The data is from the IRS and the graphic was made with R

Data is fucking infuriating

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How so?

Trying to interpret this. So column 1 is telling me that (for instance) that 18.3% of taxpaying men make between $50k - $75k right? And 14.1% of taxpaying woman.

Then the second column is wage distribution. So that same row ( $50k - $75k ) has wage distribution for woman at 21.1% and men at 17.6.

Whats the best way to understand this?

This data is like trying to read spaghetti thrown against the wall

Did you actually look at the data? They are very clearly and visibly unequal. Every bracket under 40% there are more women than men, every bracket above more men than women.

For all brackets above $100,000, there are over twice as many men as women, in the highest categories as much as 10x

This data very visibly shows income inequality between the genders

I think "total wages" is "what percent of w-2 wages are in this range".

So sum every male w-2 in the bucket, then divide by total male w-2 wages.

So while 0.0004% # males in highest bucket, it accounted for 0.2% of all male money earned.

You forgot the /s at the end of your comment. Obviously there's no way that's a serious comment made after looking at the graph.

There’s nothing clear about this data

Slightly confused by everyone saying this, I agree it could be presented/explained a lot better but it’s still not that hard to understand

Yes it is

Agree to disagree I suppose, whether or not something is comprehensible to someone isn’t really a point one can argue about

I think you mean FEMALE money earned in highest buckets but i get your drift. Interesting. So what information does this graph tell me?

We can't/shouldn't argue if you can comprehend something, but arguing about if something is generally comprehensible is different.

Okay but this means nothing without it being broken out by occupation

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Shhhhh. Wage gaps are only caused by gender. No other factors. This is Reddit sir.

Disagree. Breaking it out by occupation will help you better understand some of the drivers, but understanding that women are a higher proportion of lower paid earners is in itself useful.

Say you’re planning policy for low income people in times of tight economy. You should consider that a higher proportion are likely to be women. Policies that speak to financial vulnerability will commonly not care if you were a teacher, plumber or a baker.

You forgot that people survive sarcasm without a /s marker.

As you say yourself this is obviously sarcasm.

You don't think understanding the drivers is important to fixing the disparity? Or do you only want to slap a bandaid on the symptoms and never fix the cause?

I never said that. There is obvious meaning and value in understanding drivers.

But saying this view is meaningless without the drivers is what I am challenging.

I’d also add that the comment here talks to no value without examining a single driver of occupation. There are others that should be examined (e.g. part time vs full time employment, or number of hours worked per week paid and unpaid).

Comparing % of men, it should be % of all people. You’re binning incorrectly for a comparison.

Agree to disagree, it absolutely matters

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I'm currently writing my thesis on wage gaps and this way of thinking has problems because historically many occupations have had low wages specifically because a majority of the workers in that occupation is women. Breaking it out by occupation often doesn't help much at all.

Yes it does, different occupations pay different wages. At my college, 80% of the engineering students were male. Females are more common in occupations like teaching. That doesn’t mean there’s a wage gap when engineers make more than teachers

Edit: you realize that wages are created by the value they create ($$), they aren’t just randomly created out of thin air

No you of course can't just say "they're being paid more than me" and conclude you're being discriminated against, but some of the reason why engineers are being paid so much and teachers so little can partly be explained with there being more or less men and women in a specific trade.

Issue for me trying to explain this to you is that I'm coming from a country, Sweden, which has largely solved this issue and has lots of research on the subject. And I'm guessing you're from the US, where you're largely stuck at the point we were 20 years ago. I can't expect to convince you otherwise when you have lobbyists who've been spending millions telling you this shit for the past 20 years to hinder any progress.

Like even weighing in all the relevant factors like differences in trade, hours, experience, and like 20 other things you still have a massive gap in pay, one that you really can't explain with anything other than gender discrimination.

Here's a relevant graph from my thesis, showing how there still was a big gap even when properly compensating for all relevant factors:

https://www.ekonomifakta.se/webapi/chartimage/direct/png/sv/23886/1,2/all/1200

This is official data from the official governmental agency of statistics, Statistics Sweden or SCB.

And hours worked

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Humanities masters don’t earn the big bucks.

> I’m currently writing my thesis on wage gaps

And if the majority of the people doing so are women, that explains the wage gap right there…

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I'm studying economy, and I'm not a woman. What exactly are you trying to say with this comment? That this official data published by highly regulated governmental agencies, that is backed by a scientific consensus, is biased?

You know what they say about people who graduate with degrees in economics, they’ll be able to articulate why they can’t get a job! Lol

Wow... please take your bigotry elsewhere.

Not done with my studies yet, will be working towards a degree in engineering with a focus towards IT where I'll earn 70k/month SEK.

I hope you can find happiness in life.

"bigotry" against whom? Economics PhDs? Lol

Congrats on your flexing about making USD $80K though, lol, glad you aren't insecure.

Thank god, I was like am I stupid? Was hoping someone else would tell me what I’m supposed to get here.

>Congrats on your flexing about making USD $80K though, lol, glad you aren't insecure.

Well that part was just an inside joke you weren't supposed to get, no worries ;)

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I don't think those are the actual tax brackets

When I took sociology an interesting examination was that the wage gender distribution at the 75-100k bracket was more women because of nursing. Seems to still hold true

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Uhhh that’s not the tax brackets and married people would file jointly anyway. This is as useful as a concrete parachute

What are you even disagreeing with that I’m saying? You don’t think that on its own it’s useful to understand that there’s a significant difference in the income distributions of women and men? That it’s useful to be aware of that in considering certain policies regardless of the drivers?

Pink is women.

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This is W2 money only. Rich people make money in other ways like capital gains and dividends.

Correct, It’s not useful without context

Well we will have do agree to disagree then, because I think that’s a ridiculous position.

Do you also say the same when someone plots the CPI over time? It is only useful breaking into the different sectors to better understand which areas are driving inflation?

Do you by any chance understand the words causation and correlation? Because I’m not sure you do

I do, do you understand English? Because I’m not sure you do.

What if I’m developing a policy for a discounted medical treatment which is gender specific and will apply to those on incomes below X? I don’t really care why there’s a difference, I just need to know that there’ll be one in the supplies that I’ll need.

I’d wager your great concern is because you’re fixated on the use/conclusion of the data you have in mind.

Exactly, at that point you look at the data and distribute accordingly. The data is what it is, it doesn’t mean it’s discriminatory

Lol. I'm feeling similar... Like what am I to actually take away from this display?

I do see one interesting piece in this chart which is the 50-75k group where there's a greater % of taxes paid by men but a greater % of wages earned by women. Looks to me like women in this group pay less taxes than men in this group.

Other than that... Spaghetti! Ha

You just told on yourself. I never said anything about it being discriminatory.

As I suspected, you’re so worried that someone might conclude it’s discrimination you’re jumping at shadows.

Then I misinterpreted what you said, my apologies.

I don't think it's telling us much more than that. It's just data regurgitated into a graph. You'd have to aggregate it further to make talking points. I take that further inference isn't the intent since it is so disperse.

Well, it kind of appears to be telling us some thing about wages between men vs women, over a bunch if different tiers of wage categories. But i cant figure out the “what” here.

What’s the difference between the two charts?

As an engineer, I can definitively say that teachers are more important than engineers. Almost exponentially more important. Teaching should pay better than tech jobs!! Not less!

But WTF are the two columns measuring?? What’s the difference?

That’s your opinion, not a statement of fact