Women earn 70 cents on the dollar?

[Dangerosa]

@horsetech

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?

See pages 21-26

And here is one specifically on the gender gap in engineering:

http://www.glassdoor.com/blog/engineering-pay-gap-glassdoor-reveals-many-women-engineers-earn-less-than-men/

[Peremensoe]

@Beware_of_Doug

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.

The notion that a smart, educated person is “overqualified” is based on the idea that “brain” is not much of an asset in some fields, and I think that’s not nearly as true as people assume.

The whole country has suffered by the brain drain of the most talented people being encouraged to pursue white-collar urban jobs instead of doing things like farming, forestry, construction. (Readers of The Omnivore’s Dilemma may recall Michael Pollan reaching this conclusion about farming.)

The truth is, going forward, we need education, and lots of it, but not necessarily the same kinds of education that have been considered most prestigious to date.

[Strassia]

@even_sven

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.

I have heard stories like this before. This is blatant social pressure that pushes women to lower paying jobs. But there are other more subtle pressures as well. My wife was good at math in middle school and early high school, but stopped taking higher math classes because she felt it made her seem less feminine (she regrets this now, but at the time she valued social benefits of “cute dumb girl” status more than the future benefits of more math). When she went to college she got a degree in psychology and a masters in social work. She went that route in part because she assumed that whoever she married would make enough to give her the luxury of choosing a fulfilling career rather than a lucrative career.

Which brings up a good point as to why a lot of “female” careers that require advanced training do not pay as well as other jobs. Nobody becomes a teacher or a social worker for the pay check. They do it in part for intangible rewards. Consequently they will do it for less money.

On preview: Mr. Excellent’s post is making the same point. Women tend to take jobs that have more meaning and less pay. Why that is and what, if anything, should be done about is a much more complex issue.

[Cat_Fight]

@Strassia

Which brings up a good point as to why a lot of “female” careers that require advanced training do not pay as well as other jobs. Nobody becomes a teacher or a social worker for the pay check. They do it in part for intangible rewards. Consequently they will do it for less money.

There is also the theory that if you make these jobs pay too well, you’ll invite people into the profession who aren’t truly passionate. Perhaps a tiny but true, but infuriating nonetheless. If administrators can’t tell the difference between someone teaching pre-K for the big bucks and someone who’s doing it because they love kids, something’s wrong.

Then again, this also holds true for many people who work in the arts – illustrators, graphic designers, writers, people who work in fashion, photography publishing, the list goes on. They are supposed to be so elated they’ve got work they’ll accept little pay. Or employers assume they’re getting so much personal satisfaction, even ‘fun,’ out of their job that payment is secondary.

[Shodan]

@Strassia

Which brings up a good point as to why a lot of “female” careers that require advanced training do not pay as well as other jobs.

One of the advantages of teaching is that your time off can largely coincide with the time when your children are not in school. This can partially offset lower pay. Being a chemical engineer may pay better, but it is a lot harder to get three months off every summer. IYSWIM.

Regards,
Shodan

[Beware_of_Doug]

@spark240

The notion that a smart, educated person is “overqualified” is based on the idea that “brain” is not much of an asset in some fields, and I think that’s not nearly as true as people assume.

The whole country has suffered by the brain drain of the most talented people being encouraged to pursue white-collar urban jobs instead of doing things like farming, forestry, construction. (Readers of The Omnivore’s Dilemma may recall Michael Pollan reaching this conclusion about farming.)

The truth is, going forward, we need education, and lots of it, but not necessarily the same kinds of education that have been considered most prestigious to date.

I totally agree. But the skilled and manual trades are prejudiced not just against women (as Lynn Bodoni pointed out), but against men who are not “gendered” in the ways of workingclass masculinity (see the book Learning to Labor for some background). There is going to be a lot of culture clash and some backlash, altho not so much as women face in the trades.

[Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party]

@Cat_Fight

There is also the theory that if you make these jobs pay too well, you’ll invite people into the profession who aren’t truly passionate. Perhaps a tiny but true, but infuriating nonetheless. If administrators can’t tell the difference between someone teaching pre-K for the big bucks and someone who’s doing it because they love kids, something’s wrong.

Then again, this also holds true for many people who work in the arts – illustrators, graphic designers, writers, people who work in fashion, photography publishing, the list goes on. They are supposed to be so elated they’ve got work they’ll accept little pay. Or employers assume they’re getting so much personal satisfaction, even ‘fun,’ out of their job that payment is secondary.

Or perhaps there’s an overabundance of people wanting to work in those jobs, depressing the average wage in the field?

[Strassia]

@Cat_Fight

There is also the theory that if you make these jobs pay too well, you’ll invite people into the profession who aren’t truly passionate. Perhaps a tiny but true, but infuriating nonetheless. If administrators can’t tell the difference between someone teaching pre-K for the big bucks and someone who’s doing it because they love kids, something’s wrong.

Then again, this also holds true for many people who work in the arts – illustrators, graphic designers, writers, people who work in fashion, photography publishing, the list goes on. They are supposed to be so elated they’ve got work they’ll accept little pay. Or employers assume they’re getting so much personal satisfaction, even ‘fun,’ out of their job that payment is secondary.

@Capt.Ridley_s_Shooting_Party

Or perhaps there’s an overabundance of people wanting to work in those jobs, depressing the average wage in the field?

Perhaps not an overabundance, but at least a sufficiency of potential workers willing to work for the pay offered. Pay is never the complete story of why someone takes a job.

[Dinsdale]

@Sam_Stone

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.

A couple of months ago The Atlantic had a cover story on this recession, in which it said that due to a combination of factors within a few months more than 50% of the American workforce was expected to be female for the first time ever.

[alphaboi867]

@Cat_Fight

There is also the theory that if you make these jobs pay too well, you’ll invite people into the profession who aren’t truly passionate…

Is that necessarily a bad thing? As long as someone can do their job well why does it matter if they’re being motivated by some sense of service or the desire for money?

[horsetech]

Interesting point, some people I’ve met who are passionate about what they do are also batshit crazy and incompetent. Also, increasing salaries for teachers would probably bring back IN to the profession people who love to teach but can’t stomach the miserable compensation and politics involved. It kind of like saying doctors are supposed to be in it for helping people - well, yes, in a perfect world, but being in a field for the right reasons does not give you reason to be abused or underpaid (what underpaid is is up for debate, just saying that the logic doesn’t follow). Deliberately paying less than someone is worth because that person is passionate about the field is taking advantage of that person’s passion, IMO.

[Lynn_Bodoni]

I’m old enough to remember when most teachers were women because teaching was one of the few jobs that women could get. Let me tell you, not all of those women were passionate about teaching. I’d go so far as to say that most of them didn’t really like teaching, but they didn’t want to work as a maid, either, so they went to a teacher’s college to get their certificate.

[Spectre_of_Pithecanthropus]

Were female teachers the norm, historically, in other countries? I’ve been reading some German stories lately, and it’s been at least a couple of times that a teacher is mentioned, and my mental image is of a woman. But he’s turned out to be a man in both cases.

One factor I wonder about is functional job title / official job title vs. the nature of the actual work done. I know that in the IT world the official title that appears on your review often remains “programmer” or “analyst”, or some variation of the two, by the time you move into supervision or other roles that are not directly functional. So by that time, this person has really become a manager and probably spends zero time actually programming. With respect to discrepancy in the same jobs, is this partly due to both men and women keeping the same functional job titles, yet the men being promoted to management and receiving more pay?