Cecil, you left out that women are still less likely to be promoted to top management positions, which pay the big bucks. That may contribute to the 40% less earnings average.
I assume you’re referring to this article?
That may be some of it, but it’s clearly not all of it.
Time magazine recently did an article, unfortunately locked behind a paywall, where they talk about how the pay gap affects women’s financial futures. They show how across all occupations, the pay gap is larger for older women than for younger women, but women 22-25 stillmake $3k less per year. Physicians and surgeons start on par, but the pay gap grows with age. Registered nurses, actors, and secondary school teachers are listed as professions where younger women actually make more than their male counterparts, but that changes within 5 years.
Bartenders is an interesting case because younger women make more than older women, but older men make more than younger men. The probable explanation is that bartender pay is at least partially in tips, and tips go to women for attractiveness, whereas tips go to men for skill.
But even secretaries and administrative assistants pay men more than women. That’s got nothing to do with the glass ceiling.
But it may have something to do with this:
Really? What law is that?
There may be some jobs in which all workers at the same level have to be paid the same, but I’d need evidence of that. A blanket law that forbids discrepancy in pay? Nuts.
A recent New York Times article discusses a new study that “when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.”
As for the law requiring the same pay:
Ed, you blew this one. You need to revisit it.
I believe that recent research in the UK shows that over here women in their 20s and possibly 30s now get paid more than men.
After “largely” the gap is still about 7%. I doubt men would be pleased with a 7% penis penalty…
And more recent studies have shown that the pay gap is measurable just 1 year post-college, a time with very few women have taken off work to have a baby.
Yes, but there have been other studies that have isolated factors that account for that gap as well.
Women are more risk averse than men. Men are much more willing, if not happy, to take jobs that require them to work alone, work in remote locations, work after hours, work dangerous or dirty jobs, work jobs that require strenuous physical labour etc. That has a large impact on earning ability. How large is difficult to measure, but I read study around ten years ago that took the simple step of correcting income for geographic location, and that alone took care of around 25% of the pay gap. The reason why: because men were overwhelmingly the ones working on oil rigs, as ranch hands, in mining camps and other remote are professions that offer attractive wages.
That alone could well account for a gender pay gap straight of university. If people working in remote locations get paid 10% more than their counterparts on cities, and 75% of the people working in remote locations are men, there is your pay gap right there.
If male graduates are more willing to take shitty jobs, for example, psychologists visiting criminals in dangerous neighbourhoods alone at night or scientists working jobs that require manual handling of heavy loads, then you would expect male graduates to be employed more often. And that alone could well account for the pay gap.
Speaking from personal experience, my first permanent job after graduation required me to dodge cattle in yards, drive a tractor, ride motorbikes across paddocks, dig holes and construct fences, all requiring working in remote location for weeks at a time for over half the year. It was perfectly normal to feel physically, muscle achingly exhausted at the end of every working day. That was all a standard work for a graduate experimentalist.
The fact is that few women *wanted *my job at that time and very few who wanted it could physically *do *it. As a result I gained several years of extra experience and networking over the women who graduated at the same time that I did. If you repeat that experience across the graduate pool, then very quickly men will be ahead on pay, and because men are more willing to take other opportunities that involve shitty jobs, they continue to advance faster.
There is certainly an element of plain old discrimination in the gender pay gap. But I suspect that it is very low. Most of it seems to be explainable by two factors: women work fewer years than men due to child-rearing, and women are less willing or able than men to work the shitty jobs. .
It’s quite difficult to tease out those factors in large studies because superficially similar jobs can have very different levels of shittiness. The social worker working with prisoners in a jail may seem, on paper, to be doing a similar job to the social worker working with parolees after release, but the level of danger, after hours work and so forth is likely ot be very different.
But the few studies that I have seen that do attempt to correct for those factors see most of the pay gap vanish.
Men are much more likely to be injured or killed at work than women, in both absolute and relative terms, from the first link I found on googling:
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfoi/cfch0013.pdf
Would women be pleased to be at the same level of risk? Perhaps men are being paid commensurate with the greater level of danger they experience.
That’s 7% in favour of women, at least in the UK. I found the cite I could not recall earlier. It only applies to women in their 20s, not 30s.
If you adjust for time off from work, how do women fare against men? That is, instead of looking at people of a particular age you look at time in work. So you would compare a man who’s been working for 10 years with a woman who’s had 10 years’ work over 15 years, having taken 5 years off for her children.
No, the women only make 1% more. And if you read other stories about this study it only applies to twenty-something women with college degrees, which is only about 30% of people in that age grouping.
Do you really think people over here routinely earn over £100K? The national average salary here is £26,500.
There’s a variable that none of these studies ever control for, and that’s height. I don’t think we have a gender gap as much as we have a height gap (not that this is ok, but it’s a different problem with a different solution).
Every inch taller a person is adds 789 dollars per year to their pay. The average man is 5’9" and the average woman is 5’4" (5 inches or almost $4000 per year). That seems to more than explain any residual difference in wages between men and women. The height wage gap controls for gender; this difference is seen in both men and women. But the gender wage gap does not control for height.
Obviously it isn’t ok to pay short people less (As a man of 5’6" tall, I can state this firmly!). But, I’m not sure why this pretty obvious explanation for the gender wage gap never comes up.
The law disallowing people from pay discrimination based on gender actually predates the Civil Rights Act:
Of course that doesn’t mandate everyone be paid identically, but I believe from context that what Cecil meant was that women couldn’t be paid less than men based solely on their gender. Seniority, merit-based bonuses, and so on are still legal ways to discriminate pay. Cecil made that all clear in the article, or at least I thought so.
There are too many statisticoids out there based on different criteria to get a good picture of this. Women working as physicians on average may make less than their male counterparts but that does not mean they are performing the same work. Women may gravitate toward physician jobs which pay less than other areas, or prefer localities where the pay rates are lower. Or they are being actively discriminated against. And while certainly women should not face gender discrimination in pay as physicians it is a much more serious problem when women with choices limited to less well paying jobs are discriminated against. We could really use some serious facts to look at this issue.
Nice combination of username and post. 
Okay, but did they control for the fact that doubling the potential work force cheapens the value of labor across the board?
The article says specifically that occupations that remain male-dominated have higher median incomes. This is true despite the larger potential work force.
And your question is ignoring that the issue is about the relative pay of men and women. The actual pay may have risen or fallen, but that’s irrelevant. The maintenance of a gap is what is being measured.
As a business owner, I would be extremely foolish to pay any more for labor than I have to. If women really are cheaper, why is it that employers continue to hire and pay more for men without any increase in productivity?
Entrenched (and often subconscious) attitudes, the fact that men on average tend to be more self-confident than women, knowledge that men aren’t very likely to take parental leave, possibly even a desire to avoid the trouble of sexual harassment issues. There are more than just monetary issues to take into account.