Gender and career choice

Tim Worstall has been posting a few bits and bobs about gender and pay.

In my mind the key task is to analyse occupations, gender and pay and to see if pay differentials can be explained by the type of work or the human capital brought into the workplace. If a bloke and a woman do exactly the same job and outputs in the workplace but are paid differently then there's discrimination.

But as a former labour market economist, I don't see gender pay differences in occupations and automatically scream about equality outrages. There might be some very good reasons for differences, such as productivity for one.

Also - it reminded me of something - and that's subject choice at school by gender. There are quite apparent links between subject choice and gender. Look at these two pdfs:

• A level entries by subject and gender
• GCSE attempts by subject and gender - i.e. those who sat GCSEs (didn't necessarily pass them) - this is as close to 'subject choice' as I could get.

What does this mean? well it means that the die is cast along gender lines for quite a few of our young people at a fairly young age. Interesting I thought.