Agree with most of what’s been posted, but to throw another factor in the mix:
In my experience men drive a harder bargain in asking for a good salary in the first place (and initial salary disparities can take a long time to be corrected, if ever).
I bet they’re more likely to fib somewhat on their CVs (resumes). (not that men are less honest, just that they take more risks)
And also that they’re more willing to change jobs if a lucrative opportunity arrives.
Not sure which gender should be more offended by this.
But all that has been adjusted for in the GAO report. And even adjusted, women earned 80% of what men earned (in 2001).
Some of it is almost certainly that as a population women don’t negotiate tough deals when accepting a job (or a promotion). Some of it is also almost certainly that women are penalized for their potential roles as caregivers, and men are still seen as the ‘breadwinners’ and ‘deserving’ of a higher salary due to their societal role.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at but I think this actually supports the question. The classic response to astorian’s question is that corporations are a boys’ club and they would never fire the men in favor of less expensive women just to save money because they need to keep men in power. But that seems like an absurd response when you consider how quickly corporations will lay off American workers of either sex if they can save money sourcing the work to Asia or elsewhere.
Some would argue it’s all hunky-dory with the men, and that we ought to shut up and enjoy our male privilege.
But I believe many more men feel they have to compete particularly hard and put salary at a high priority rather than really wanting to - ie: that they do this because anything else is not just seen as unmanly, but actually detrimental to one’s chosen career. Like it or not, a man is expected to negotiate like a man. If that’s not his thing, for any reason, no excuses, it’s man-up time.
Competitive drive and material gain are still “gendered.” You may not need to be a man in order to compete and earn, but you must compete and earn in order to be a man.
I think that ought to offend more people of both sexes.
Whatever data is out there is bound to be too old to be useful now. Things have changed, and quite rapidly.
For one thing, women now make up the majority of college grads. For another, the recession disproportionally hit male professions (82% of recession-related job losses hit men), because it has largely hit occupations that are male centric, such as construction and manufacturing.
In addition, most of the jobs created have been in the public sector, and the public sector salaries have not been hit (I think they’ve actually increased overall during the recession), while private sector salaries have fallen. Women outnumber men in the public sector by more than 2-1 because of the influence of teaching and health care employment.
Where all this shakes out I don’t know, but one thing’s certain - any pre-recession statistics are likely to be significantly wrong.
In any event, statistics regarding the gap between male pay and female pay has to be countered by the knowledge that more men work in harsh, dangerous conditions.
For example, according to the Bureau for Labor Statistics, there’s about a 13-1 ratio between men and women when it comes to job-related deaths. This means men overall are being asked to do more dangerous things at work than are women, and that has to factor into the salary equation.
But many of those things have been true in prior recessions as well. As early as the 1973 recession, men’s jobs were hit disproportionally (because women got paid less, perhaps?). Women have been the majority of college grads since 1990 - twenty years is a long time in a career.
And, once again, the difference in gender choices is accounted for in the analysis. When comparing attorneys or accountants - there is still a gender gap.
And the argument is getting worn. I’ve been hearing “well, those numbers are old, the next set of numbers will close the gap” since I was in college in the 1980s. The next set of numbers has yet to close the gap. I sincerely hope the next set of numbers closes the gap - but I’ll buy it when I see a current analysis because I’m kind of tired of the “well, just wait, you’ll catch up for sure next time” reasoning.
What concerns me is that as fewer men get educated, educated men (outside a few privileged professions) will be overqualified for more and more work. That will drive the numbers down even further, and turn the stereotype that education is a sissy pursuit into reality (or as good as reality).
When a society is information-oriented but a man’s balls and backbone are worth more than his brain, we’re going to become a very segregated society.
As far as women choosing less lucrative careers- how much of that is real choice, and how much of that is that women are subtly and sometimes blatantly guided onto these paths?
An anecdote from my own life- when I was a high school student in the mid-90’s, I had a guidance councilor who would not let go of trying to push me into keyboarding classes because “a woman who can type can always find a job.”
Now, I was an honors student who was obviously headed to college with a strong arts background. I was clearly aiming for something higher than secretary. However, nothing I said could get him off of this idea, even the fact that I was at the time making $13.00 an hour as a data entry clerk because I’m a speed demon at the keyboard. Keyboarding class would clearly be a massive waste of my time.
At one point he actually enrolled me in the keyboarding class against my will and I had to get my parents to call in order to get enrolled in a more appropriate elective.
How many young women face forces like that who work to curtail their dreams and reign in their ambitions? I imagine quite a few of us.
As yet another “fair” factor leading to higher male wages: men are vastly more likely to take jobs in which injury or death are possibilities. In 2008, men accounted for 92.7% of workplace fatalities. Needless to say, dangerous jobs command a premium.
Men are also more willing to take jobs with a high variability in earning, if it has a higher average salary. (The vast majority of high-growth entrepreneurs are male.) Again, the “safety premium” is not accounted for in the global salary stats.
Male *outcomes *in general are also much higher variance. Yes a very few males become high-earning CEOs etc., but males are also disproportionately represented among the homeless. The former skews statistics much more than the latter, and unsurprisingly nobody is complaining about inequality in homelessness.
In general I am skeptical that the much vaunted “accounting for same jobs” really accounts for all factors.
I’m rather dismayed by even sven’s anecdote. I mean, I had pretty much the same experience in the mid 70s, my parents and my advisor wanted me to take typing. I hoped that such instances had disappeared. As it happens, I find that touchtyping is useful to me…but I’ve never used it in the workplace, and it only became useful when I had a computer to play with.
People can argue all they want to about women not going into high paying fields, but the truth of the matter is that until VERY recently, it was perfectly legal and considered OK to refuse to hire women for a “man’s” job. It’s not legal in the US any more, but it’s still done, it’s just that it’s not done in the open. If a woman gets a job with a bunch of good ol’ boys, they can and quite frequently do make it clear to her that she’s not welcome in their little HeMan Women Haters club, and will make her worklife miserable. Hell, either this year or last year a woman sued the Dallas Fire Department for sexual discrimination and harassment.
Admittedly, it’s a very narrow sector of the workforce, but a recent study by the American Association of Equine Practitioners (horse vets) found that women, on average, made much lower salaries than men for slightly fewer or sometimes slightly more hours worked per week (i.e., lower hourly wage). They also broke down the income disparity by age group, and men and women under 30 had comparable earnings (which are generally peanuts in the equine vet industry when you first come out of school, then go up dramatically as you become more experienced). However, their graph of age vs. salary did not break down by hours worked, so it’s a little hard to tease out how experience (with age as a proxy for experience), hours worked, and gender interact. It is still suspicious, IMO, for some sort of unconscious (or conscious) bias, on the part of employers, although I suspect that self-employed women vets may charge less/value themselves less than their male counterparts. But, then, is it simply that women are less likely to be risk-takers than men (set your prices too high, and clients go elsewhere or start stiffing you, resulting in less income than if your prices were lower), or is there some difference in the way she is treated by clients?
The above is not exclusive of equine veterinary medicine, horsetech. I was being told the same thing a few years ago while I was in vet school. I was told that several times, in fact. The higher ups at the school wanted us (mostly female class) to really know it, and as a result, demand better starting packages.
Actually, it’s more like 81 cents on the dollar, (at least it was in 2008). There’s a 100 page report on the reasons behind the pay disparity available from the US Department of Labor (published 2009) available here. Women are fast catching up because they’ve started to focus more on mathematics and business heavy degrees in university, amongst numerous other reasons:
As I mentioned, women are more liable to work part-time, leave the workforce for varying lengths of time, have less work experience, and take more responsibility for child care.
And a single parent is nearly always a woman, which probably accounts for much of the “earnings boost” mentioned above.
Remember that, while it’s probably becoming a vanishingly small number, that advisor you had in the mid 70s very well could have been the same person sven had in the 90s.
While it’s possible, I don’t think it’s likely. The advisor in my second high school was outraged on my behalf when I told her about the first advisor.
I did get some small measure of revenge. When the first advisor found out about the record score I set in the second school on the PSAT, she asked me if she could claim me as one of her students. I gave her the most poisonous smile I knew how to give, and told her that she was one of the reasons why I’d run away from home, and in fact she was about the worst person in the school system that I’d ever encountered. I had asked her for help and guidance when I was depressed and troubled in my freshman year, but she had no time for me then, and I reminded her of how she’d brushed me off.
Interesting point, from the legal profession: Female attorneys, on average, make less money than men (though I can’t recall the size of the disparity). However, what often gets lost when people talk about this is that women tend to make up a disproportionately large share of civil rights/public interest practice, which tends to pay a lot less than BigLaw. Women who go into nonprofit or government work are doing a very different job from BigLaw, and comparing nonprofit/gov’t salaries to BigLaw isn’t particularly helpful.
Of course, one could argue that women are being forced into nonprofit or government work - but I’d be skeptical about those claims. Nonprofit legal jobs, in particular, are often fiercely competitive. A woman who can get, say, a two-year fellowship with the ACLU could easily be working BigLaw if she wanted to - she’s making $60k because that’s what she wants to do. The same holds true of, say, the DC Public Defender’s Service - it’s easier to get into some BigLaw firms than that shop.
Income disparities may not be telling the whole story about workplace discimination between men and women.