Nine Shift

Gender Pay Discrimination: Point B

There's outright unethical and illegal gender pay discrimination against women that has to be stopped.  But then there is Point B: complex, unresolved issues about gender and pay. 

Claire Miller and the NYTimes like to scream 'discrimination' wherever they can, or can't, including nursing.  But is nursing really biased against women in pay?  AllNurses.com, fortunately for you and me, deals with the complex unresolved societal issues behind why male nurses make more than female nurses.  Hold on, its fascinating. 

Here's why male nurses, according to AllNurses.com, make more money than female nurses:

1.Males go into higher paying nursing specialists.  
  Some 40% of nurse anesthetists, for example, are male. Only 13% of nurses overall are male.  But even here, male anesthetists make $17,000 more a year than female anesthetists, according to the AMA.  Here's three more reasons for that.

2.Males put in more overtime than females.

3.Males work shifts that may pay more, such as weekends and third shift (I hope nurses don't call it the graveyard shift).

4.Men are also known to negotiate salary increases and higher pay rates than women.

5.Women are more likely to stop-out of work to have children, then come back to work later.
So people who continue working get annual pay raises, and people who stop out and come back, then get their last pay.

OK folks, you got solutions for these complex societal issues?  You wanna take away experience and seniority in pay?  You wanna force women to work overtime? My proposal is to focus on getting to Point A before we try to get to Point B.   I would ask Claire Miller for her ideas, but she and the NYTimes are stuck on screaming anti-male diatribes.  

Photo: Farm near our town with natural artesian wells where the water rises upwards from underground, allowing the farmer to form these ice sculptures. 

Gender Pay Discrimination: Point A

There's complex, tough and so-far unresolved issues regarding gender pay.  And then there's outright no-good unethical, hopefully illegal, gender pay discrimination against women. 

Claire Miller, in a NYTimes article about nursing, screams bloody discrimination about nurses. But is it?  Nursing is a field where over 90% of the most experienced nurses are women. More importantly, there is no rash of lawsuits with simple charges and simple solutions.  

Once again, feminists are confusing lots of issues and hollering 'discrimination.'  Instead, feminists and business people and everyone have zillions of cases of outright, no-good, unethical, hopefully illegal, cases of gender pay discrimination against women.  Let's deal with the obvious cases.

We featured two obvious and hypocritical cases recently in this blog:
1.Fearless Girl.  State Street Corporation builds a statue about empowering women, but discriminates against its own female employees, even executives, as a lawsuit has pointed out.
2.Fired Google Engineer.  Google fires a 28 year old male engineering for quoting the science (which is found on Google) that males have more testosterone, and thus more spatial ability, than women. Then Google is sued by its own female employees for gender pay discrimination.  

Point A is dealing with the outright no-good unethical, illegal gender pay discrimination against women.  

We're not even at Point A.  But we will explore Point B next, and why it is so complex and hard to get from Point A to Point B.  Claire Miller, our gender editor, doesn't even have a clue about Point B, much less how to get from Point A to Point B.  

Photo: Three college women in my town know what to do when the temperature is only 5 degrees - - ride your horse on campus.

NYT Starts Off New Year Attacking Men - - Again

The New York Times continued its attack on men in its first gender article of the new year.

The New York Times and its "gender" (yes, that's her title) editor Claire Miller, writing about the 13% representation of men in the field of nursing, both screamed sex discrimination and provided lots of mis-information.  

Mis-information:
Jobs that are disappearing are male jobs, jobs that are growing are female jobs.  WRONG.  Jobs that are disappearing are jobs requiring less than a college degree.  Jobs that are growing are jobs requiring a college degree.  

Computer science, a job many men are attracted to, is growing.  So is engineering.  So is jobs for mathematicians. 
The reality is that fewer men than women are awarded a college degree for the past 40 years, so yes men are in jobs requiring less than a college degree. 

Wrong Prediction:
Nursing will significantly increase the percentage of nurses who are male.   As my brilliant co-author Julie Coates has documented with real evidence, the more democratic and prosperous a society is, the more women go into traditional female jobs, and the more men go into traditional male jobs. 

Gender Equity:
Miller screams: "Nursing is no paragon of gender equality: Even though men are a minority, they are paid more than women."  In the next few posts, we examine the reality behind gender pay equity in nursing (and other fields). 

Photo: The river flowing through our town, usually open in winter, frozen now.

 

China's Top Scientific Advance in 2017: Train Simulator

The top scientific advance for 2017 in China's universities was named last week. It is a high speed train simulator.

The project “Model Testing of the Dynamic Behaviors of High-speed Trains”, conducted by a research team led by Professor CHEN Yunmin and Professor BIAN Xuecheng with ZJU’s College of Civil Engineering and Architecture, has won this highly-acclaimed title.  Here's the story.

The team has pioneered the invention of a testing device for the dynamic behaviors of high-speed trains all over the globe. Their device can measure track vibration and soil response of a ballastless high-speed railway from a full-scale model testing with simulated train moving loads at various speeds.

The velocity of a high-speed train approximates or surpasses the wave speed of subgrade soil. The vibration induced by a train may lead to shock waves and the Mach effect, thereby adversely affecting its safety and comfort. Model testing in the laboratory, as an effective alternative to a field measurement, is of immense scientific and engineering significance.

The ZJU research team pioneers the invention of a testing device for the dynamic behaviors of high-speed trains all over the globe. This device measures track vibration and soil response of a ballastless high-speed railway from a full-scale model testing with simulated train moving loads at various speeds. A computer-controlled sequential loading system is developed to generate equivalent vertical loadings at the track structure for simulating the dynamic excitations due to the train’s movements. The proposed model testing can precisely reproduce dynamic behaviors of the track structure and underlying soils under train moving loads. The attenuation characteristics of dynamic soil stresses in a ballastless slab track are found to differ distinctly from those in a ballasted track. The model testing results provide better understanding of the influence of dynamic soil-structure interaction and train speed on the response of track structure and soils.

Photo: Students working in the high speed train simulator laboratory.

Meanwhile Back to the Future

This will blow your mind.

On China high speed railways, face-recognition technology is used in some major railway stations and is expected to be promoted nationwide.  This also from the Telegraph story here. 

Trains Keep Getting Better

It's another train week at NineShift. 

Wi-Fi is going to be available on all high-speed trains in the future, said Huang Min, the deputy general manager of China Railway Corporation, the country’s railway operator, according to a report by chinanews.com that was covered by The Telegraph in this story. 

The stability of the internet in tunnels and mountainous areas is a major obstacle to overcome in improving Wi-Fi services on high-speed trains.  NineShift would add that our cell service dropped just driving through some hills last week, so Internet in tunnels, bluffs and other hilly areas affects service in cars too.  

 

Choo Choo 2018. First U.S. Private Train Starts This Week!

Happy 2018.  We start out the New Year with big news.

Brightline, the first all-private (track and train) passenger train in the U.S. in over fifty years, starts this week.

The train will run from Ft. Lauderdale to West Palm Beach, Florida.  Soon the big Miami train station will open for service.
And Brightline has already received federal approval to build the track to Orlando.
Orlando to Miami is the goal.