College Majors with Fewer Women tend to have Larger Pay Gaps

The Gender Pay Gap has become a key talking point for many in politics in the past few years. It is commonly quoted that women make only 77¢ for every $1 of their male counterparts. This statistic is calculated by taking the average salary of women and comparing it to the average salary of men. This does not control for job title, degree, regional difference, company size, or hours worked. After controlling for these factors, the gender pay gap drops from 77% to 98% (Payscale.com does a fantastic analysis and break down of the gender pay gap. I highly recommend you check it out.)

Using the salaries that controlled for these factors from the Payscale report, I decided to do further analysis on the pay gap. I wanted to know how the percentage of women in a field effected the pay difference between men and women. Since many companies try to hire equal amounts of men and women for similar roles and there are significantly fewer women in science and engineering, I assumed these few women would be able to demand a higher salary because of the scarcity. However, I found the opposite.

The interactive graphic below shows that college majors with fewer women tend to have higher differences in pay. (The graphics may be difficult to see on mobile, please switch to a desktop or use the mobile-friendly version)

Two of the largest outliers are Nursing and Accounting. Nursing has 92.3% women and men still make about $2400 more on average. Accounting has 52.1% women and a pay difference of +$2400 for men. One point of interest is elementary education where women make 1.4% more than men.

The following graph shows the same results as above, but instead of absolute difference in dollars, the commonly used metric of women's salaries as a percentage of men's salaries is plotted.



Any guess as to why this occurs would largely be speculative, but I imagine a “boy’s club” mentality could be to blame where men like to hire men and are willing to even pay more to do so.

The links to the data sources can be found below and as always, add any suggestions in the comments.

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Data Source:

[1] http://www.payscale.com/career-news/2009/12/do-men-or-women-choose-majors-to-maximize-income
[2] https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1FDrXUk4t-RQekuKotqMD7pyGFmylHip-xarOawcVvqk/edit#gid=0

A Look at Lynching in the United States

With the current racial tension within the United States and the Halloween season, I have seen many posts on Facebook showing black mannequins and other human-like figures hanging from trees. These images spark debate on whether these are directly racist acts or just distasteful mistakes. The comment sections are filled with pseudo-lynching-experts defending both sides.

So I decided to do an analysis on lynching within the United States. I found data on lynching from the Tuskegee Institute [1-2]. This data set contains information on lynchings from 1882-1962. I tried to find lynching statistics from before 1882 and found, during slavery, lynching Africans was fairly uncommon due to slave owners having a vested interest in keeping the slave alive.

The first bit of information I found shocking was whites made up 27% of lynching victims. However, the percentage of whites vs. blacks changes wildly from state to state. To understand this the percentage of black victims were plotted by state. As can be assumed, the deep south had the highest percentage of blacks followed by the rest of the south.

However, a look at the total number of lynchings showed states in the deep south did not offend evenly. Mississippi, Georgia, and Texas had the most lynchings (581, 531, and 493 respectfully) and then there was a large drop off to Louisiana and Alabama at 391 and 347. New Hampshire had zero lynchings and Delaware, Maine, and Vermont had one. New York and New Jersey only had two.

Over time, the number of people lynched has dropped to near zero. The next graph shows how lynching has decreased over time for whites and blacks. Black lynchings have about a 30 year lag behind the decrease of white lynchings.

In the first few years of the above chart, whites out number blacks in the number of lynchings. Below is a graph showing the percentage breakdown by year. Whites out number blacks for 4 years and then blacks out number whites for 60 years. In the last few years in the data set, whites exceed blacks. When taking into account how infrequent lynchings where in these last few years, two white people being lynched can account for 66.6% of lynchings.

I hope you learned something new, reading this analysis and as always, please feel free to add ideas for additional graphs or analysis in the comment section.

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Data Link and Notes:

[1] - http://law2.umkc.edu/faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingsstate.html
[2] - http://law2.umkc.edu/Faculty/projects/ftrials/shipp/lynchingyear.html