Equal efforts = unequal salaries... Wtf?!

[indierock82]

Was going to post this in GQ but figured that it might start a debate so I thought I might spare the moderator his/her time.

Was looking at salary statistics in the papers today and was shocked to see how much less money women earn in the job market than men. Sweden is supposedly the most egalitarian country in the world where equality amongst the sexes is the closest we’ve ever seen. Yet women earn substantially less than men- why is that?
How much do their salaries differ in your respective countries? Do you think it’s fair that women earn less money for the same effort that men put forward?

Just curious.

[gazpacho]

It may or may not make any difference to weather or not women are under paid but in general what should matter is equal results should get equal salaries.

[John_Mace]

@indierock82

Was going to post this in GQ but figured that it might start a debate so I thought I might spare the moderator his/her time.

Was looking at salary statistics in the papers today and was shocked to see how much less money women earn in the job market than men. Sweden is supposedly the most egalitarian country in the world where equality amongst the sexes is the closest we’ve ever seen. Yet women earn substantially less than men- why is that?
How much do their salaries differ in your respective countries? Do you think it’s fair that women earn less money for the same effort that men put forward?

Just curious.

In general, people are paid for results, not effort. And although some prejudices do come into play, the market is generally pretty good at punishing employers who overpay. If company A doesn’t like to hire women, and pays a premium to hire men, then they’re gong to struggle to compete with company B, which can draw from a larger pool of applicants if it doesn’t discriminate. Assuming, of course, that women, as a group, are as productive as men, as a group. If it turns they aren’t (for whatever reason), then if company A is big enough, it might actually have an advantage by paying a higher salary for men. Note: You might see different results when looking at very small companies, where the variation among individuals is going to be more pronounced.
At any rate, you need to provide some kind of link to the story, because these things are notoriously difficult to measure. Many jobs are highly skewed towards one gender, and comparing salaries across job categories can be difficult. I’d want to see the methodology before I’d say whether I agree with the conclusions.

[Quartz]

Link? Are you talking about pay in the same job or average pay over the whole population? In the latter case, it seems to me that many women take part time, lower paid, jobs to fit in with childcare. In the former case, I agree with gazpacho.

[Bryan_Ekers]

Are these comparison in “the job market” or in specific jobs? Women may be disporportionately attracted to jobs that happen to pay less.

As for it being “fair”, of course it’s fair. What would be unfair would be governmental intervention in market forces.

[hawksgirl]

@Bryan Ekers

Are these comparison in “the job market” or in specific jobs? Women may be disporportionately attracted to jobs that happen to pay less.

Or traditionally “female” jobs don’t get as much social value, and are therefore paid less.

[HoboStew]

There was a Marylin Vos Savant column about this a few years back that I can’t find now, basically her point was that equal pay for equal work between genders in America is more or less a reality. Now of course there will be differences in average salaries, but that is more to do with the types of jobs men gravitate towards compared to women and has little to do with equal efforts = equal salaries.

This jibes with my experience as a recruiter, a job I held on & off for many years since my parents own a recruiting firm. The candidates I looked for were simply pieces of paper with skills on them, which I tried to match with skills required for various jobs. Never once do I remember anyone caring about age, gender, or race. All they cared about was could they do the job and what skills/experience did they bring to the table. These were almost always consulting jobs, not full time employment, so take that as you wish.

I have met people who claim this is not the case, that men get paid more for the same work. However when I press them for details, its always “there was this guy at this job I had who…”, none of them ever had any specific data to support their claim.

[indierock82]

I should have proofread what I wrote first and added a /results, but in essence it’s what I meant. I’m trying to dig up the article that I was talking about (although it is in swedish). It has a nifty graph that shows the median salaries in ~20 different jobs and how mens salaries differ from womens. In every case men earn varying amounts more than the women. I discussed this with one of my neighbors and he brought up the issue of how women take off time from work to have a baby and so on. But isn’t that discrimination? Why punish all women with garnished salaries if only some of them are going to have babies? Wouldn’t it be along the same lines as giving smokers lower salaries because of the risk of disease later in life? Or overweight people? Why are women given the shaft? Nobody in this day and age actually believes that women work less or less efficiently than men.

[Sarahfeena]

@hawksgirl

Or traditionally “female” jobs don’t get as much social value, and are therefore paid less.

I don’t think “social value” drives the cost of anything, including labor. If a job is difficult to fill for whatever reason, the salaries will rise to attract people to that profession. If a job is easy to fill, the salaries will drop. Teaching, a profession that is often cited as 1) female-dominated, and 2) low-paying, doesn’t suffer (at least these days) from a lack of respect. Most people, I would venture to say, would agree that teaching is underpaid relative to its importance. The problem is, a lot of people want to be teachers, and a lot of people are willing to take low salaries in order to meet that desire. If suddenly the number of job candidates was cut in half, you can be sure that salaries would rise.

[Sarahfeena]

@indierock82

I should have proofread what I wrote first and added a /results, but in essence it’s what I meant. I’m trying to dig up the article that I was talking about (although it is in swedish). It has a nifty graph that shows the median salaries in ~20 different jobs and how mens salaries differ from womens. In every case men earn varying amounts more than the women. I discussed this with one of my neighbors and he brought up the issue of how women take off time from work to have a baby and so on. But isn’t that discrimination? Why punish all women with garnished salaries if only some of them are going to have babies? Wouldn’t it be along the same lines as giving smokers lower salaries because of the risk of disease later in life? Or overweight people? Why are women given the shaft? Nobody in this day and age actually believes that women work less or less efficiently than men.

But when you are talking about medians or means, it doesn’t mean that all women are making less than men, it just means that the women on the low end are dragging down the numbers.

[Sarahfeena]

Wanted to use the edit function to add this, but it took me longer than 5 minutes to type out, so it wouldn’t let me…sorry for the double post…

To take an extremely simplistic example, let’s say there are four people, 2 men and 2 women, who all work at the same level in the same job. They all start out at the same starting salary of $30,000, but one of the women takes 5 years off to have children. The two men and the woman who stayed at the job get a 5% raise every year, and the woman who stayed at home comes back at that original salary. The 3 who kept working each now makes $38,290. For the two men, their average salary is $38,290. For the two women, the average salary is now $34,145. So, the woman who never left the job is not being “punished,” but the average salary for the women is considerably lower than that of the men.

[Der_Trihs]

@Bryan Ekers

As for it being “fair”, of course it’s fair. What would be unfair would be governmental intervention in market forces.

:rolleyes: Market forces are many things, but innately fair isn’t one of them.

@indierock82

In every case men earn varying amounts more than the women. I discussed this with one of my neighbors and he brought up the issue of how women take off time from work to have a baby and so on. But isn’t that discrimination? Why punish all women with garnished salaries if only some of them are going to have babies?

But are all women being paid less, or are they being paid less on average because they are less productive on average ? If women on average are less willing to sacrifice everything else in their life for the job, then they will be paid on average less than men who do sacrifice everything for the job.

[indierock82]

Oh, I forgot the link. Check this image first to see where to click on the swedish homepage whereupon you will get a graph of a huge list of job categories where the dark blue line represents mens salaries and the light blue line represents the, you know, womens.
And this is the actual article.

To those of you that don’t agree with the facts and label it as feminist propaganda, know that this newspaper is perhaps the most respectable and least biased newspaper in our country. The study was done together with the the Högskoleverket, which is the national agency for higher education.

[indierock82]

@Sarahfeena

To take an extremely simplistic example, let’s say there are four people, 2 men and 2 women, who all work at the same level in the same job. They all start out at the same starting salary of $30,000, but one of the women takes 5 years off to have children. The two men and the woman who stayed at the job get a 5% raise every year, and the woman who stayed at home comes back at that original salary. The 3 who kept working each now makes $38,290. For the two men, their average salary is $38,290. For the two women, the average salary is now $34,145. So, the woman who never left the job is not being “punished,” but the average salary for the women is considerably lower than that of the men.

That is a damn fine point. However, is that the reason why all womens salaries (exclusive of pornactresses), across the board, are lower than mens in Sweden (and, as I’m sure, in most countries). I think the fact that the majority of women were essentially housewives until the fifties has something to with it. If I remember correctly (and no, I can’t cite this at this moment), women are offered lower starting salaries than men in some job categories.

[robby]

@indierock82

…It has a nifty graph that shows the median salaries in ~20 different jobs and how mens salaries differ from womens. In every case men earn varying amounts more than the women. I discussed this with one of my neighbors and he brought up the issue of how women take off time from work to have a baby and so on. But isn’t that discrimination? Why punish all women with garnished salaries if only some of them are going to have babies?

Do you have a cite that supports this contention that all women are paid less because some of them take time off? You are, after all, looking at averages and medians, which are affected by the “some” women taking time off, etc.

As others have noted above, the free market is very “efficient” with respect to salaries. If an employer pays its employees too little, they will quit. If an employer pays its employees too much, it will not be as competitive in the market and will suffer the consequences of lost business.

If an employer pays its female employees too little, other employers will take advantage of this and lure them away.

Every study that I’ve ever seen ties women’s lower pay to a combination of their career choices, taking time off to have children, and number of hours worked.

I’ll consider each of these in turn:

1. Career choices: For whatever reason, women tend to take lower-paying jobs. There are far more female administrative assistants than male, for example. My company doesn’t care whether an AA is male or female, but they’re not getting paid as much as an engineer.

2. Taking time off in mid-career: If you have two mid-level employees, and one has 10 years full-time experience, and the other has four years experience, followed by 2 years off, followed by 3 years of part-time work, followed by a year of full-time work, should they be making the same salary?

3. Number of hours worked: My company has salaried employees that typically work 50-60 hours a week. We also have salaried employees (male and female) that only work 40 hours a week. Should they make the same salary? In my experience, women with children are far more likely to fall into the second category, and are typically unwilling to work more than 40 hours in a week because it will keep them from their kids. I’m not saying that anything is wrong with this, but it is a choice that they make.

Now for some anecdotes. My wife works for the (U.S.) federal government. Her job is filled by both men and women. Every employee’s salary is set by their paygrade and time in government service. There is no difference between salaries for men and women.

Prior to this, my wife and I were both officers in the U.S. Navy. Throughout the ranks, pay is set by paygrade and time in service. There is no difference between salaries for men and women.

In my current job, I’m an engineer for a consulting firm in a small branch office. Our two female engineers are paid the exact same amount as the male engineers with the same experience level. If they were paid less, there is no doubt that they would quit in a heartbeat. If anything, female engineers are in more demand because employers like having a diverse workplace.

After posting, I see that some of my points have already been made. Oh well. It took a while to type all of this.

[Dangerosa]

There is a case that men start negotiating where women accept what is given them. This case is made in the book Divided Lives to explain the difference in salaries between beginning women surgeons and beginning men surgeons - sometimes the women were from better schools and still got paid less. But they’d accept the offer made, where men would use it as a starting point in negotiation.

[athelas]

Dangerous jobs (Arctic drilling, mining, and so on) attract men nearly exclusively, and often pay well. You rarely hear of female miners dying in cave-ins.

[robby]

@indierock82

That is a damn fine point. However, is that the reason why all womens salaries (exclusive of pornactresses), across the board, are lower than mens in Sweden (and, as I’m sure, in most countries).

Where are you getting the “all” from? Again, we are looking at averages and medians!

Are you talking about “all” of the various job categories? If so, the reason is that women tend to take time off for children; men do not. More men than women tend to be willing to work long hours and sacrifice their family for work. The market recognizes this and pays them more.

All of this is reflected in the medians and averages across the board in “all” of the various job categories.

[jjimm]

There’s been a huge scandal in the UK recently, whereby local councils were paying women less than men for doing the same damn jobs. Being government jobs, there’s meant to be a pay ladder; however, this has been abused.

[XT]

Here is what our own Cecil Adams has to say on the subject:

If you want to be literal about it, yes, it’s a bunch of hooey. Paying women less than men for the same work violates U.S. law. The federal government being the model of efficiency that it is, we can be sure this type of discrimination has been totally stamped out. One may object: But everybody knows women get paid less than men! Of course, but the question was about pay for the same work. The thing is, women, in some people’s eyes, don’t do the same work as men. They stay home having babies and knitting dirndls while the men are out hunting bear and fending off the Visigoths, so naturally they get paid less. You may detect a note of sarcasm here, but dressed up in slightly more refined terms this is largely the argument used to explain wage differentials today.

Fifty years ago it was common for women to make less than men for the same job. Among the rationales: women required “extra services” (tampon dispensers in the johns?), didn’t want to work overtime, needed help with heavy physical labor, etc. But the real reason, as a 1939 pay-policy manual noted, was “general sociological factors”–testosterone-speak for “That’s just the way it is, honey.” This sort of discrimination was outlawed by the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and similar statutes passed by the states. Some employers subsequently attempted to weasel out of them along the lines suggested above, arguing that wage differentials for similar jobs were justified by the fact that the guys occasionally had to lift heavy items and so on. Never mind the incidentals, said the Supreme Court. If the jobs are substantially equal (not identical), the law requires equal pay.

Usually, anyway. Four “affirmative defenses” permit unequal pay for the same work: seniority, merit, performance-based incentive systems, or other nondiscriminatory business reasons. (I’m taking this from the new book Compensation by George T. Milkovich and Jerry M. Newman, with the assistance of Carolyn Milkovich–one wonders what she got paid.) The last item offers a fair amount of wiggle room. For example, in Kouba v. Allstate the plaintiff said the minimum salary she earned as a sales rep was less than males typically got. Allstate admitted this but said minimum salaries were individually set so they’d be: (a) high enough to attract applicants, but (b) low enough that reps would want to make sales and earn commissions. Since women usually had been paid less in their previous jobs, it took a smaller minimum salary to attract them to Allstate. OK by us, said the court.

The conclusion?

Despite progress, women on average still get paid much less than men. In 1979 women working full-time earned about 60 percent as much as men; by 1998 that figure had climbed to 76 percent. Does that reflect an injustice? Many say no, arguing that women earn less because they take time off to care for children or elderly parents (and thus have less seniority) or accept lower pay in return for more flexible working arrangements. Women also tend to go into lower-paying lines of work, shunning higher-paying technical fields. It’s easy to caricature this view (dirndls versus Visigoths, etc), but there may be some truth in it. Some research suggests that when women behave as men do–not having babies, mainly–the income gap largely disappears. If so (I won’t claim the matter has been definitively settled), the question facing women is a stark one: What do you want, kids or cash?

FWIW, I’m generally in agreement with Cecil on this one. However, I have to say that my own personal experience with female network engineers is that, at least among my own network of friends and workers, women generally make what I make if they have the same skill sets I do (same certs, amount of exp., etc)…at least within a few percentage points. Of course, my own sample size is fairly small…but I think women do better in the tech field…maybe because there aren’t that many of them, and they are generally more decorative than us computer geeks.

-XT