Full-time employees in public maintained schools, secondary education teachers with a higher university degree:
Basic salary men: 31 737, women: 30 856 (including overtime etc: 32 944 and 31 817)
Full-time employees in the ICT-sector, clerks:[/bold]
In all of the states that I am familiar with in the US, public seconday school teacher’s salaries are determined strictly by years of experience and educational level ( eg. a master’s degree bumps them up a salary level and a certain number of graduate classes beyond that another level). The school principle or even the superintendent cannot give an individual teacher a raise at all. Please let me know if there are other factors in other states.
I would guess that the same is true in Norway given that is more socialized than the U.S. (let me know if there are other factors in Norway). That means that the small discrepancy in pay can only be accounted for by men obtaining a greater number of advanced degrees or a greater number of years experience. Because women often want or need to stay home for a while after they have kids, that alone could account for the small difference in pay.
If all of this is correct, then it makes all of the Norwegian studies findings suspect for the conclusions that are drawn.
If anyone is interested in what The Master has to say on this subject, here is a link.
FWIW, my own personal take on this from my own anacedotal well is that, at least in the tech industry, women who do the same work are generally paid the same amount as men…its all about the number of hours billed verse overhead. I had several peers when I worked for the various telco’s and other IT vendors who were women and the ones who did the same work as I did, and more importantly BILLED the same that I did (which meant extensive travel), generally made exactly the same as I did (give or take a few thousand based on senority of course)…and got the exact same bonus and stock packages I did. These were professional women with no husbands or families generally, and worked (and billed) the same hours and did the same travel that I did.
But do you see that your conclusion is totally invalid, even if these three variables were the only relevant ones? Yes, if you control for occupational group, men earn more. If you control for education, men earn more. If you control for age, men earn more. But really, you’d need to control for all three at the same time to make that claim, since men in the same occupation as women might have more education and have more experience and would therefore earn more. Men with the same education as women might have different occupations and have more experience. And men of the same experience might have different occupations and more education. So when you see that men and women with the same educational level make different salaries, and men and women with the same occupation make different salaries, and men and women with the same age make different salaries, you CANNOT therefore conclude that men and women with the same education, occupation and age make different salaries, although they may. Of course there are other factors you would have to control for anyway, like number of hours worked and seniority.
For instance, there is a very strong correlation between height and illiteracy. Short people are much more likely to be illiterate than tall people. Proven statistical fact. Shocking! Except short people are much more likely to be children than tall people are. When you control for age the discrepancy disappears.
So you can’t just control for one variable at a time and conclude that since there is still a discrepancy with each variable there must be gender bias. There may be, but you haven’t shown it. I would also suspect that gender bias would be more prevelant in some occupations and less prevelant in others. But even there, you’d have to somehow compare workers with the same occupation, the same experience, the same skills, the same education, the same number of hours worked annually, the same level of uninteruppted seniority.
Is there data that show salaries for women compared with that of men in similar jobs when the person with the power to decided on their salary is male Versus the case when the decision maker is female? is there a trend there?
I wonder if men typically feel that women are less productive, or feel threatened by them…
There was also a study (I forgot who it was) that indicated that women are less likely to negotiate or prolong a negotiation particularly when it comes to salary.
I don’t know that such a study would tell us anything useful.
If we assume that lower earnings for women are evidence of sex discrimination then such a study might tell us whether women are less likely to be guilty of sex discrimination than men, but in the context of this discussion that’s not an assumption that we seem to be willing to make.
Conversely, if we assume that women are less likely to be guilty of sex discrimination than men, and we found that women managers tended to pay women workers the same as men, we might argue that pay differentials are indeed evidence of sex discrimination. But that’s not an assumption I’m prepared to make, and I don’t see any evidence for it.
Without making either of these assumptions, I don’t see what conclusions we could draw from such a study?
Sure, but it’s always in the back of a lot of peoples heads. “How long will she stay in this job?”, “is it worth giving her a more senior roll” and so on. Right or wrong, a lot of people have those biases.
Actually, I recall starting a thread on this very same topic a short time ago. Unfortunately it was moved to the Pit and shut down after some…unpleasentness.
It may well do, but the figures don’t demonstrate that it does.
It’s worth noting that the salary gap has narrowed since equal pay legislation was introduced, and it’s reasonable to infer that this has happened at least in part because equal pay legislation was introduced. So at least some of the effect of sex discrimination has been filtered out.
My hunch is that the remaining disparity is partly due to sex discrimination and partly to other factors, and that it would be very difficult to disentangle the two. It would also depend on your political/philopsophical stance. If women tend to attach a higher value to flexibility and a lower value to earnings, relative to men, is that a legitimate and freely-expressed preference, or the result of sexist conditioning and unwelcome social pressures? There isn’t a clear answer to that.
Only if her baby was fathered by a working man. (House work counts.)
Should a man be penalized in senority and salary for his part in the conception of a child that leads to the necessity of a woman having to take a break to give birth?
Should on-the-site daycare be mandated for businesses of a certain size so that fathers don’t have to leave their jobs to tend to matters involving their children?
Should a woman have to stop teaching when she is five months pregnant regardless of what her doctor says? (That was the rule during my child-bearing years – a rule made by an all male school board, I might add.)
How many of you fathers have been asked how you manage to juggle a career, housework and child-rearing?
According to a CBS interview with the Dean of Admissions at Harvard University, the opposite is happening. Harvard is having to give men preferential treatment in order to keep the freshman class admissions at at 50-50 ration. 70% of the most qualified applicants to Harvard are women.
You are right. She does. Her training is longer, more demanding and more expensive.
I do agree that the statistics I quoted don’t prove that there’s unequal pay for equal work with equal qualifications within the same business. That’s why I wrote “exceedingly likely” and “a very good chance” instead of “proven” and “certainity”.
Well, some of those factors are covered in the statistics I quoted. They cover wages for full time jobs, not part time. Overtime is (supposed to be) compensated separately, and is given as a separate figure in the tables. (As I mentioned there’s a loophole in the laws about overtime compensation, so this is probably not completely true for all high-level jobs.) Breaks in employment because of maternity leave isn’t supposed to influence wages (relevant part of gender equality act). Another aspect is that the wage differences follow all ages. Even if maternity leaves made a dent in someone’s experience and expertise a few years after it was over, it shouldn’t matter much fifteen or twenty years later.
But yes, I agree, I’d prefer statistics which take into account all factors. It’d also be interesting to see stats comparing wage differences in businesses with different wage policies. I remember reading an article about a big insurance company which switched from determining wages based on strict rules (experience, education, position in the company) to a more flexible system, and the result was increasing gender differences in wages. I don’t remember enough specifics to be able to dig up the article again, unfortunately.
It’s mostly true, but there are some additional payment for specific tasks, such as being main teacher for a class (means some extra administration and responsibilities). We don’t know, of course, if more men than women have such tasks because of choice or because the tasks are offered unequally.
As I said above, time spent away from work because of maternity leave is supposed to be included in years of experience when calculating wages. Whether reality follows legislation is another question, but I’d expect public institutions to be pretty good about following the letter of the law, at least.
My gut feeling is that in the arena of gender equality, Norway can beat USA (and most of the world) without working up a sweat. But I freely admit that this might be mindless patriotism - I haven’t seen statistics comparing the two countries.
This sounds interesting, I’d like to hear more about it. If Cecil was following this thread, I’d ask “Cite?”
Both Cecil Adams’ article (quoted by xtisme) and some cases described by the Norwegian Gender Equality Ombud point to a nice little Catch 22. It’s legal (both in Norway and in US) to determine wages based on market rates. So, in some (many?) situations it’s legal to pay women less because they earn less. If we want to earn more, we’ll just have to make sure that we earn more first…
Thinking about this issue, it seems to me that a reservist in the US Army is in a somewhat similar position as a woman in fertile age. For both of them, it’s possible that they might have to leave work for a long stretch of time, possibly on short notice. (Please correct me if I’ve misunderstood how the reservist system works.) If you (generic you) were in a job interview, would you think you’d be less likely to get the job if you admitted that you were a reservist?
A related question: I’ve got the impression that if a reservist in the US Army is called to active duty, his/her employer has to keep his/her job for him/her while (s)he’s away, and reemploy the reservist when (s)he returns? I’ve also got the impression that if a parent wants more than a very few weeks off for taking care of an infant, (s)he usually will have to quit, and the employer has no obligation to take her/him back when the child is older. Is that correct? And if it is, do you agree that it’s grossly unfair?
There’s an important fact you’re not getting here. Normalized data isn’t just better than non-normalized data; rather, the former is useful, while that latter is worthless. You can’t take unadjusted, raw data, add a pinch of speculation, and let the conclusions start flying.
It tell us nothing to compare the salary of 2 groups, if those 2 groups do not have the same level of education, experience, time off, and hours worked, because we don’t know which factor is responsible for the inequity. You can speculate all you want, but unless you use proper controls, it remains only speculation.
Let’s say I do a study, and find that wearing green clothing causes a reduction in life expectancy. I can speculate all I want about possible toxins in green dye, but if I didn’t make allowance for the fact that soldiers wear green uniforms, my speculation is meaningless.
When discussions of this nature come up, I generally see a subtext that says “You awful men are keeping us women down!” Moreover, I think that this was generally the case up to the mid-20th century. Since then, women have fought an ongoing uphill battle to demand the equality they deserve. Though I do agree that the “old boy’s network” has played a (declining) role in wage discrepancy, I believe there are of course additional and complex factors at work as well.
I agree with the other posters who have suggested that the question “why does pay discrepancy happen?” is the real matter we are grapppling with. There have been several opinions posted, I’d like to add some of my own to the discussion soup…
Conjecture:
I believe that there is less of a direct relationship between the amount someone is paid versus how hard they work than there ought to be. In addition to work ethic, I believe a person’s pay is most directly related to how well they manage their own career. Opportunism. How aggressive does a person negotiate their salary? How important is it to that person to be that aggressive? Has there ever been a study done on the disparity of “Type A” individuals versus others? I wonder if there is inequality of pay in that case?
I also believe that there are basic biological imperatives that may play an important factor in the disparity of pay. At the most basic level, men are programmed to be providers. Being a strong provider is generally valued by women when choosing a mate. Is it not reasonable then, that a male will be more inclined to adopt as many wage-increasing traits as possible because “that’s what the ladies are looking for?” Is it not reasonable that a woman (being programmed at a basic level with a whole other set of imperatives) is not as inclined to do whatever it takes to advance and climb that corporate ladder (though there certainly are some that do?) Put in the the simplest of terms, though many women have a desire to succeed in business, most men have a need to succeed in business.
That may dynamic may play a factor — that’s all I’m sayin’.
Now we’re into the whole “nature vs. nurture” debate. I see lots of examples of women who have no problem being competitive in any field, so I suspect that any differences that exist between the genders is more a holdover from societal expections that women be more demure than men. If it really were due to biology, I would think that all women would have trouble being competitive, and that’s clearly not the case.
At any rate, that all seems moot to me, because if women are short-circuiting their own careers due to their biology (or that men’s innate competitiveness is “stronger”), then it would just tend to prove that discrimination doesn’t exist - that they’re doing it to themselves.
I was thinking something along these lines. While it certainly wouldn’t completely explain all cases of pay gaps, I did come up with a thought experiment that could shed light on the question.
I’d like to see a study showing the cost gap of purchasing a new car, which is traditionally a highly negotiated purchase. You could easily compare the exact same makes, models and years.
It would be interesting and valuable to note whether men and women, when faced with the same negotiation, came out spending the same amount on average, or if the men negotiated a better price.
If it were the latter, we would at least have a “negotiation normalization” variable to play with when comparing negotiated salaries.
