Talk:Issues in Interdisciplinarity 2018-19/Evidence in the Gender Pay Gap

Tuesday 20 November: Summary of our meeting: In this meeting, we discussed further our idea of linking evidence to the gender pay gap. We specifically brainstormed the disciplines in which evidence linked to the pay gap is discussed, both in terms of causes and solutions. We decided that we want to look at a mix of social and “hard” sciences, including: psychology, sociology, economics and biology. We split up the disciplines between us, so that each of us could do further research on each disciplines stake in the gender pay gap. We are planning on coming together on the week of the 26th to share our findings and figure out the outline of our project.

Thursday 29 November: Summary of our meeting: In our meeting today, we brought together our research findings from our individual work on each disciplines to create an outline/ plan for our chapter. A draft of what we brainstormed is below:

OUTLINE:

Eibhlin - Historical Perspective - Everyone uses different evidence :
 * Evidence was faulty, women “belong at home” etc. Clear examples of misuse/ lack of evidence used to backup bad points. Olden days.
 * Turning point - Evidence for pay gap increased
 * Nowadays - exploring our current disciplines’ theories and evidence on gender pay gap

Alisha - Psychological:

Hanna - Sociology
 * modeling, looking at individual behaviors

Isabelle - Economists: mathematical, models, etc

To do afterwards together: Conclusion/Evaluation -
 * Varying use of evidence,
 * nature of evidence (quantitative/qualitative),
 * clashing opinions,
 * too much evidence?
 * while no one can agree, we don’t seem able to solve it.

Monday 3 December: Summary of our meeting: Met up to talk each other through our individual research, findings and contribution to the chapter before cutting down our words. We also talked through each of our ideas of what we would want to include in our evaluation based on our own research. Decided that our tasks for the week are to cut down our own sections, read through each other's and begin adding content to the evaluation. Scheduled another meeting for the weekend to go over the whole chapter and fine tune the evaluation together.

Tuesday 4 December : We used this meeting today to conclude how we would structure the evaluation part of our wikibook chapter. We had decided that we didn't want to assign parts of the evaluation and would rather write it together so we began brainstorming its specific content. We also discussed word count (looking at what parts could be made shorter/longer).

Evaluation Content Discussed: Sociologists Psychologists Economics
 * In addition to human capital theory there is cultural discrimination and lack of opportunity that also are explanatory of the wage gap
 * Discrimination is impossible to quantify
 * Sociologists use holistic, non-quantifiable evidence
 * Lack of opportunity is also impossible to measure
 * Sociologists: ethnographic research, interviews
 * More individualistic evidence, models do not include measurements of stronger social forces
 * Structure vs. agency
 * Decomposition of variables (hourly wages, median wages, etc)

Wednesday 5 December : Hanna and Isabelle discussed over the phone the ways in which they could edit their respective disciplinary portions to ensure a continuity in argument.

Facebook messenger : In our group chat we discussed ways in which we might have to change the structure to accommodate the word count by merging the discussion of disciplinary perspectives with the ways in which each discipline clashes.

Saturday 8 December: We consolidated our ideas about what to include in our evaluation to make it into a cohesive paragraph. We also worked on our word count, as we needed to greatly cut down. Once we felt that we could not cut down anymore on our own writing, we switched and cut words/edited each others work. Once we had the evaluation written, we looked through the chapter as a whole to make sure it flows as a unified piece of writing. We also went through our references to make sure we cited ideas/theories presented.

A large portion of our drafting and research was conducted in the form of a google docs document that could be accessed and edited by every member of the group. It can be viewed using this link - https://docs.google.com/document/d/11Nv9lf4JfHxqjbp5uGDg-xLSUgTn1fPvyN2xOC8hnkU/edit.