The myth of the teacher pay gap?
&gt; (2) Annual wages have been calculated by multiplying the hourly mean wage by a &quot;year-round, full-time&quot; hours figure of 2,080 hours; for those occupations where there is not an hourly wage published, the annual wage has been directly calculated from the reported survey data.<p>See, this is where things go wrong. So they&#x27;ve got mean wage figures which are constructed both on a fact (hourly wage) and an assumption (working hours).<p>I know n=1 but, my girlfriend is a teacher and I see her working about 40 hours a week, for a 24h job. She has a 0.6 FTE contracted position (and an according 60% monthly salary), she&#x27;s at the school about 4 days a week. On her off-day, every single evening before work and after work, and at least one, sometimes two days of the weekend, she&#x27;s grading papers, designing exams, preparing lessons, calling up parents, responding to students on their education platform (some saas application on laptop &amp; phone) etc etc.<p>There&#x27;s no way she can handle a 1.0 position, she&#x27;d burn-out within 1 or 2 years. She knows this, all of her colleagues know this. Almost everyone works part-time.<p>She does teach difficult classes (lots of kids from low socioeconomic background, crappy parents, many distractions, little socialisation skills etc etc) but even teaching &#x27;easy&#x27; kids, you&#x27;ll still top-out at 0.8 FTE for the same mental effort &#x2F; working hours &#x2F; strain of 1.0 FTE at a &#x27;normal&#x27; job (like mine, corporate job at a financial institution).<p>Hourly wages can&#x27;t be straight-up compared between jobs high in mental or physical strain (e.g. teaching or construction) versus say an administrative office job. You just can&#x27;t last 40 years working the former jobs at a full-time position. Not the average person.