Category: Wage Gap

Somehow I missed this one, but apparently a new Congressional study was release in January that found salaries for female managers declined from 1995 to 2000 in seven of the ten industries the study surveyed. In addition, only 12 percent of corporate officers were women, although women make up 50 percent of the workforce.

But writing in National Review, Anne Marlowe notices what the Government Accounting Office study actually revealed — that women tend to make far different career choices than men and, as a result, “self-select” themselves out of the highest levels of government.

In fact women and men in this study actually earned exactly the same amount until they reached their early 30s when women as a group began to lose ground to the men. Why? Almost certainly different patterns in child rearing. Women tend to take time off and look for less demanding jobs after having children, while men do not, on average.

As Marlowe puts it,

Three is a significant amount of self-selection by women away from the stressful, time-consuming, demanding careers that are the most lucrative, both because these careers are difficult to reconcile with significant involvement in child-rearing and far harder to pin down cultural reasons.

As for the cultural reasons Marlowe claims hold women back, she argues that women in managerial positions assume that a glass ceiling is holding them from succeeding, and as a result they do not succeed largely through nobody’s fault but their own.

She cites a survey of job satisfaction among Wall Street professionals to make her point. Women and men in the survey she cites had very similar job satisfaction levels. But when asked whether they agreed with the statement, “I believe that if I work hard I can make it to the top of my firm,” only 44 percent of men and 28 percent of women either agreed or strongly agreed with that statement.

Meanwhile, even though only 63 percent of women said they lacked mentors compared to 73 percent of men, 50 percent of the women said they were dissatisfied with the availability of mentors compared to 36 percent of the men surveyed.

Marlowe interprets this to mean that, “Men accept the game as offered and play it without attributing its difficulty to their gender. Women decide that if there are bad things about their work environment, it must because of their gender.”

An alternative view might be that women more accurately appraise their opportunities for job advancement than men. On the other hand, having an realistic view of your job opportunities might not make one ideal CEO material (having an irrational faith in one’s own abilities might be an important ingredient in climbing to the top of an organization given all of the obstacles).

Source:

Pride and Prejudice: Women’s career achievement and individual choice. Ann Marlowe, National Review, January 28, 2002.

Two of the more inane ideas that came out of feminism in the late 1970s and early 1980s were those of pay equity and comparable worth. Unfortunately after lying dormant for years, feminists are trying to bring both ideas back and make them part of social policies.

Maine, for example, is attempting to institute comparable worth by law. The driving principle behind comparable worth is the claim that pay rates should be based upon the difficulty or type of job that a person performs. Typically, feminists compare the wage rates in occupations dominated by women such as nursing and compare that to the wage rates in occupations dominated by men, just as janitorial service. Nursing and janitorial work require similar skills, they argue, and so should be compensated at the same rate.

The problem with this idea is that people are not compensated according to the difficulty of their job, at least not directly. Rather wage rates are related to the supply of qualified workers. Nursing jobs, for example, have typically had an oversupply of qualified workers (largely women) and so wage rates have long been depressed. In the last ten years, however, this has started to change as the ratio of qualified nurses to positions has begun to decline, and wage rates for nurses in many parts of the country are beginning to increased markedly.

Trying to create some sort of master index of jobs and set wage rates equally across similar jobs is an absurd proposition that simply wouldn’t work. As Anita Hattiangadi of the Employment Policy Foundation notes, whom Minnesota tried a comparable worth-style system for state government employees, the main result was that female unemployment increased by almost 5 percent while male unemployment rose by only 1.25 percent. (One of the main effects of a comparable worth system would be to reduce overall opportunity which would disproportionately affect women for a number of reasons).

The pay equity idea claims that women earn lower wages than men due solely to sexism and the state needs to step in to equalize pay. Current if government statistics show that the average woman working full time makes 26 cents less than the average man working full time. Is this evidence of rampant sexism? No.

The National Longitudinal Survey of Youth provides a more likely explanation. It found that childless women aged 27 to 33 earned 98 percent as much as childless men. Although some of the wage gap is due to past sexual discrimination which prevented women in the 1960s and 1970s from access to advancement paths, today the main cause of the wage gap is women leaving the work force temporarily during their 20s to become mothers. As Patricia Hausman of the Independent Women’s Forum writes,

Study after study finds that women with children work fewer hours, accumulate less experience, and take more extended leaves from the workplace — all of which limit their advancement. While sometimes a necessity, these are often choices gladly made by women who consider being with their children more important than maximizing earnings

Hausman also scores points by wondering why feminists aren’t concerned about other pronounced gender gaps:

One might also wonder why the national conversation about equity is so singularly focused on wages. After all, females earn less, but live an average seven years longer than males. Yet, feminists have not declared Equal Life Expectancy Day to demand government intervention designed to end this injustice.

Indeed.

Source:

I am woman, hear me whine. Patricia Hausman, National Review Online, April 3, 2001.

Maine becomes first state requiring pay equity. Cindy Richards, Women’s E News, April 3, 2001.

A recent report by British researchers examining earnings inequalities between men and women in the United Kingdom comes to much the same conclusion that similar studies of the U.S. wage gap have arrived at — women make significantly less than men, but the difference is better explained by choices women make rather than sexual discrimination.

In 1998, the average full-time pay of women in the United Kingdom was 80 percent of the average full-time pay of men. As researchers J.R. Shackleton and Peter Urwin of the Westminster Business School argue, however, “Only a part of the labour market advantage enjoyed by men can be attributed to discrimination in any sense that can be addressed by public policy.”

Specifically, a major cause of the wage inequality in the UK and US is the way men and women deal differently with marriage. Single men tend to learn less than married men and tend to work fewer hours. The reverse is true for women — single women tend to earn more than married women and work more hours. A very large proportion of the difference in men’s and women’s wages is due to the fact that for a variety of reasons, women are far more likely than men to switch to part-time work or exit the work force altogether after they are married.

In fact when you hold hours worked, experience and other factors constant, the UK researchers found that women’s wages averages about 90 percent of men’s wages. In the United States similar results have been found, and in fact there are some professions where women earn higher wages on average than men.

Short of using paternalistic tax policies to force married women to work more, it is hard to see, as the report puts it, “that [wage inequality] can be addressed by public policy.”

Source:

Work inequality questioned as women catch up. Philip Johnston, The Daily Telegraph (UK), November 27, 2000.

The latest annual salary survey by Working Women magazine pretty much confirms the trend over the last decade — on average women’s earnings are only 76.5% that of men’s, but the difference disappears when comparing men and women in the same field with similar characteristics. In fact in some fields, women earn significantly more than men.

The current figure is an improvement of 14% since 1979, when women made on average only 62.5 cents for every dollar a man made.

Comparing men as a whole to women as a whole is deceptive, however, since the two groups are not homogenous in the work force. Men, for example, tend to work many more hours than women. Many women also tend to take extended breaks from the work force to have children during the twenties, which sets them back in the race for promotions.

“It’s extremely hard to make comparisons, but when you are better able to compare employees of equivalent aspirations and equivalent commitment, the closer the salaries are,” economist June O’Neill told the Associated Press.

Ironically there are now some fields where men out-earn women.In advertising, women CEO’s earn an average of $275,000 compared to men who make $253,100. The most startling example is occupational therapy where women earn an average of about $39,000 compared to men who make an average of about $32,000. Typically many feminists have argued that the mere existence of discrepancies in average salaries is prima facie evidence of sexual discrimination. It will be interesting to see how they shift their position once the salary advantage shifts in other occupations.

It is also interesting to consider how the closing wage gap will affect support among men and women for affirmative action programs. As Working Woman editor Lisa Freeman pointed out, the reason for the shift is largely because most business today care little about the sex of a worker, but rather the quality of a worker. “They’re looking for good employees, regardless of color, regardless of sex,” Freeman told the Associated Press.

Contrary to the assertions of radical feminists, women don’t need any special privileges to succeed economically, just a fair shot based on their merit.

Source:

Study: women’s salaries lag behind men’s pay. The Associated press, July 4, 2000.