There’s a great piece here at Huffington Post on occupational segregation. Not so much in the sense that I agree with the writer’s take on the subject, but rather at the data presented. Take a look. (I’ll not steal his charts from him.)

Women’s jobs happen to be mostly about care work: health care, childcare, and interpersonal relations - and they pay less than men’s jobs, which are blue-collar jobs or positions of authority, and pay more.

Leaving aside the pay part for a moment we around here would offer a reason for that concentration in the “caring industries”. As you know, we’re believers in the theory that people are placed upon a spectrum, from systemisers to empathisers: and we expect there to be more women at the empathising end of the spectrum than men and vice versa for systemisers.

So we’re absolutely not surprised that there are more women than men in the caring professions.

Moving back to the pay differences. An economist would simply point out that jobs which are more productive will pay higher wages. It might be that jobs in the caring professions are indeed less productive or, more likely to my mind, that they’re regarded as having other than monetary compensations.

I do think our Mr. Cohen here is playing a little fast and loose with the statistics though.

Some of these differences could reflect the cold hard facts of biology, women’s choices, strength differences, and so on: but nurse aides and truck drivers require the same amount of education and strength, and trick drivers earn 40% more - that’s almost 4 million workers in those two occupations alone.

The gold standard on jobs in the US and their pay rates and other statistics is the Bureau of Labour Statistics. Here’s their page on truck drivers and here’s the one on nurse aides.

You’ll note that the higher paid truck drivers are those doing the long distance jobs. These require a number of years experience, the possession of a licence and, more to the point, some fairly unpleasant side effects of the job: like being away from home for large parts of the year. If you look at the pay rates for people driving trucks on local deliveries, without those licence requirements and long distance travel, you’ll see that wage rates are just about the same as they are for nurse aides.

Indeed, when we look deeper, we see that median hourly for nurse aides is $10.67, and while long distance drivers get $16.85, local get $12.17 and drivers/sales people get $9.99.

I don’t think the pay statistics are saying quite what Mr. Cohen says they are saying. Do you?