Wrong About the Wage Gap: Jordan Peterson.

see now the sense even if you're just
looking at this one chart of how difficult it is to pin down precisely what the gender gap is but you know what the University of Toronto employs exactly the sort of people who have that skill set so this is the strange thing about dr. Jordan Peterson this controversy has been haunting him his whole life when I was a student the University of Toronto decades ago it haunted me and my life was a huge controversy there he's been at the center of this storm and he's been commenting on the press for all these years and it's very strange that he never took an interest in the social science process of analysis to identify whether or not there was a problem and then to mathematically determine the extent of the problem you might have noticed that I don't particularly subscribe to this 21st century trend of speaking your truth of speaking about life in terms of one's own truth his truth her truth my truth your truth I'm still kind of stuck on this concept of the truth as oppressive as that may seem and you know a guy like Jordan Peterson although he is somewhat of a conservative if not outright fascist political vigor you know it's really strange that he actually personifies that far or left-wing stereotype of having a certain kind of creative plasticity with the truth and never has this been more true to reference to what he has to say about um gender equality and the so-called pay gap which is to say the inequality between the amount of money men earn and the amount of money women are and not only have I seen him asked about this in general terms in interviews but often enough the question is put to him with reference to the university that he was and is a professor at for so many years the University of Toronto I'm now a hundred years old but when I was a young man I also was a student at University of Toronto and at that time already decades ago there was an ongoing controversy about the pay gap between men and women now when people are dishonest it's very difficult to tell what it is they're being dishonest about and why Jordan Peterson takes this issue of the gender pay gap and whenever he's asked about it or ever he gives a lecture about it or speaks on it he twists the topic so that he can express his personal philosophical convictions about the so-called Big Five personality test he twists the question so that he can give an irrelevant answer about agreeableness and his personal philosophy that the problem most women have not all most women and some men have is that they are too agreeable to get paid a higher rate in a capitalist free-market situation now the problem with that philosophy is not whether it is right or wrong not the extent to which it's gonna lead you into leading a bad life the problem is that it's actually completely irrelevant to the question which is an interesting one and a good one that should be taken seriously of whether or not men and women actually are paid the same amount to do the same kind of work or the same amount of work or the same quality of work at the University of Toronto Canada which is a very large employer as to some extent representative of these problems throughout many sectors of the economy the University of Toronto does not have much resemblance to a gold mine whether or not men and women are paid the same working as miners is a different question it's not that similar to working in the fire department however there were a lot of large companies offices of course schools and what-have-you where you will encounter many of the same issues that the issues that arose in people sincerely trying to measure the width of the wage gap trying to establish whether or not there was an equal pay and women doing the same kind of work so this is really the one and only statistic I want to confront you with this is the list of the highest-paid individuals at the University of Toronto you'll notice that just two of them are highlighted in yellow take a good look this is an institution with extreme wage inequality and something I've discussed in this channel again and again and again is that economic inequality very often has nothing to do with helping the poor all right at the top of this chart we have someone earning more than $1 a year at the bottom of this chart we have someone earning $390,000 years these are all rich people it's inequalities economical it's extreme economic inequality but everyone in this picture is a wealthy person if not extremely wealthy right why are just two of the numbers highlighted in yellow I highlighted them in yellow because those are the only two female employees in this chart everyone else is male so this already is a really instructive demonstration of why it is so difficult in terms of serious social science research to establish the inequality of male and female pay scales the main benefits salaries being paid to people when you're in institution where positions such as the professor of Finance is a male position the professor of marketing the professor of economics I hate these the most highly paid positions are dominated by men you do not see here the professor of poetry right somewhere much further down the list I'm now allowed out there living in poverty right I don't see the professor of French right these are positions that's stereotypically have female professors and I know I had many many female when I was in university oh no my German professors two of them were women and so on you know in many many different subjects I know that one of the professors of Buddhism and Buddhist philosophy is a female for some reason the professor of Finance and the professor of management and professor of economics these people are earning much much much more money than the professor of poetry the professor of French professor of Buddhism so on and so forth and that question which is tremendously meaningful and tremendously important is not examined by dr. Jordan Peterson it's not examined by the third wave and fourth wave feminists of our time that's actually an unbelievably important question now I am in some ways more radical and more left-wing than Bernie Sanders and I am in some ways more conservative than Jordan Peterson let's keep it all the way real I am a mix of contradictory political impulses but I actually think it is an injustice to pay the professor of Finance and the professor of economics so much more than the professor of French and the professor of English and I think if you break it down it's at least possible that the person who is teaching French is doing more work more hours of work harder work and maybe even more important work you know meeting with students face-to-face and helping them learn this language then the professor of Finance like maybe if you had a fair system of bonuses maybe at least some years some of the time some of the French teachers would be paid more than the professor of management maybe sometimes the professor of poetry person I think there is actually a real question of justice and injustice given that fundamentally all of these jobs boil down to standing in front of a chalkboard lecture in a room full of students grading papers grading essays collecting exams right there's a sense there is a fundamental equality to the type of labor here and yet there's a profound inequality to how these people are paid that has nothing to do with gender and yet of course the types of jobs the types of careers these people choose are very gendering asymmetrical right and now you might think you might think I'm a tremendously macho testosterone driven individual you would be wrong I'm someone who wants to lead a meaningful life and I have a lot more in common with the women who choose those lower pay hanging paths in life all right there is no part of me ever that has looked at this kind of pay pay scale and felt motivated to think well I got a claw my way to the top no I don't even know why I'm climbing this hill but I want to be on the top of it I'll be damned if the the vice dean of marketing and Business Studies earns more than me I'm I got to do whatever it takes to be in the top 10 of these highly paid I would never be motivated that way right I would be in one of those other departments asking totally different questions about how I can live a meaningful life and how I can help my students and how I can do important research and make the world a better place you know so I'm not motivated by money in this way and that puts me into that stereotypically female gender role but by the way when I when I had a kid I'm divorced but you know I was a full-time stay-at-home dad so just just want to put that in their first year of my daughter's life I was a full-time stay-at-home uh-huh and it was great I was it was wonderful I got to see my daughter take her first steps and chew her first solid food and all that stuff got to have all those great moments with my daughter during her during her first year of life would it be an exaggeration to say I heard her say her first words she made some made some sounds all right so let's turn in this question so you know of assets even if you're just looking at this one chart of how difficult it is to pin down precisely what the gender gap is but you know what the University of Toronto employs exactly the sort of people who have that skill set so this is the strange thing about dr. Jordan Peterson this controversy has been haunting him his whole life when I was a student a University of Toronto decades ago it haunted me and my life was a huge controversy there he's been at the center of this storm and he's been commenting on the press for all these years and it's very strangely he never took an interest in the social science process of analysis to identify whether or not there was a problem and to mathematically determine the extent of the problem so you don't need a background of math to understand this is how do you proceed you start with the Union rules for who gets paid how much because there are very strict rules negotiated between unions and universities who's getting what raise from what salary from what starting point for doing what job you start looking on a unit-by-unit basis for evidence that say two different professors of poetry who've both been professors for the same number of years and had the same number of promotions and who check the same boxes on the Union pay scale is there a difference between men and women when you are as precisely as possible comparing their achievements in the type of work they do in an academic setting like University of Toronto that also requires you to itemize how many books they've published how many peer-reviewed articles they've polish sometimes even the quality of those books right you're gonna have to break that down because one professor of poetry is not equal to another and their pay is not equal he's able that's because this professor had a hit book so then you're gonna have to come with okay how many dollars is a hit book worth as opposed to a less successful book or a book with a great poet they had to break down these things as finely as possible all right and then calculate any inequalities between males and females department by department position by position to establish if there were a gender bias and what had added up to ten years later the numbers are in 1.3 percent men were being paid 1.3 percent more than women when you really did the math to establish how much of the difference in pay is attributable to gender bias as opposed to all of these palpable factors so the University of Toronto provides us with a fascinating powerful and insightful case study of what happens when we move past the initial sticker shock of just looking in university and saying wow all the people who are making more than $400,000 are male I'm sorry there was one female in the list there's one professor of accounting who's female everyone else making more than $400,000 is male it's very easy to just look at that and say oh this is gender inequality this is oppression this is an injustice now I am actually the important yin that there is an injustice I think there is a profound and important injustice in how education is organized but it is not principally an injustice of men oppressing women I would describe it frankly as a kind of aristocracy we now live in a society where arbitrarily some people have these positions of unquestioned power Authority and nearly unlimited finances and universities and you may feel their merited but plenty of people who live within aristocratic societies felt that the privilege of the people in charge was based on merit - I'll tell you something about these people earning four hundred thousand five hundred thousand even a million dollars nobody elected them nobody questions them nobody cross-examines the merit of their publications and asks are you really worth four thousand dollars nobody evaluates the quality of the education they're delivering to students and asks are you actually training people with useful skills that justifies your salary $14,000 there are a lot of really important questions but when we did the social science research funded basically by a legal core challenge seen through by a labor union and a dispute turb you know and ultimately ending with a small but significant sum of money being paid to women who were proven to be paid slightly too little for the jobs that were doing the university the number that came up at the end of that investigation was 1.3 percent the much more profound inequality of the society we live in is that imbeciles like jordan peterson end up in a pulpit in a position of real power and influence where they can go on for decades self-indulgent Li promoting their own peculiar air sets ideology and seemingly never showing even the slightest interest into facts facts someone like I was able to turn up with just a few Google searches what is the value of an education when it's in the hands of someone like Jordan Peterson someone who has used his position of power frankly to preach his peculiar doctrine about wage inequality between men and women while sitting in the eye of the storm of the University of Toronto a place where this research wasn't folding right before his very eyes with very real consequences for him and for his fellow colleagues at that same University [Music]