Q21 - A study of the difference in earnings between men and

[moon]

Hi. Could someone please explain why (C) is incorrect?

Doesn't (C) explains the reason why average annual earnings of women who are employed full time is higer than all employed women?

Thank you in advance!

[C.Michael.Kim]

(C) is only a partial response. Without knowing what proportion of males and females engage in part time work, you wouldn't be able to explain explicitly why the annual earnings of all employed women was 65% to that of all employed men. The answer choice leaves the possibility that more men are engaged in part time work which would depress the average salary of men, which in turn wouldn't explain the difference in salaries between all men and all women.

[ohthatpatrick]

Nice response.

To the original poster, I think you're framing the paradox slightly incorrectly.

You made it sound like we're trying to explain why full-time women make more than all employed women.

Be careful, though, it's not about how much either of them make in absolute terms. The paradox is only about how much full-time women vs. full time men make and how much all employed women vs. all employed men make.

As far as these facts are concerned, it's completely possible that full-time women make LESS than part-time women.

The 80% vs. 65% disparity is about how close/far women's pay is to men's pay.

When it comes to full-time workers, women are somewhat close to men.
When it comes to ALL workers (full-time and part-time), women are farther from men.

Well, there's actually only one way both of those facts could be true: the part-time workers HAVE to be pulling the females and males further apart.

This is a completely unique Resolve/Explain question, because the answer is something you can actually predict (and something that basically MUST be true).

So (C) doesn't present a fact that relates to the comparison between female pay and male pay, and it doesn't get to the necessary inference that part-time women have to be causing the disparity between the two statistics.

== other answers ==

(A) this just reinforces the idea that THERE IS a disparity, but it doesn't do anything to EXPLAIN the disparity.

(B) this talks about men and women who make the SAME amount. That's not going to help us explain a DISPARITY.

(C) this compares female pay for certain types of jobs to female pay for other types of jobs (it does NOT deal with full-time vs. part-time, and it doesn't deal with females vs. males)

(D) this explains how part-time female workers contribute to increasing the disparity between female and male pay overall.

(E) this brings in other countries, which are irrelevant. It compares Naota's 80% full-time figure to other countries' 50-90% full-time figures. But it does nothing to address Naota's 80% full-time vs. 65% overall disparity.

Hope this helps