What would be good inclusivity training?

[bopper]

Some articles:

https://fortune.com/2015/02/17/a-female-computer-science-major-at-stanford-floored-by-the-sexism/

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/02/13/magazine/women-coding-computer-programming.html

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-25-revolution-how-big-does-a-minority-have-to-be-to-reshape-society/

[Caracal]

...If teacher pay went up, I suspect you would see as a side benefit, more men going into the profession. I'm perplexed by the argument that paying teachers more is going to cause a plumber shortage. I don't think that's really how it works...

The men have to come from somewhere.

The unemployment rate for people without high school diplomas is over 9%.

So, presumably, higher wages will entice more people to work instead of whatever they are doing now.

And those can be teachers? This is about teachers.

If there are fewer plumbers because they decide it's worth it to become teachers for better pay, despite needing to get more education, then that frees up more plumbing jobs.

Supply, demand, that sort of thing.

Without High School, the unemployed will not become teachers. Plumbers could become teachers, though. Then there will be fewer plumbers! Their wages must rise to entice more people to become plumbers to fill the now empty plumbing jobs. As these will be more male than female, the gender imbalance is not changed. All we have is higher wages for teachers and plumbers and less stuff for everybody else.

Supply and demand can be parroted. Look at more than one market at a time when necessary.

Thimk!

That is not how labor markets work. First of all, you can look this up. Only 12 percent of plumbers have bachelor's degrees. Do you really think that if teachers got paid more, lots of people who decide to go into a career that doesn't require a college degree, would suddenly decide to go to college to become teachers? If it worked like that, wouldn't those people all have gone to college and become engineers or something? Obviously, these things are driven by opportunity, aptitude, and vocation.

I know quite a few people who taught k-12 for a while. Most of them aren't teachers anymore. None of them are plumbers or blue collar workers of any sort. Mostly they are lawyers, actually. There was zero chance any of these people would have ever become plumbers or roofers or construction workers. Men who might become teachers if the profession paid more would do it instead of going to law school or working in a business field, or, ahem, getting phds.

Raising teacher pay wouldn't mean paying them so much that you distort the labor market. Mechanical engineers would still make a lot more money than science teachers. However, I'm sure there are people who become engineers who might have preferred to be k-12 science teachers if the pay was high enough for them to make a reasonable living doing a tough job.

[dismalist]

...

That is not how labor markets work. First of all, you can look this up. Only 12 percent of plumbers have bachelor's degrees. Do you really think that if teachers got paid more, lots of people who decide to go into a career that doesn't require a college degree, would suddenly decide to go to college to become teachers? If it worked like that, wouldn't those people all have gone to college and become engineers or something? Obviously, these things are driven by opportunity, aptitude, and vocation.

I know quite a few people who taught k-12 for a while. Most of them aren't teachers anymore. None of them are plumbers or blue collar workers of any sort. Mostly they are lawyers, actually. There was zero chance any of these people would have ever become plumbers or roofers or construction workers. Men who might become teachers if the profession paid more would do it instead of going to law school or working in a business field, or, ahem, getting phds.

Raising teacher pay wouldn't mean paying them so much that you distort the labor market. Mechanical engineers would still make a lot more money than science teachers. However, I'm sure there are people who become engineers who might have preferred to be k-12 science teachers if the pay was high enough for them to make a reasonable living doing a tough job.

That's exactly how labor markets work. We're agreeing.

Teachers and plumbers was an example. You can change examples, of course. What one cannot do is to believe that cushy jobs, skilled hobs, can be filled with those currently unemployed who have no high school diploma, and you have not done so.

How much people have to be paid more to fill certain quotas is an empirical question whose answer will differ from job to job. I have no clue.

One would distort the labor market. Only question is how much.

To put this more generally, if one wishes to change the allocation of people across jobs, wages must change.

[Caracal]

...

That is not how labor markets work. First of all, you can look this up. Only 12 percent of plumbers have bachelor's degrees. Do you really think that if teachers got paid more, lots of people who decide to go into a career that doesn't require a college degree, would suddenly decide to go to college to become teachers? If it worked like that, wouldn't those people all have gone to college and become engineers or something? Obviously, these things are driven by opportunity, aptitude, and vocation.

I know quite a few people who taught k-12 for a while. Most of them aren't teachers anymore. None of them are plumbers or blue collar workers of any sort. Mostly they are lawyers, actually. There was zero chance any of these people would have ever become plumbers or roofers or construction workers. Men who might become teachers if the profession paid more would do it instead of going to law school or working in a business field, or, ahem, getting phds.

Raising teacher pay wouldn't mean paying them so much that you distort the labor market. Mechanical engineers would still make a lot more money than science teachers. However, I'm sure there are people who become engineers who might have preferred to be k-12 science teachers if the pay was high enough for them to make a reasonable living doing a tough job.

That's exactly how labor markets work. We're agreeing.

Teachers and plumbers was an example. You can change examples, of course. What one cannot do is to believe that cushy jobs, skilled hobs, can be filled with those currently unemployed who have no high school diploma, and you have not done so.

How much people have to be paid more to fill certain quotas is an empirical question whose answer will differ from job to job. I have no clue.

One would distort the labor market. Only question is how much.

To put this more generally, if one wishes to change the allocation of people across jobs, wages must change.

Sure, yes, of course. However, teacher salaries aren't really determined by markets anyway. These things get decided by the budgets state legislatures put together. There were already long term teaching shortages before the pandemic, and things have gotten much worse. It's hard to see how it's going to get better without raising wages. That's what employers do when they are having trouble attracting qualified employees. Of course, paying people reasonably well isn't just something employers do when they can't find enough bodies. If you want to retain and attract talented people, paying as little as you can possibly get away with is obviously a pretty bad strategy.

The point is that is not going to cause some massive disruption to the labor market to pay teachers more. First of all, the result of paying teachers more couldn't be that everyone becomes a teacher. Right now there are big shortages, but if pay resulted in those jobs getting filled, schools could then become more selective in their hiring and some people who couldn't get a teaching job would go do something else. Even in the short term, a lot of the increased interest in teaching would come at the expense of areas of the job market where there is an oversupply. Too many people go to law school and too many people get phds in some fields. There are a fair number of people who might decide to teach instead if it seemed like a sustainable choice.

[bio-nonymous]

...

That is not how labor markets work. First of all, you can look this up. Only 12 percent of plumbers have bachelor's degrees. Do you really think that if teachers got paid more, lots of people who decide to go into a career that doesn't require a college degree, would suddenly decide to go to college to become teachers? If it worked like that, wouldn't those people all have gone to college and become engineers or something? Obviously, these things are driven by opportunity, aptitude, and vocation.

I know quite a few people who taught k-12 for a while. Most of them aren't teachers anymore. None of them are plumbers or blue collar workers of any sort. Mostly they are lawyers, actually. There was zero chance any of these people would have ever become plumbers or roofers or construction workers. Men who might become teachers if the profession paid more would do it instead of going to law school or working in a business field, or, ahem, getting phds.

Raising teacher pay wouldn't mean paying them so much that you distort the labor market. Mechanical engineers would still make a lot more money than science teachers. However, I'm sure there are people who become engineers who might have preferred to be k-12 science teachers if the pay was high enough for them to make a reasonable living doing a tough job.

That's exactly how labor markets work. We're agreeing.

Teachers and plumbers was an example. You can change examples, of course. What one cannot do is to believe that cushy jobs, skilled hobs, can be filled with those currently unemployed who have no high school diploma, and you have not done so.

How much people have to be paid more to fill certain quotas is an empirical question whose answer will differ from job to job. I have no clue.

One would distort the labor market. Only question is how much.

To put this more generally, if one wishes to change the allocation of people across jobs, wages must change.

Some of this discussion is quite discriminatory against PIBCP (people in blue collar professions). /snarkoff :)

A master carpenter, a licensed electrician (or plumber, HVAC, general contractor), and so forth--the skilled workforce that build things (as opposed to the supervised helpers who fetch and carry), can not simply be replaced by any random high school drop-out. The argument isn't realistic: whether having a college degree or not, these are smart people with real world experience, great work ethic, and a valuable skill set. Most of those professions I listed make more than most professors, certainly more than most teachers, on average, and some can lead to paths of great wealth through small to medium business development. These entrepreneurs and highly skilled hands-on workers may not feel any impetus to suddenly join the "white collar elite" even if, magically, somehow, salaries were increased enough for it to be a competitive economic option. Not everyone wants to, or needs to, go to college to succeed. Now on the other side of this, could a middle aged bricklayer, for example, suddenly become a viable middle school science teacher? Maybe, maybe not (some people may not be cut out for certain career paths)--however, the opportunity cost of not going to work for 4 years, paying for the college degree, and suffering through classes/exams versus just making a living at the job they already have might make it less than attractive even if it came with a raise (and a cushier lifestyle).

[dismalist]

Some of this discussion is quite discriminatory against PIBCP (people in blue collar professions)

I sure as hell didn't mean it to be. Quite the opposite.

My point was that if somebody else -- a politician, a protest movement, whoever -- wishes to reallocate labor by gender or other characteristic, s/he must be prepared to change the wage structure.