. But as we’re depriving kids of a fundamental part of their development, such a deficit might be at least partially to blame for the negative outcomes that follow.
Kids Need Free Play Outdoors
As researcher and psychologist Peter Gray says, “Children are designed, by nature, to play and explore on their own, independently of adults.” Gray is a fierce defender of kids’ physiological and psychological need for play, and his book “Free to Learn” makes the case for the importance of self-directed time for a child’s development, with ripple effects into everything from academic performance to life outcomes.
Gray isn’t alone. As Lenore Skenazy argues in her book “Free Range Kids,” children need exactly what the term “free range” suggests—the ability to run wild and be free, not cooped up in the cages created by four walls and an adult’s supervision. Skenazy made national headlines after letting her 10-year-old ride the New York City subway home alone (unstructured and unsupervised outdoor time at its finest). Those headlines weren’t the good kind. Reporters were quick to title her “America’s worst mom,” and a media feeding frenzy followed (an unwatched child, normal mere decades prior, had become a scandal).
And yet, Skenazy was giving her son what so many others suffer for want of: freedom.
Letting your kids have outdoor time doesn’t require something as radical as giving them free range of New York City. Most parents would understandably balk at that. But there’s a wide swath of options between “wander New York City alone” and “have no time outside at all,” and frustratingly few find themselves in that median.
Even programs that give kids time outside—things like private schools with on-campus gardens, forest schools, or homeschool groups focused on time in nature—are considered frivolous, peculiar, and radical, respectively.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a minimum of 30–60 minutes of outdoor free play for children two and under. The CDC suggests a minimum of three hours of unstructured and vigorous free play for preschoolers (ages 3–5), with at least an hour of that time being spent outdoors, and at least an hour of vigorous physical activity (preferably outdoors) for school-aged children (ages 6–17).
These are all recommended baselines from some of America’s most mainstream health authorities. Many independent psychologists, developmental experts, and education researchers would consider those numbers to be the bare minimum.
Charlotte Mason, the nineteenth-century British educator whose methodology is still used today by large swaths of homeschoolers, argued that children should spend four to six hours a day outside whenever possible: “Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.”
Mason didn’t see outdoor time as “recess,” but as a fundamental part of a child’s education in its own right. For the early years, she considered it even more important than formal instruction, helping children develop their attentiveness, wonder, and observational skills. She advocated nature walks, observations of weather patterns and wildlife, keeping a nature journal, and long uninterrupted swaths of free play.
This unstructured playtime is part of the whimsy of childhood, but it also plays a critical role. Free play supports kids’ cognitive development, imagination, and executive function. Physical activity develops strength, coordination, and motor skills, and is shown to reduce anxiety. Studies suggest exposure to the microbiome of the dirt leads to a strengthened immune system, and can decrease stress. Exposure to natural sunlight supports a child’s natural circadian rhythm.
And of course, exposure to sunlight also improves vitamin D levels—the lack of which can cause everything from fatigue and a weakened immune system to, you guessed it, anxiety and depression.
Our kids are struggling, physically and psychologically, for want of time for free play and time outdoors. That fresh air and freedom, no matter how basic it seems, is fundamental to their health and success, as necessary to their health (if not their survival) as air and water.
Our parents and grandparents knew this by intuition; our forebears never considered it could even be a question, but our culture has slowly let it erode to become only the tiniest fraction of our kids’ lives.
Free play and time outdoors is indivisible from health and success. If we want to raise a healthy, happy, and thriving generation, then their outdoor time is a resource we must defend.
Gray isn’t alone. As Lenore Skenazy argues in her book “Free Range Kids,” children need exactly what the term “free range” suggests—the ability to run wild and be free, not cooped up in the cages created by four walls and an adult’s supervision. Skenazy made national headlines after letting her 10-year-old ride the New York City subway home alone (unstructured and unsupervised outdoor time at its finest). Those headlines weren’t the good kind. Reporters were quick to title her “America’s worst mom,” and a media feeding frenzy followed (an unwatched child, normal mere decades prior, had become a scandal).
And yet, Skenazy was giving her son what so many others suffer for want of: freedom.
Letting your kids have outdoor time doesn’t require something as radical as giving them free range of New York City. Most parents would understandably balk at that. But there’s a wide swath of options between “wander New York City alone” and “have no time outside at all,” and frustratingly few find themselves in that median.
Even programs that give kids time outside—things like private schools with on-campus gardens, forest schools, or homeschool groups focused on time in nature—are considered frivolous, peculiar, and radical, respectively.
The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends a minimum of 30–60 minutes of outdoor free play for children two and under. The CDC suggests a minimum of three hours of unstructured and vigorous free play for preschoolers (ages 3–5), with at least an hour of that time being spent outdoors, and at least an hour of vigorous physical activity (preferably outdoors) for school-aged children (ages 6–17).
These are all recommended baselines from some of America’s most mainstream health authorities. Many independent psychologists, developmental experts, and education researchers would consider those numbers to be the bare minimum.
Charlotte Mason, the nineteenth-century British educator whose methodology is still used today by large swaths of homeschoolers, argued that children should spend four to six hours a day outside whenever possible: “Never be within doors when you can rightly be without.”
Mason didn’t see outdoor time as “recess,” but as a fundamental part of a child’s education in its own right. For the early years, she considered it even more important than formal instruction, helping children develop their attentiveness, wonder, and observational skills. She advocated nature walks, observations of weather patterns and wildlife, keeping a nature journal, and long uninterrupted swaths of free play.
This unstructured playtime is part of the whimsy of childhood, but it also plays a critical role. Free play supports kids’ cognitive development, imagination, and executive function. Physical activity develops strength, coordination, and motor skills, and is shown to reduce anxiety. Studies suggest exposure to the microbiome of the dirt leads to a strengthened immune system, and can decrease stress. Exposure to natural sunlight supports a child’s natural circadian rhythm.
And of course, exposure to sunlight also improves vitamin D levels—the lack of which can cause everything from fatigue and a weakened immune system to, you guessed it, anxiety and depression.
Our kids are struggling, physically and psychologically, for want of time for free play and time outdoors. That fresh air and freedom, no matter how basic it seems, is fundamental to their health and success, as necessary to their health (if not their survival) as air and water.
Our parents and grandparents knew this by intuition; our forebears never considered it could even be a question, but our culture has slowly let it erode to become only the tiniest fraction of our kids’ lives.
Free play and time outdoors is indivisible from health and success. If we want to raise a healthy, happy, and thriving generation, then their outdoor time is a resource we must defend.
From the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER)
Friday, October 10, 2025
As Women Take Over a Male-Dominated Field, the Pay Drops
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| Thoka Maer |
By Claire Cain Miller
March 18, 2016
Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.
That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.
Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the other end of the wage spectrum, janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”
She is a co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study, which she conducted with Asaf Levanon, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.
And there was substantial evidence that employers placed a lower value on work done by women. “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” Ms. England said. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”
A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
While the pay gap has been closing, it remains wide. Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance centrist policy ideas.
Today, differences in the type of work men and women do account for 51 percent of the pay gap, a larger portion than in 1980, according to definitive new research by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, economists at Cornell.
Women have moved into historically male jobs much more in white-collar fields than in blue-collar ones. Yet the gender pay gap is largest in higher-paying white-collar jobs, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn found. One reason for this may be that these jobs demand longer and less flexible hours, and research has shown that workers are disproportionately penalized for wanting flexibility.
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.
Many differences that contributed to the pay gap have diminished or disappeared since the 1980s, of course. Women over all now obtain more education than men and have almost as much work experience. Women moved from clerical to managerial jobs and became slightly more likely than men to be union members. Both of these changes helped improve wage parity, Ms. Blau’s and Mr. Kahn’s research said.
Yes, women sometimes voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations because they are drawn to work that happens to pay less, like caregiving or nonprofit jobs, or because they want less demanding jobs because they have more family responsibilities outside of work. But many social scientists say there are other factors that are often hard to quantify, like gender bias and social pressure, that bring down wages for women’s work.
Ms. England, in other research, has found that any occupation that involves caregiving, like nursing or preschool teaching, pays less, even after controlling for the disproportionate share of female workers.
After sifting through the data, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn concluded that pure discrimination may account for 38 percent of the gender pay gap. Discrimination could also indirectly cause an even larger portion of the pay gap, they said, for instance, by discouraging women from pursuing high-paying, male-dominated careers in the first place.
“Some of it undoubtedly does represent the preferences of women, either for particular job types or some flexibility, but there could be barriers to entry for women and these could be very subtle,” Ms. Blau said. “It could be because the very culture and male dominance of the occupation acts as a deterrent.”
For example, social factors may be inducing more women than men to choose lower-paying but geographically flexible jobs, she and Mr. Kahn found. Even though dual-career marriages are now the norm, couples are more likely to choose their location based on the man’s job, since men earn more. This factor is both a response to and a cause of the gender pay gap.
Some explanations for the pay gap cut both ways. One intriguing issue is the gender difference in noncognitive skills. Men are often said to be more competitive and self-confident than women, and according to this logic, they might be more inclined to pursue highly competitive jobs.
But Ms. Blau warned that it is impossible to separate nature from nurture. And there is evidence that noncognitive skills, like collaboration and openness to compromise, are benefiting women in today’s labor market. Occupations that require such skills have expanded much more than others since 1980, according to research by David J. Deming at Harvard University. And women seem to have taken more advantage of these job opportunities than men.
Still, even when women join men in the same fields, the pay gap remains. Men and women are paid differently not just when they do different jobs but also when they do the same work. Research by Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, has found that a pay gap persists within occupations. Female physicians, for instance, earn 71 percent of what male physicians earn, and lawyers earn 82 percent.
It happens across professions: This month, the union that represents Dow Jones journalists announced that its female members working full time at Dow Jones publications made 87 cents for every dollar earned by their full-time male colleagues.
Colleen Schwartz, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We remain absolutely committed to fostering an inclusive work environment.”
Certain policies have been found to help close the remaining occupational pay gap, including raising the minimum wage, since more women work at the lowest end of the pay scale. Paid family leave helps, too.
Another idea, Ms. Liner of Third Way said, is to give priority to people’s talents and interests when choosing careers, even if it means going outside gender norms, for instance encouraging girls to be engineers and boys to be teachers. “There’s nothing stopping men and women from switching roles and being a maid versus a janitor except for social constructs,” she said.
A correction was made on March 27, 2016: An Upshot article last Sunday about the gender pay gap misstated the percentage of the gap that two Cornell economists said could be attributed to pure discrimination. They determined it was 38 percent, not 9 percent.
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.
That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.
Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women), according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the other end of the wage spectrum, janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”
She is a co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study, which she conducted with Asaf Levanon, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.
And there was substantial evidence that employers placed a lower value on work done by women. “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” Ms. England said. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”
A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
While the pay gap has been closing, it remains wide. Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance centrist policy ideas.
Today, differences in the type of work men and women do account for 51 percent of the pay gap, a larger portion than in 1980, according to definitive new research by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, economists at Cornell.
Women have moved into historically male jobs much more in white-collar fields than in blue-collar ones. Yet the gender pay gap is largest in higher-paying white-collar jobs, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn found. One reason for this may be that these jobs demand longer and less flexible hours, and research has shown that workers are disproportionately penalized for wanting flexibility.
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.
Many differences that contributed to the pay gap have diminished or disappeared since the 1980s, of course. Women over all now obtain more education than men and have almost as much work experience. Women moved from clerical to managerial jobs and became slightly more likely than men to be union members. Both of these changes helped improve wage parity, Ms. Blau’s and Mr. Kahn’s research said.
Yes, women sometimes voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations because they are drawn to work that happens to pay less, like caregiving or nonprofit jobs, or because they want less demanding jobs because they have more family responsibilities outside of work. But many social scientists say there are other factors that are often hard to quantify, like gender bias and social pressure, that bring down wages for women’s work.
Ms. England, in other research, has found that any occupation that involves caregiving, like nursing or preschool teaching, pays less, even after controlling for the disproportionate share of female workers.
After sifting through the data, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn concluded that pure discrimination may account for 38 percent of the gender pay gap. Discrimination could also indirectly cause an even larger portion of the pay gap, they said, for instance, by discouraging women from pursuing high-paying, male-dominated careers in the first place.
“Some of it undoubtedly does represent the preferences of women, either for particular job types or some flexibility, but there could be barriers to entry for women and these could be very subtle,” Ms. Blau said. “It could be because the very culture and male dominance of the occupation acts as a deterrent.”
For example, social factors may be inducing more women than men to choose lower-paying but geographically flexible jobs, she and Mr. Kahn found. Even though dual-career marriages are now the norm, couples are more likely to choose their location based on the man’s job, since men earn more. This factor is both a response to and a cause of the gender pay gap.
Some explanations for the pay gap cut both ways. One intriguing issue is the gender difference in noncognitive skills. Men are often said to be more competitive and self-confident than women, and according to this logic, they might be more inclined to pursue highly competitive jobs.
But Ms. Blau warned that it is impossible to separate nature from nurture. And there is evidence that noncognitive skills, like collaboration and openness to compromise, are benefiting women in today’s labor market. Occupations that require such skills have expanded much more than others since 1980, according to research by David J. Deming at Harvard University. And women seem to have taken more advantage of these job opportunities than men.
Still, even when women join men in the same fields, the pay gap remains. Men and women are paid differently not just when they do different jobs but also when they do the same work. Research by Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, has found that a pay gap persists within occupations. Female physicians, for instance, earn 71 percent of what male physicians earn, and lawyers earn 82 percent.
It happens across professions: This month, the union that represents Dow Jones journalists announced that its female members working full time at Dow Jones publications made 87 cents for every dollar earned by their full-time male colleagues.
Colleen Schwartz, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We remain absolutely committed to fostering an inclusive work environment.”
Certain policies have been found to help close the remaining occupational pay gap, including raising the minimum wage, since more women work at the lowest end of the pay scale. Paid family leave helps, too.
Another idea, Ms. Liner of Third Way said, is to give priority to people’s talents and interests when choosing careers, even if it means going outside gender norms, for instance encouraging girls to be engineers and boys to be teachers. “There’s nothing stopping men and women from switching roles and being a maid versus a janitor except for social constructs,” she said.
A correction was made on March 27, 2016: An Upshot article last Sunday about the gender pay gap misstated the percentage of the gap that two Cornell economists said could be attributed to pure discrimination. They determined it was 38 percent, not 9 percent.
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