Frequently you hear that women make some percentage less than men. The rebuttal to this is that women and men make the same when you adjust for equal qualifications and experience. That is, the difference in average salaries is due to women taking time out of their careers for childbirth, etc.
Both perspectives at least partly seem to be agenda driven. Where does the truth lie in this?
There’s a website called jobsearchintelligence.com. It tells you for a given job how much you would get without any gender/race/etc. bias.
That data would tend to indicate that the salary you are offered is lower because you are a woman, not because you took time off for child bearing/rearing (because otherwise the assumption is that every woman is assumed to have taken time off, which doesn’t make as much sense as there is probably a gender bias at play).
Example search result on jobsearchintelligence.com:
I chose Female, Caucasian, CEO, and Stanford University as parameters.
I think what’s interesting is that often women have an idea about all that when they choose their career paths. Women know that their partners are likely to make more money, so they choose careers that are thought to be family friendly partially for that reason, and then end up making less money than men. Generally speaking, of course - these are trends, not universal truths. But it’s still hard to pinpoint causality here.
I’m highly doubtful that once you get to this salary level that women make significantly less than men. The competition once you get past the 6 figure barrier is pretty intense, and if you’re qualified and desired, you’ll get the offer.
My school district hired a superintendant a couple years back. She’s a woman, and (for reasons inexplicable to me) they hired her in at a salary ABOVE what the exiting superintendant (with more experience, and accolades throughout the community) was getting.
And she’s not all that great, either.
I’d be surprised if Stanford University suffered from gender bias at this level.
What’s Stanford for? Where you got your degree or where you’re applying? I assumed the former (universities don’t have CEOs), but **crazyjoe **clearly assumed the latter, so I figured I’d ask.
There’s also some evidence that women, in general, do not negotiate starting salaries the way men do. Many women (if not most) take the initial starting salary offer as set in stone, rather than see it as the beginning of a process of counteroffers and countercounter offers.
There’s an interesting book about the phenomenon: Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide.
I’ve never understood this issue, because there is an obvious way to find the answer, with no “adjustments” ,or games with statistics.
Just compare two specific individuals who do the exact same job , and look at their paychecks.
In every place I have ever worked—sex never mattered.
Starting as a teenager, a long time ago:
Every single hambuger flipper-male and female- got exactly the same pay ($1.65 per hour 
).
Every single cashier at the bookstore -male or female-got the same hourly pay.
Every single lab technician at Big International Oil Company-male or female-got the same hourly pay for part time, or same flat salary for full time.
Every single clerk/technician/janitor, etc at the Government office got paid exactly the same .
Every single architectural draftsman-male or female-got the same salary, based on experience.
etc, etc,
People who have enough qualifications (engineers, etc) to list their own salary requirements on their resume got paid as much as they could negotiate for in their interviews–and women with experience got more than newly hired men.
So what’s the big deal?
Obviously, if you average 10 million women’s paychecks, and 10 million men’s paychecks, men come out higher.But that’s a stupid statistic. The 10 million women include a huge number of elementary school teachers and part-time workers.
I don’t think they’d be that stupid. The way I’ve seen the stats has always specified that the disparity is for the same jobs. They’re not comparing secretaries to CEOs, generally speaking.
Of course, there’s *also *the parallel issue of whether some professions that are considered to be “women’s” work are undervalued compared to “men’s” work that would require similar levels of qualifications.
I work at a certain large retailer, and this is exactly why the men there make a bit more than the women - it came up in conversation that most of the men negotiated and got a higher starting wage, while all of the female workers I talked too felt too nervous too, or didn’t realize you could.
And of course, if women really are willing and able to do the same work at the same quality level but for less money then men, then surely their would be at least some companies where greed would outweigh sexism, and would hire all women.
Agenda-driven: Maybe.
I once did an article on this topic. I started out thinking I would find out one thing. After looking at a bunch of statistics and interviewing a bunch of people, my conclusion was the opposite.
The publication I was writing for killed the story. (Possibly for some other reason, but I don’t think so.)
So I, the reporter, didn’t have a bias–or I did, but as I did the research, the facts didn’t support it.
The publication, which did have a bias, killed my story when it didn’t support the publication’s bias.
I did this in 1995, and the theory was that 20 years after the big feminist push, women were still making less. Turned out that women make less because they choose to make less, and when men made the same choices, they made less also. (Example: one corporate attorney chose to work her career, but somebody had to do the thing with the kids, and that somebody was her husband, who became a “special counsel” instead of partnership track, with fewer hours and about 2/3 of the salary.)
Firstly, I disregard reasons such as choice of jobs based on gender difference. For me, the issue is whether men and women in like-for-like jobs have a pay difference. In my experience, yes there is a pay difference.
Anecdotal evidence - there’s a pay gap of about 10p between men and women at my company, in like-for-like jobs. Some folks might think that’s inconsequential, I say if it’s not equal, it’s not fair pay. Secondly I had to leave a job as my male boss paid his male staff more per hour than me, doing exactly the same roles. In fact, I trained his staff when his team won the tender for my department. There were no negotiated payscales. I asked him three times to sort out the discrepancy and when he did not, I walked. This was in 2005.
I worked at two major hotel chains and did some Six Sigma projects on payroll with both of them. I failed to find any difference in pay between men and women when comparing equal.
In otherwords if you compared a 40 year old never married man, without kids to a 40 year old never married woman without kids, you’d find the same pay.
The problem often is people fail to really compare equals. An unmarried man isn’t equal to a divorced woman when you compare even though now both people are not married.
We did the same thing for race and found no differences. People would complain about it, but for every example of supposed discrimination there was a person of the same race/sex with equal pay. It almost always came down to “extras” in companies.
For instance, I found that women who participated in golf outings and took overtime interests in the hotels were promoted. Those women (especially non-golfers) had less promotional rate. But those less promotional rates were similar to men non-golfer.
The one clear thing I found was a “good old boys” network. To get ahead you had to play along with the company line, go golfing, volunteer for things, and basically be willing to sacrifice and “Suck up” to the higer ups. Which makes sense 'cause when time for promotions come, who are the higher ups gonna remember?
There are three separate issues here that are often conflated (sometime by accident, sometimes by agenda)
a
Two people with identical jobs, skills and histories except for gender with imbalanced pay (direct discrimination)
Two people with identical jobs and skills, but different histories with imbalanced pay (indirect discrimination - linking pay to years of continuous service has nothing to do with productivity, but results in anyone taking time off for any reason being discriminated against)
Two people with similar skills and histories, and different yet somehow equivalent jobs with imbalanced pay (a much more complex issue and hard to categorise. Some more direct discrimination gets hidden as this, for example by giving different titles for essentially the same work).
Situation 1 definitely happens, but is illegal under many anti-discrimination statutes in various jurisdictions, so generally only survives when pay is negotiated and secret.
Situation 2 not only happens, but is both legal and institutionalised in many industries.
Situation 3 is very entrenched, but it isn’t necessarily a gender issue.
These female workers in Birmingham have just won their case, and it could cost the council millions.
Please tell me that doesn’t mean what I think it means.
In a tangential but related example, earlier this year a federal judge ruled that a Milwaukee man had been discriminated against based on his race when he worked for the State of Wisconsin’s Equal Rights Division (no, seriously). The discrimination was both income-based (raises and bonuses) *and *related to the evaluation of his work (blamed for unrelated things while not given credit for his own achievements). Workplace discrimination is seldom as straight-up as, “You’re in the minority, so I’m not going to pay you as much.”
I have been suspicious of data that purports to illustrate the systematic under-paying of women since I saw the results of study that included pay for female physicians in Canada. The “in Canada” is very important because all docs in a given province in Canada are paid exactly the same for the same work. It makes no difference what your age, experience level, etc., are, you get the same payment for a given consultation, operation, procedure, etc. All docs in Ontario, say, get $300 (or whatever) for taking out a gall bladder.
In other words, if female docs in Canada were being “paid less” than their male counterparts, it can only have been due to them working less, doing fewer procedures, fewer consultations, etc. The notion that there was a gender bias at work is untenable.
(By “all” docs, I mean all docs in the appropriate specialty. For example, a family doc does get paid less than a specialist for a consultation. But all family docs get the same, as do all surgeons).
Can you say more? I have wondered if this happens but you’re actually the first person I’ve heard say they’ve seen it that I could ask. Well, the first person in maybe 20 years or so. It seemed pretty clear it was happening in the 60s and 70s.
Here’s another anecdotal thing.
I worked in an office where there was a guy, and his assistant. The guy was nice–level-headed, humorous, responsible. His assistant was a real sourpuss, and she had a small fit every time a woman there was promoted, although she always blamed the potential reaction of somebody else (e.g., “Karen is going to flip out when she finds out that Sue was promoted to that job!”)
They had both been with the company for years and years. It wasn’t until after I left that department that I found out that they had gone to the same college, graduated the same year, with the same degree. Then they had both gone to work for the company, and after about a year she became his assistant–because at that time, that was all she could be, even with the same degree he had. And 20 years on, he had gotten an MBA on the company’s dime, and she as his assistant had moved up with him.
No wonder she was sour. He was making about 7 times what she was, and yet they had started in exactly the same place at exactly the same time.
Now, some other woman might have charged in a little sooner and claimed discrimination. I think many other women would have. But she didn’t, so there she was, really dragging down the average salary for women everywhere.
But she wasn’t doing the same job he was doing.
They may have started at the same level,;-- but he was a congenial team worker and she was a sourpuss.
He played the game, worked hard for more education,got the MBA and more responsibility–and yes, more pay.
What’s the problem?