Many talk about the gender difference in the US in pay. Like that women are paid something like 75% less than men.
I think we can all agree on that number is based on a accumulation and average of incomes so yes, overall, men make more money. However that doesnt mean that at any given job with a company the men are automatically paid 25% more. Many places, like government work, work on set salary schedules.
To me, I dont think it will change much because:
Many women will simply choose motherhood and family over a career. This will mean they either quit outside work entirely or work part time.
Many women choose careers that lead to jobs that simply dont pay as well. For example english and art majors.
Some careers simply women not being able to do such as professional athletes. Ex. a man and a woman can both be working for the Tennessee Titans. He’s a player and making $20 million a year. She is an accountant making $50k.
Still latent sexism keeping women from high positions.
In the UK it is already illegal to pay men and women differently for the same work.
The difficulty comes with defining what “the same work” means. Working in a burger bar? easy, Production line work? no problem but there are may jobs where it becomes difficult to define. If a major male movie star brings in far more box office than a female is that an equal job? Is a female model worth more to a fashion house than a male? How do you equalise wages between a man and woman in a two-person sales commission work environment. How do you account for wage increments lost due to child career breaks?
I’m not so sure that the wage gap due to gender is quite as black and white as is often gets painted.
I agree that defining what equal work means is the issue. It depends on the job position and requirements. There are certain jobs that men are typically better at than women (calm down people). Men typically have more physical strength. If there is a heavy labor job, do the man and woman get paid the same wages, given than the male counterpart is able to be more productive in the job due to his biologically predisposed increased strength or muscle? Of course I am speaking in general here and about the typical male and typical female.
Who decides who gets what job in that case? Is it sexist to not hire a woman or pay her the same if she cannot perform the same physical duties as a man. Would there be a “physical” interview for the position where one could demonstrate their abilities?
I am genuinely curious about what others think of this. I am for wage equality of course, but only if both sides can demonstrate equal ability.
I doubt very much there is a huge competition for physically intensive labour jobs between men and women. Are there women lining up to be miners, construction workers and automotive line assembly workers? For those that are, they should absolutely get the same pay rate because if they can physically do the job then the productivity difference is likely negligible because most jobs are now highly assisted by automation and machinery.
The more applicable comparison between men and women when it comes to wages is for work that is not highly physically demanding. Jobs like in the IT industry, sales, health, food, education, etc… Careers where body muscle mass composition is irrelevant.
I absolutely agree, I was speaking more of that small minority of jobs, whatever they may be, that do not have automated or machine assistance or the like, but as you said it is not like women (or men for the matter) would be lining up for those jobs if there was any other opportunity. The proper comparison absolutely is what you stated above, there is no excuse for a wage gap there.
In the US it is also illegal to pay one sex differently from another.
But also remember the old phrase “your not paid what your worth, your paid by what you negotiate for”.
Many employers give a jobs salary range or they might not tell you what the pay is at all and one must negotiate. Plus many employers tell their people not to discuss their pay or risk being fired.
Again, I really dont see the pay gap decreasing even as more women move into better paying jobs.
This may be an unpopular opinion, but I don’t think you’ll ever eliminate it because of the way we are designed by evolution. Men can attract mates by having high socio-economic status, women cannot. So men have an innate motivation women do not have.
Even if you culturally try to overcome this, it is still going to be there. It is like being upset that women have more body issues or fears of how aging will affect their appearance than men, and wanting to make that equal. But some things are inbuilt.
Giving women equal access to the same careers is important, but at the end of the day overall they aren’t collectively going to pursue the same careers or work the same hours as men because of the reason above. Men work longer hours are more dangerous, more lucrative jobs. Unless women are willing to do the same they won’t be paid the same.
The pay gap has already changed significantly - it used to be much greater - and there is no obvious reason to assume that this process will now stop.
I take the point that much of the current pay gap is attributable to choices made by women with respect to parenting, or with respect to the field in which they make a career. But there is no a priori reason to assume that women will always make the choices that they are currently observed to make; these, too, have changed in the past and there is no reason to expect this to stop.
It’s not just that women take time out of the workforce to have and care for babies; it’s the way those women are perceived when they return to work. According tothis Fortune magazine article,
Men, on the other hand, are more likely to experience a salary BUMP when they have a child.
There’s also an unspoken assumption that women with small children are more likely to miss work, and this may have some basis in fact. According to Atlantic Monthly and most women I know (including myself), women are 10 times more likely to be the parent who stays home with sick kids. The payroll officer for my former employer (about 400 employees) said men had on average more than twice the accrued sick leave that women had, and I don’t think it was because women were staying home with slight colds or menstrual cramps. I’m not suggesting dads don’t stay home with sick kids, merely that on average women are more likely to do so. One factor may be that women are more likely to have sole physical custody in divorce cases. And it’s not that the people making these assumptions are all male: female bosses make them, too.
Sure, women could stand to negotiate for better pay, but that’s not the root cause of the pay differential:
(Fortune article again.)
What it boils down to is that the main reason women make 82¢ for every dollar a man earns is…bias.
There is certainly not universal agreement on this. Many sources argue that there is no gender pay gap when comparing men and women doing the same work:
The official Bureau of Labor Department statistics show that the median earnings of full-time female workers is 77 percent of the median earnings of full-time male workers. But that is very different than “77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men.” The latter gives the impression that a man and a woman standing next to each other doing the same job for the same number of hours get paid different salaries. That’s not at all the case. “Full time” officially means 35 hours, but men work more hours than women. That’s the first problem: We could be comparing men working 40 hours to women working 35.
Source
To be even more precise, what the economic studies indicate is that “labor market discrimination” explains, at best, only a fraction of the gender wage gap. It would also be a myth to say that “sexism” explains only that fraction. Even if employers largely don’t discriminate based on gender by paying equally qualified men and women differently, employer-driven discrimination is not the only form of sexism that might matter for explaining pay differentials by gender.
All the economic studies say is that differences in skills, experiences, and preferences between men and women explain the clear majority of the gap. What such studies do not address is the degree to which the differences in men’s and women’s skills and knowledge (their “human capital”) is due to sexism before they come to the labor market. Nor do such studies ask whether differences in preferences or job experience by gender are also due to sexism or other aspects of socialization.
https://fee.org/articles/truth-and-myth-on-the-gender-pay-gap/
It’s deceptively easy to calculate how much—or how little—women in the United States earn relative to men. “You take everyone who’s working 35 or more hours a week for the full year, find the median for women, find the median for men, and divide,” says Lee professor of economics Claudia Goldin, explaining how to arrive at the ratio repeated by public officials: 78 cents to the dollar. “It’s very simple.”
“It answers a particular question,” she says, “but it doesn’t say that men and women are doing the same thing. It doesn’t say that they’re working the same amount of time, the same hours during the day, or the same days of the week.” The rhetoric of politicians, and policy prescriptions meant to close the gender wage gap, assume that pay disparities are created primarily by outright discrimination by employers, or by women’s lack of negotiation skills. Goldin has a less popular idea: that the pay gap arises not because men and women are paid differently for the same work, but because the labor market incentivizes them to work differently.
Consider a couple graduating together from a prestigious law school, and taking highly paid jobs at firms that demand long hours. The evidence suggests they’re likely to begin at similar salaries. But a few years later, Goldin says, one of them—more likely the woman—may decide to leave for a smaller practice with fewer hours and more flexibility in scheduling. In that new job, research suggests, she’s likely to earn less per hour than her partner. Goldin calls this phenomenon non-linearity, or a part-time penalty: the part-timer works half the time her partner does, but earns less than half his salary.
Good points.
It gets tiresome seeing this debate often framed in the media as “There’s still a pay gap between men and women…how can we eliminate this appalling discrimination?”
Maybe a few decades ago discrimination was the defining factor, but now it’s just one piece of the puzzle and in some countries may well be negligible already.
I disagree.
If work was just trying to punch a wall or something, then I would expect more men would succeed, because they’d be willing to smash up their hands to be impress others and get girls. Sure.
But modern work is (usually) much more complicated, and in most cases a desire to impress others is insufficient to even get you through the day, let alone to the very top: you have to develop a passion for the work itself.
I’m fortunate enough to work in a 50:50 gender split office, and senior management is equally split too. When I look at those people who got the senior positions I don’t see a personality of wanting to show off; they’re people who really like what they do and are very disciplined.
I varies across companies and industries. When I worked at Microsoft, the pay difference between men and women at the same level (job ranking) was +/- 1%, and varied by year. So, some companies already are at parity.
Line assembly worker is less and less physical everyday, and yes, women do line up for those kind of jobs when they’re allowed to. I know several factories which had near-parity or even a majority of women (sometimes a very large majority of women) in the production lines for different reasons. I’m not talking about traditionally-female sectors such as canneries or clothing; a glass factory, electronic factories, one which made rebar and other construction materials… For two of them I’ve heard the personnel manager (one on TV, one my dad) say that the hardest part had been convincing the women to try out. In the case of the factory Dad worked for, the selection test required manual dexterity and the women started showing up to try for it when their men got home whining about having to use “that tiny little thing” (a solder).
And even that can be related to prejudices. In my line of work (IT consultant) married women are unlikely to be offered projects which include travel; married men will be expected or even ordered to take them, whether they happen to have children or not. If Mommy is in town and Daddy isn’t, Daddy can’t stay home with the kid, even if his job happens to be the one that’s more conductive to working from home (a lot of our job can be done remotely in most cases). I’ve seen the same happen to engineers of different specialties. This is very frustrating both to the women who’d like to travel and to the men who’d rather not; it also means that the advancement opportunities will be higher for the men, but for those who have kids it comes at the cost of kissing them goodnight over Skype.
With all due respect, fee.org is the site of the libertarian Foundation for Economic Freedom and naturally biased . They’re quite wrong in saying that studies don’t address sexism before men and women come to the labor market. Nor are they correct that skills, experiences, and preferences are what “all studies” say explain the majority of the gap.
So there is a gap between the average earning of men and women. However, gender discrimination accounts for at most a very small share of the gap, and possibly for none of it al all.
[/QUOTE]
Bias is in fact a very large part of the gender pay gap. Goldin imagines a legal-eagle couple where the wife swaps out longer hours for less pay not because, one presumes, she wants to work on her golf swing, but because the couple is having children. But the gap is due to more than the fact that Mrs. Legal Eagle is more likely to be the one to devote time to raising their kids. (Goldin doesn’t assume Mr. Eagle is going to be the one to reduce hours, and for good reason: he’s much less likely to do so.) Women working fewer hours after having children account for only ¼-1/3 of the “motherhood penalty.”
But usually women return to the workplace after maternity leave and** don’t** take jobs with fewer hours. Still, according to a Cornell University study, “employers rate fathers as the most desirable employees, followed by childless women, childless men and finally mothers. They also hold mothers to harsher performance standards and are less lenient when they are late.”
The gender pay gap is still there even in hourly wage jobs. But wait, all hourly workers are paid the same! Yes, but those jobs also have the least flexible hours and no paid maternity leave. Women are more likely to lose those jobs due to childbirth or sick kids and to get rehired elsewhere at starting wages.
When more men—who seldom get paternity leave, paid or unpaid—take time off after the birth of a child, and when they stay home with sick kids a lot more often than they do now, maybe more of the gender pay gap will vanish. But for THAT to happen, there has to be less gender bias.
My dad was an operations manager in the 1990s for a large bank. They were concerned with the pay wage gap even then, so much that he was tasked with reviewing the salaries of everyone in the region of seven states he worked in that was below him in rank. He was pretty high up, so there weren’t a lot of folks above him at the time.
After two months of working this project it was determined that the wage gap was due to the way that salaries were awarded at hire. They were calculated “at years of prior experience related to the current job.” Without awarding women more pay than men for their experience, the gap would stay.
Interestingly enough, both of my dad’s bosses were women (and super nice if my memory serves correctly.)
I wonder if that isn’t the same problem, or at least a part of it today. I have never, ever had a job that my salary wasn’t based on what I used to make at the last place.
My wages have been stagnant for 8 years though. I sorta topped out in 2010.
I guess a large part of the issue can be summed up as this debate: “is the fact that women are, and are perceived to be, more involved in child-care than men (particularly for very young children), sexual discrimination - or merely different life choices in action?”
I suppose to the extent this choice is driven by legal discrimination (such as availability of maternity leave as opposed to paternity leave), a good case can be made that this is in fact discrimination at work.
However, a case could be made that the legal discrimination merely tracks the experience of choice … though that choice may be mostly cultural.
Take the legal example you both used.
In my province of Canada, the number of legal workers hired at the associate level in large law firms is approximately equal for men and women. Yet there are far fewer women accepted as partners. Why is that?
Probably not because the law firms actively discriminate against women, thinking they can’t do the work (if that was the case, they really ought to hire fewer female associates - it’s a very competitive field).
Rather, it is that becoming a partner requires a sort of obsessive devotion to generating business that makes having any sort of active involvement in family life difficult for many (a thing continually lamented). More women then men find this too great a sacrifice, so they leave the partner-track - often moving “in house” (that is, working as a salaried lawyer for a corporation) or go into government work - because those jobs offer more balance. - They also offer less pay, though still not bad pay.
(It is worth noting that the large firms in Canada at least tend to offer, by contract, reasonably generous mat/pat leave, so that’s not a big issue. The concern was more day-to-day involvement in family life. It doesn’t help that trends in child-rearing continually increase the amount parents are expected to be involved in a child’s life: from breastfeeding through supervising homework to “play dates”, societal standards require much, much more parental involvement now than when I was a child).
In order to redress this balance, so that you get an equality in pay, you’d have to create an equality of choices - that is, women as well as men would have to choose a life in which taking an active role in raising one’s family was more secondary. Either that, or change the nature of partnership so as not to require such single-minded focus (plenty of paper generated about the desirability of doing that! Unfortunately, that part seems pretty hard-wired into the nature of “partnership”).
Until that happens, stats will continue to show “men” as a category out-earning “women” in the law.
So you’re saying the fix would be to have women CHOOSE to put family second and work first? And how would that work exactly, when in most families, fathers DON’T choose to stay home with sick kids? A race for the door and a cheery, “Looks like you’re on your own, Jimmy”?
Also, men earn on average 6% MORE after the birth of a child than they did before, and only about 16% of that is due to an increase in working hours. Women who return to work at the same number of hours as before having children experience no such salary bump. (These are US stats.) So no, legal discrimination doesn’t track the experience of choice: it shapes it; it denies it.
The whole “Women CHOOSE to sacrifice work for family, so women must CHOOSE to sacrifice family for work if they want to earn the same as men” argument doesn’t hold water. In the countries with the narrowest gender wage gap, both men and women take and are expected to take very active roles in their children’s lives. Necessity is recognized as necessity, not choice, and for both fathers and mothers.
As far as I know, I haven’t said I knew what the “fix” would be - except to point out that in the specific case of legal partnership, there isn’t really a good “fix”.
Aren’t these two sentences - somewhat contradictory?
Countries with narrow wage gaps are, it seems, ones in which for whatever reason (culture, legal, or whatever) both sexes have either CHOSEN (or are required by NECESSITY - your word) to take equal roles in children’s lives.
Point here is that, for whatever reason, in our culture (here in Canada and presumably also in the US) - they haven’t. In contrast to these other countries, in these countries women tend to, for whatever reason, work less and interact with family more than men – or at least, that is the case in the legal profession.
Whether they merely “want” or are “required” (by cultural or other factors) to work less, it seems to me, is debatable.
(Note that this doesn’t imply leaving the workplace altogether - just not doing the stuff required to make partnership. If you deal with in-house counsel, you quickly find out that a majority are female.)
Is the “fix” then to make them do so - whether they want to or not? To create the “necessity” you speak of?
Maybe it is. If so, though, it ought to be stated as such - that this is the area in which our culture needs to change.
Without such change, you won’t see income equality. So the issue is - is income equality a goal worth the friction required to enact that social change? In short, should we, if possible, model our societies on those of Scandinavian nations that frequently top the equality charts?
I personally wouldn’t have a problem with that as an outcome - its the friction involved in getting from here to there that is likely to be difficult.
For example - our nations (particularly my home town of Toronto) are very immigrant-heavy: this has a big impact on cultural stats.