It is an interesting problem in research on inequality, maybe especially in sociology, that we focus on the jobs people have and their earnings, more than other aspects of their lives that may be more directly indicative of their happiness, well-being, or success — which we assume follow from income. This has improved with the introduction of more studies of health outcomes, for example. But we should study consumption patterns more as matters of inequality. That we don’t is only partly a function of available data (I’ve used the Consumer Expenditure Survey a little, and it’s not pretty). Anyway, I’d like to see more of it.

Thanks for taking the time to respond.

First off, it’s probably important to understand what this income dynamics analysis was…and what it wasn’t.

We’re a strategy and market research firm focused on emerging shifts in the consumer landscape. The inquiry was triggered by some client work on a community development project a few years ago where we noticed that single women were buying 40% of the homes, a dramatic shift from past patterns. Since then, we’ve been finding similar patterns in other industries and geographic areas. Researching the drivers behind that shift triggered a multi-year research project digging into whether there’s anything different about a generation of young women that’s about 1.5 times more likely to graduate from college than young men…and income dynamics were an obvious part of the inquiry since that tends to drive consumer spending patterns.

It’s critical to note that this was never designed as a study to prove or disprove wage discrimination in the workplace. Unfortunately, we’ve seen a number of interests on all sides of the spectrum try to take or refute the data for that purpose, when there are far better inquiries on that specific issue from various academics and advocacy organizations as you point out. For us, this is a much simpler matter of trying to determine how various shifts might impact consumer markets.

But this leads to my main issues with this post, which we hope to respectfully convey. We actually concur that if the point was to prove or disprove wage discrimination or job segregation, there are other research pathways to accomplish that objective. Given the nature of our work, this research simply wasn’t designed for that purpose.

At the same time, all the academic work on related issues that we reviewed wasn’t able to help us assess potential impact on consumer markets either, simply because those examinations weren’t designed for our needs. But I’m not going to assert that those approaches were wrong. We found significant value in many of them, but not necessarily for what we needed to find out. (As an aside, my wife is a professor who recently released some research that’s generated attention in academic circles on the history of gender discrimination in the financial arena, and while our research approaches are rather different, I’m not going to dare say that difference means hers is wrong!)

A related issue we have is the assertion that “this approach is wrong” since it’s an “odd, unrepresentative slice of the population.” If it were attempting to represent the entire populace, it would be wrong, but instead, it’s simply the specific cohort that we found most interesting from the perspective of a comprehensive income dynamics analysis churning through a ridiculous amount of American Community Survey microdata (and the Census data that preceded the ACS). At least from a consumer market perspective, it’s not an insignificant slice when the number of single women in their 20s increased dramatically in the past decade. So with this combination of issues coming together for this slice of the population, their impact is starting to get notice…at least in the consumer marketplace.

As many of the academics and some of the interest groups concluded when considering this data and implications, many of us agree that it’s a primarily driven by educational gains…there are far more young women than young men with the educational credentials to enter today’s knowledge-based work force. But yes, there’s a ton of stuff underneath.

Regarding your data on men with BAs earning more than women with BAs, that’s a pretty good example where the data is generally accurate…but the real devil is in the details. To one of the points that you mention, there’s certainly the question about job segregation. After pulling data on 2,000 communities across the U.S. and appending various demographic data to those communities, and when comparing means versus medians, it certainly became clear to us when looking on a more granular level that there are some communities dominated by industries (e.g., software and finance) where the overwhelming majority of top earners remain male. Likewise, the minority issue that you allude to is another rather interesting topic that was evident in the analysis. But job segregation and social stratification are areas that other experts are far better suited to discuss with other research more relevant to those topics.

So onto the question of what happens as this increasingly well-educated cohort moves through their next life stages? It’s a huge wildcard worth watching, and we’ll certainly continue to track the data over time to see how that informs what happens in the consumer market, as I’m sure others will examine the data for issues such as job segregation or wage discrimination.

We look forward to crossing paths at some point down the road since you examine some issues that we like to track, although we hope that you don’t find it off-putting that even private-sector researchers sometimes read academic work as well

As for Belinda Luscombe’s TIME article, we accept that her job is not to crank out copy to serve the needs of the academic community or the consumer marketing community. We suspect that her objective is to prompt thinking and consideration of interesting issues among as many people as possible. Based on this dialog, maybe she nailed it in that respect?