I am a lawyer for a federal agency. I guess government employment might qualify as a “lower-paying” legal job when compared to private firms, but when you compare hours worked and quality of life, I think we do okay.
Maybe it is because of the quality of life issues that our office attracts and retains many women. Probably 2/3-3/4 of our attorneys at all levels are women. My immediate boss is a woman, as is our regional chief counsel, our agency’s national chief counsel, and the commissioner of the whole kitt and kaboodle.
And our office - as most of the fed gov’t - has a pretty strict pay scale. So with rare exceptions, a man and a woman hired at the same time will advance at the same rate.
Due to my personal situation, I always have a hard time accepting this type of pay-inequality statistic. And the US government is by far our nation’s largest employer, whether or not you include the armed forces.
Yes, women may go into lower paying professions, but then the question becomes "are teachers paid less because its a “woman’s job” and car mechanics paid more because its a “man’s job” or is there some intrinsic difference in the worth a car mechanic adds to society over a teacher. Or is it even worth bothering to make the comparisons.
I think it isn’t worth bothering.
At the same time, I did have a job where I did the same job as my male coworkers (3 men, 3 women), was more qualified than any of the men or women (more education, more experience in the field), did a better job (IT case work - I handled more cases, and cases of a more difficult nature) and discovered I made 70% of what the lowest paid guy made and more than any of the other women. Not one of the six of us had any children - so time off for child rearing wasn’t an issue. It was 1992 or so, recent enough that they should know better. Completely ancedotal, but worth mentioning.
Another ancedote, take it for what its worth. In 1999 I was offered a promotion, simultaneously with a male coworker. We were both being promoted to a new position. My boss told me that “because my review was only three months away we’d take care of the raise for the promotion at that time.” I said OK. I called him back an hour later and said “not OK.” I said, “I read a study that said that one of the reasons women get paid less is they aren’t aggressive in asking for compensation when they should. I think I earned the raise with the promotion and I should get it.” He gave me the raise. I don’t know what happened with the male coworker.
I had a similar conversation with the HR guy at my current job when I was hired. He also admitted that the it was unexpected from a woman, but he wouldn’t have blinked had the high demands come from a man.
—Yes, women may go into lower paying professions, but then the question becomes "are teachers paid less because its a “woman’s job” and car mechanics paid more because its a “man’s job” or is there some intrinsic difference in the worth a car mechanic adds to society over a teacher.—
Well, again, the standard market response would be: no one has that sort of control over wages. They’re set by the market, not by some patriarch. That may not be entirely true in the case of teachers, because it’s a public government job. But even there it’s hard to believe since women vote in powerful numbers and the profession isn’t really seen as being so woman heavy anymore anyway.
Now, that’s not to say that there couldn’t still be consumer driven discrimintion. If consumers have a preference for men serving them, that could definately create a differential. It just wouldn’t be as much cause for blaming bussiness.
Just to add my own anecdote: here in New York, our public administration grad schools are overrun with women. When I took classes at a certain place, I would very often be one of only two or three men in a class of 30 (though the actual ratio was more like 1 man to every 5 women). I doubt the same numbers held at the law school.
Don’t have a cite handy, and I may certainly be mistaken, but my recollection is that for the past several years, women make up more than 50% of law school applicants/enrollees.
Of course, I doubt many “professions” have more firmly established old boy networks and glass ceilings than most areas of law.
“Lifestyle choices” (wanting to work part-time and/or quit working for a while to raise your kids, etc.) indeed are probably the most significant factor in the wage gap these days, I’d guess. I’m not as confident as Apos that “girl’s job” vs. “boy’s job” discrimination is a negligible factor because of market forces. Markets are imperfect and can take a long time to compensate for non-market forces.
It was taken for granted for many decades that a “girl’s job” like teacher, nurse, or secretary was lower-paid than a comparable “boy’s job”. (The “family-wage” principle was part of that pattern: men were considered to need more money because they were supporting families.) So we’re now used to thinking of some traditionally female occupations such as teacher or secretary as being comparatively low-paying, even though most of us no longer believe that their work is intrinsically less valuable than that of, say, an electrician or auto mechanic. (I’d guess that market forces are changing such perceptions somewhat faster for the traditionally female occupation of nursing.)
Besides “lifestyle choice” and “comparable work” issues, though, good old-fashioned gender discrimination may still play a non-negligible role. If exploiting traditional gender prejudices to get away with underpaying women is profitable, there are going to be some companies that will do it. Consider the current sex-discrimination class-action suit against Wal-Mart, which might end up representing as many as half a million current and former workers:
If such claims are an accurate picture of a general gender-discrimination pattern at such a huge business as Wal-Mart, then given the number of employees it’s got, that could account for a penny or so of the “wage gap” all by itself.
Yes, it is all about women’s choices. Choosing to work in lower paid professions, working less hours, taking time off for children, being more likely to take sake days and so on.
Even a widening of the “pay gap” isn’t the result of some dastardly conspiracy, when the gap among managers in the UK widened it was because more women were coming in from universities, they had less experience and got less pay bringing down the average. This just means the profession is becoming predominately female.
That is increasingly the state of the world today, look at the gender gap in universities. The glass ceiling is what keeps working class men down in jobs no-one in their right minds would do with a reasonable alternative.
Goo & Kimstu are both right. All things being equal, men & women are paid within a couple % of each other (Goo). That small difference is likely due to the “good old boy” network, and the “glass ceiling”(Kimstu).
But the difference is something under 5%. I’ll accept the 2% Goo shows.
Are we living in a perfect “color blind” world? No, but the USA comes pretty damn close. The difference is small enough that no big stink needs to be made about it (and quoting statistics out of context qualifies), but not so small as to allow us to completely let our guard down. I think the expression “guarded optimism” is the right one to use here.
—So we’re now used to thinking of some traditionally female occupations such as teacher or secretary as being comparatively low-paying, even though most of us no longer believe that their work is intrinsically less valuable than that of, say, an electrician or auto mechanic.—
But what we think is valuable just isn’t, in practice, what determines wage rates.
What CAN help determine them, however, is the labor pool. If women concentrate on wanting to enter just a few specific professions, then the pressure will drive down wages in those professions.
Apos: *But what we think is valuable just isn’t, in practice, what determines wage rates. *
Well, it does play a part. As I said, market forces are not the only factors affecting the wage-and-working-conditions patterns in different professions. For example, IIRC, competition among lawyers is much more fierce for prestigious corporate-law-firm jobs than for poverty-law and public-defender jobs, but that supply-side pressure has not driven wages in the former area down below wages in the latter.
Labor supply and demand does affect wage levels, but so do cultural patterns in different professions. If many people simply take it for granted that professions like teaching and social work are inevitably comparatively low-paid, and continue to consider those professions worth entering anyway, it will take a long time for market forces to bring wages for teachers and social workers up to the level of those in comparable jobs.