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Transsexual men earn an average of 1.5% more after transition;transsexual women earn an average of 32%less.Why?

Studies done show that transsexual men earn an average of 1.5% more after their transition, whereas transsexual women earn an average of 32% less: "Schilt and Wiswall found that women who become men (known as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female, even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs earned an average of 1.5% more. ...the overall pattern was very clear: newly minted women were punished, and newly minted men got a little bump-up in pay. The study was just published in the Berkeley Electronic Press' peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy." 'If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less' Source: Time Magazine, 2008 article. Read the article please, lazy people. Job choices (a function of education) was controlled for and therefore had nothing to do with the results. You should even be able to grasp it from the article excerpt alone: "authors controlled for factors like education levels". BUT, that's only one part of the answer to this "complicated question". xampayne is the only person who has answered so far demonstrating any capacity for critical thinking. Congrats, big guy. Let's also not forget that women are judged more harshly for their looks than men. Many transsexual women (the ones in the real world, not professional entertainers) are not exactly very pretty. That would be another factor to examine. Its yet another from of gender discrimination.

Public Comments

1. with everything that's wrong in the world this is what your interested in, interesting i assume your a man considering becoming a women if you do decide to "change" i like the name Shirley
2. Job choices.
3. I think the real question should be: what kinds of fly-by-night companies have such poor HR departments to hire whack jobs who get sexual reassignment surgery???
4. thats interesting i never heard of that, and i guess it really goes to show that men still have an advantage in the work force economically
5. The question is why is the women's movement being handed (not earning) more money than a men's movement where there's more pressing facts affecting males like the fact that: women kill 3 times more boys than girls boys/men commit suicide 3x more than girls/women Women dominate colleges yet most scholarships are women only men are openly discriminated against to let underqualifies women into a career (positive discrimination) feminists tried to shut down all womens prisons in the UK saying "women need to be with their families" and much much more..... These anti-male initiatives are all funded by my taxes and feminists moan about men being payed more? LOL
6. :-D The lengths that people go to in order to try to show that the gender pay gap is based upon sex discrimination astound me! 1,5% more, 32% less. I'll just take a WILD guess and assume that the sample size for this study was absolutely tiny. I've tried to find details of the study quoted but all I get is the abstract. I'd be surprised if the sample size was more than ten people. In other words this piece of junk science doesn't contribute anything to the pay gap debate. Show me that the sample size was big enough and I'll eat some of my words. Even if we humour the people who produced this by accepting their results on face value it can be explained away very easily in at least two ways. One is that the male hormone the FTM subjects took might have increased their drive to succeed at work. Driven people tend to have higher levels of testosterone. More likely however is that the MTF subjects simply couldn't pass themselves off convincingly as women and therefore became figures of ridicule at work. They couldn't be taken seriously in high paying leadership roles. That is very sad but it tells us nothing about the gender pay gap! The gender pay gap is caused by the job choices women make and the time they take out of employment to raise children. From your link: "...it's harder for MTFs to pass than FTMs: men who become women still have large hands and bigger frames. The less-convincing appearance of MTFs probably explains part of the reason they earn so much less after they transition".
7. I think it's a very complicated question. I suspect that at least in part it has to do with how conventionally "masculine" or "feminine" the trans person appears after having gender confirmation treatment. Whilst vaginoplasty is generally more successful than penoplasty (a trans guy can really only hope for a cosmetic result, whereas a trans woman's best case scenario is basically indistinguishable from the factory model) secondary sexual characteristics are a different matter. Transition is never easy. However, guys tend to experience the most dramatic facial reconfiguration, because testosterone is such a mighty engine for change. A trans guy may very quickly come to look like a cisgendered man; his beard will grow in, his voice will drop, even his bone structure may look more masculine. A guy who is still big on top can still pass well if he binds and dresses carefully. A woman on the other hand can have a very rough time of it, especially if she transitions later in life. When a girl goes through "male" puberty, all kinds of violence is done to her body. Her forehead and jaw become more pronounced. Her voice drops. Her Adam's apple becomes visible. She develops unwanted facial hair. If she has to wait too long for treatment she may also start losing her hair. These things can be very difficult to remedy. Bear in mind also that trans folk have to have at least a year, and more usually several years, of real-life experience before they even get treatment. This means that a woman has to start going to work in her female attire long before she even gets electrolysis or hormones. She's very likely to be read as "a man in a dress" at worst, a homely woman at best. Her male counterpart is also at risk of harrassment, but it's easier for him to pass as a regular guy. Perception is important; even if the company has an excellent HR department that prioritises skills and experience over some random medical condition, co-workers can make life very difficult for trans folk. There are many other factors at play here, but conventional perceptions of femininity & masculinity are clearly a big part of the story.
8. Well, transsexuals typically are people who fail to fit within their gender expectations with such severity that they take extreme action to correct it - FTMs, prior to operation, are typically women who are very opposed to being feminine, whereas MTFs, prior to operation, are typically men who are extremely opposed to being masculine. So I'm not terribly surprised that one reflection of societal gender expectations, namely focus on profession and economic success, is emphasized particularly starkly in men who have newly become women and vice versa - these tend to be among the people who most enthusiastically embrace their new gender roles. To put it simply, a man who decides to become a woman probably isn't doing so in order to further his law career; similarly, the woman who decides to become a man probably isn't doing this in preparation to quit her job and start a family.
9. Because...MTF transsexuals take to much time off for maternity leave and to take care of kids...Wait no..that wont work Face Palm! The REAL answer is that there is still discrimination against women in the world place...we just have dipsnits around here who refuse to acknowledge the truth.