There's been a lot of talk lately about the gender wage gap. On Sunday, Rachel Maddow weighed in on the topic on "Meet the Press." She said that women earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. Alex Castellano replied to her on the show.
In article for Politico, Kay Hymowitz explains why women earn less – motherhood. After women have kids, they work less hours then men, they take more flexible jobs, or take years off when their children are little. Taking time off is basically a career killer.
Hymowitz is right about the cause of the gender wage gap. Ann Crittenden covered the same territory in The Price of Motherhood: Why the Most Important Job in the World is Still the Least Valued
Apt. 11d 
“Parents should not be penalized in the workforce for caring for their children.”
And where on the planet does that not happen? If you read Baranskaya’s “A Week Like Any Other,” (a late 1960s classic of Soviet women’s literature about a week in the life of a research scientist and married mother of two) it’s pretty clear that Baranskaya’s heroine is paying a fairly steep price. (Of course, winding up a childless elderly Russian woman would be a much higher price to pay.)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natalya_Baranskaya
“I’ve lost seventy-eight days, almost a third of my whole working time, in sick days and certificates. And all because of the children. Everybody copies out their days and so can see what everybody else has got. I don’t understand why I feel so awkward, even ashamed. I shrink, avoid looking at people. Why? I’m not guilty of anything.”
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From the Canadian experience, mat leave is not a solution since we have one of the worst gaps in the OECD nations.
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“Parents should not be penalized in the workforce for caring for their children. ”
But they’re not; they’re penalized for doing less work. I think the real question, and the way it should be framed, is that parents should not have to pay outsized consequences (compared to the effect on the work). I workers and employers should think creatively about work to make sure that irrelevant issues aren’t interfering with parent’s ability to do the work and to look at how work can be reorganized. But I always find this “70%” number to be meaningless, the way it is reported now and a disservice to the days when women *really* were paid 70% for the same work (i.e. male teachers getting paid more because they were just obviously better, right? or because they had to support their families and women didn’t, a self-fulfilling excuse).
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Or put differently: “People should not be penalized in the workforce for caring for their children, their parents, or themselves.”
What I think happens is that parents bear the brunt because it’s impossible to ignore the needs of one’s children. One can ignore the nagging pain or foist off taking care of parents onto a sibling, or professional services. But it’s something we’re all going to have to deal with.
And where on the planet does this happen? There are places–either by government decree or by workplace policy–that pay you for sick time, whether yours or your child’s (or a parent in some cases). You earn sick leave. At some places, you can even cash it out. So parents miss out on the extra cash, but they at least they aren’t losing anything (or getting fired). There are places that have laws on the books that require companies to let women on maternity leave get their jobs back without financial penalty. I’ve worked in places like that, or have had friends that have.
There are ways to fix this problem, just no political will to do so.
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bj, on Rachel’s show, she actually showed that it’s 77% even accounting for fewer hours, so that a male teacher indeed does make 23% more for the same exact work and number of hours. The right is trying to say it’s because of the lesser number of hours, but it’s not. With the hours, I think it goes down to 70%.
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Since Doug is being a copy-editing geek in the other thread, I’ll have to be a ratio geek and point out that if wages(women)=77%wages(men), that the men make 30% more than the women: i.e. the wages(men)=130%wages(women).
I haven’t followed the story in detail, so shouldn’t comment in a detailed way. A cursory look at the data in Sweden is pointing towards a difference in the work actually done within the same category (i.e. if women teachers teach elementary school v male teachers teaching high school — though I’m making up that explanation, and making up explanations like that is always a resort of bias, unless you actually look for the data to support it).
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PS: I do think gender bias contributes to differing pay in the situations above (i.e. when elementary school teachers get paid less than HS teachers).
Talking about the ways in which the world undervalues the contributions of women is a big part of my conversations with my daughter. Recently, she was annoyed at understanding that the boys in her class, many of them, are, pretty soon, going to be able to run faster, lift more weight, get taller, than she is. I pointed out that some day she’ll be able to have babies, which is a pretty amazing physical feat. It wasn’t a satisfactory response for her, because, as she pointed out, that’s not a physical feat she can show off right now, or any time in the near future. But, still, it’s pretty amazing.
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And, yet, studies have shown that the wage gap starts early, before parenthood is an issue for many workers: right at the get-go. Furthermore, whereas men are praised and rewarded for negotiating aggressively for increased pay, women are condemned and marginalized for pursuing something in a ‘masculine’ fashion.
From Babcock & Laschever’s Women Don’t Ask – “both men and women in our society typically take a harder line against women than they take against men in a negotiation. they make worse first offers to women, pressure women to concede more, and themselves concede much less. This doesn’t simply limit the results women produce when they negotiate. If the benefits from negotiating are likely to be small and the process promises to be difficult, many women feel less incentive to ask in the first place.” [p.11]
Women’s role as primary caregivers compounds a broader socio-economic trend that rewards men for actions that earns women disapproval: being ambitious or simply asking for what they should be earning.
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“There are places that have laws on the books that require companies to let women on maternity leave get their jobs back without financial penalty. I’ve worked in places like that, or have had friends that have.”
And how well do mothers advance within those organizations? As Shandra said, Canada has both very generous maternity leave and a big pay gap. That is a very predictable combination. Olya, the woman from the Soviet novella I quoted has a secure job, takes lots of sick leave, has dirt cheap daycare, could take a very long maternity leave, but as long as she is taking all this time off, she is not going to advance within her organization and will definitely not be given greater responsibilities. (Of course, things may improve a bit when her kids get bigger.)
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If your kids are boys and get really big, they can just go mug your boss.
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LOL, bj. Thanks for the ratio correction. That’s what I get for writing quickly. The Bureau of Labor Statistics has the real info on this. It’s fascinating. And Rachel showed the graphs. Pretty amazing stuff.
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Here is one article about the pay gap in Europe. http://epp.eurostat.ec.europa.eu/statistics_explained/index.php/Gender_pay_gap_statistics
Italy’s pay gap is only 5%. That is, men make 5% more than women. They have generous parental leave policies, though their general sick pay is similar to most US companies.
Look, anyone who is away from work for a significant amount of time is going to suffer a loss of advancement. 78 missed days, as Amy’s fictional character experienced, is a lot, and above normal. Either she has a lot of kids and they all get sick at different times, or she has a kid who’s prone to illness. That happens, but is not my experience, both as a mother and as someone who works with a lot of mothers.
What I see more often is someone who misses, say 10 days, more than what’s allotted but within the realm of possibility even if you only have one kid. And they are then passed over for things. And maternity leave, of course, will put you at the higher end of things. I took 6 weeks, just after FMLA had passed. I used accrued vacation and sick time, but I had to get special permission to do so.
Honestly, what makes having kids work for me is the ability to tag team with my husband. There’s nothing the government can specifically do about that, except make it nicer for anyone to miss work for a legitimate reason. But women can certainly make sure that husands and partners do their fair share. If a kid needs to miss 10 days in a year, all those days shouldn’t be missed by the women. Too many women I know assume it’s their job to deal with the kids for even the simplest of things. I understand why that happens, but really, it shouldn’t.
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This isn’t something I think government can correct. Look at tenure clocks, as an example. Consider 2 professors, man and woman. They start at the same time. Let’s say the woman has a baby and the clock stops for 1 year. A man doesn’t have a baby – so no stopped clock. he gets tenure on schedule, with a raise. Assume the university give a COLA every year (I SAID assume!) She gets tenure one year late (with the raise). At this point they both have the same number of years of experience, but he is making more because of the COLA. Was she discriminated against? Was she penalized? What if the hypothetical was composed of two women – one with baby, one without?
What if we allow merit raises after tenure? The professor without a stopped clock had the opportunity for that – was that penalizing the parent?
You can never equalize the pay if one party values something other than money. if firms were willing to allow more flexible schedules (or they don’t have to be on call), but pay less to parents are they offering a benefit or a penalty? Continuing to say that they must get the same paycheck ignores all of that.
And, to head off the usual crap about no one can do that, if you work for a small firm, you absolutely can negotiate more flexibility, more time off etc. I did it at one place to finish college, and at another to give me more time/flexibility to deal with issues for my very elderly parents. My brother-in-law has done, several of my cousins have done it.
Working in a small place is a choice that comes with trade offs. Saying I shouldn’t have to make any trade-offs is stupid and childish.
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Elegant: Children are the future, and we must cherish them. Inelegant: We are all going to need somebody to wipe our butts when we get old and incontinent.
We have to find a way, as a society, to make it work for people to have children. We don’t want to go down into a population crash like Japan, Korea, Italy. Women notice! that their elders with kids are skint, and never get out, and look harried, and their elders without kids, well, prosperous and playful lives. Not so many of us look ahead fifty years and see how much pleasure comes from grandparenthood, and, well, someone to wipe your butt.
You can’t really fix the problem by regulating workplaces: anything you do creates huge incentives not to hire women, or creates advantages for independent operators who don’t have the cost structure. I think the answer is some kind of child subsidy. I know – good luck with that. Or just don’t fix it, but then we have the childless old age problem writ larger.
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“Women notice! that their elders with kids are skint, and never get out, and look harried…”
We Starbucks mommies with nice strollers are trying our best to fix that.
(There’s a cartoon with two vehicles side-by-side. The first one has rear window decals with a mom and dad and three kids. The second one has a husband, wife and a pile of money the size of the three kids from the first decal.)
http://xkcd.com/946/
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“78 missed days, as Amy’s fictional character experienced, is a lot, and above normal. Either she has a lot of kids and they all get sick at different times, or she has a kid who’s prone to illness.”
It is kind of outlandish, but her kids are supposed to be itty bitty, they’re in daycare, and it’s the 1960s in Soviet Russia, so a lot of vaccines and medical procedures we take for granted wouldn’t have existed. For instance, I bet they weren’t putting in ear tubes for recurrent ear infection in that time and place.
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I need to read “A Week Like Any Other” again sometime, because when I initially read it, I was a childless, married graduate student. It’s going to be weird reading it with a bit more eye for everyday detail and thinking about what it must have been like to live in a two-professional family in a place and time without nice grocery stores, delivery food, a dryer, good baby equipment, the Landsend catalog and cleaning services, basically all the infrastructure that makes the two-income upper-middle class US family tolerable. Instead, if you were lucky (!) you’d have a live-in mother-in-law.
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bj, on Rachel’s show, she actually showed that it’s 77% even accounting for fewer hours, so that a male teacher indeed does make 23% more for the same exact work and number of hours.
Really?! How did she show it?
The 77% comes from a very blunt metric, comparing median salaries of full-time employees grouped by gender, with no correction for any other factors:
http://www.iwpr.org/initiatives/pay-equity-and-discrimination
Another measure of the earnings gap, the ratio of women’s and men’s median annual earnings for full-time year-round workers, was 77.4 in 2010 (data for 2011 are not yet available), less than half of a percentage point higher than that in 2009. (This means the annual gender wage gap for full-time year-round workers is a little under 23 percent.)
When you correct for things like education, hours worked, responsibilities, etc. the picture looks a lot different:
http://www.city-journal.org/2011/21_3_gender-gap.html
A good example of how proofers get away with using the rogue term “occupation” is Behind the Pay Gap, a widely quoted 2007 study from the American Association of University Women whose executive summary informs us in its second paragraph that “one year out of college, women working full time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn.” The report divides the labor force into 11 extremely broad occupations determined by the Department of Education. So ten years after graduation, we learn, women who go into “business” earn considerably less than their male counterparts do. But the businessman could be an associate at Morgan Stanley who majored in econ, while the businesswoman could be a human-relations manager at Foot Locker who took a lot of psych courses. You don’t read until the end of the summary—a point at which many readers will have already Tweeted their indignation—that when you control for such factors as education and hours worked, there’s actually just a 5 percent pay gap. But the AAUW isn’t going to begin a report with the statement that women earn 95 percent of what their male counterparts earn, is it?
I’m curious whether Maddow was being intentionally misleading or needs staff who can do cursory background research.
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I don’t think she was trying to be misleading. Her sources were legitimate. But I think the skeptics might be right. The 77% does indeed include those women who work fewer hours. When you control for that and some other factors, the gap shrinks to 5%. That info comes from the aqua report mentioned by Siobhan. Here’s an article that details that info: http://thegrindstone.com/career-management/rachel-maddow-alex-castellanos-wage-gap-283
Personally, I haven’t felt a wage gap. I have, however, experienced some thoughtless planning by men who don’t get child care issues.
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Here’s a complicating factor: self-employment. There are a lot of US women with small businesses. If women are poor negotiators and are prone to undervaluing their own labor, self-employment may be depressing women’s income.
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I think it is complicated. I’ve turned down pay raises, because I prefer to stay in my 9am-3pm part-time job at a professional services firm.
I’m thrilled that my company offers me this opportunity to work in a challenging career, and still be home when the kids get off the bus. (They could double my salary and I still wouldn’t choose to work full-time.)
But if my husband had the chance to scale back his career to a 75% role, perhaps I would go full-time and let him be the after-school parent? Could part of the problem be that men haven’t had the *opportunity* to do the same? (in my case, he’s in a technical field that is 99.9% male dominated)
This is not to disregard the research on the fact that women don’t earn the same as men for the same jobs. I don’t doubt that is true.
But, in my very anecdotal case, I’m earning less…and I *chose* to earn less. At the end of the day, I value my time more than my money. So I seek out jobs that provide more flexibility.
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Italy’s pay gap is only 5%. That is, men make 5% more than women. They have generous parental leave policies, though their general sick pay is similar to most US companies.
I think you have to look at a lot of these numbers in context. Italy has one of the lowest percentage of women working (compared to men) in any Western country.
http://www.economist.com/node/15174418
I’m sure America could close the wage gap by a lot if 20% of the low earning women all left the workforce.
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kristen–I think your anecdotal situation occurs quite a bit, and I think it points to a society that expects women to scale back, but not men. Sometimes that comes out directly in company policy, but more likely, it’s a cultural thing. A man just knows he’d be laughed out the door if he asked for a 75% job, whereas a woman might know that that’s something she *can* ask for. And ragtime, I agree, it must be complicated. If all those female fast-food/retail/housemaids left the workforce, we probably would see a smaller gap.
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“And ragtime, I agree, it must be complicated. If all those female fast-food/retail/housemaids left the workforce, we probably would see a smaller gap.”
Really? Isn’t it probably the other way around, that the gap occurs more at the high end than the low end? There’s only going to be so much difference in hourly wages for very low end workers, whereas there can be tremendous differences in compensation for CEOs, professors, lawyers, psychologists, doctors, etc.
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Here’s an example of wage differences within a single field. One of my young relatives is starting a career as a pilot. His last job (at a rinky dink regional airline) paid $18k a year. Meanwhile, his dad (who works as a pilot for a major airline) made over 10X as much. (The young relative has since moved on to a pilot job at $60k.)
There would not be such a big distinction between the wages of Burger King employees.
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…at least not with the same job description.
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There’s only going to be so much difference in hourly wages for very low end workers, whereas there can be tremendous differences in compensation for CEOs, professors, lawyers, psychologists, doctors, etc.
Amy — the chart cited to was labeled:
The unadjusted gender pay gap, 2009 (% difference between average gross hourly earnings of male and female employees, as % of male gross earnings, unadjusted form)
It’s not that male fast food workers make more, its that all the male fast food workers are bringing down the male denominator, so the women who are working look comparatively better.
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“It’s not that male fast food workers make more, its that all the male fast food workers are bringing down the male denominator, so the women who are working look comparatively better.”
So we’re not comparing pay within a particular job category, but among different job categories? Now I’m confused.
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I know a few same-sex couples who are raising children. In this small sample, there is usually a main wage-earner, and a spouse who is either full-time or part-time “child-raiser.” It would be interesting to see if the “gender gap” is actually a “childcare responsibility” gap.
When comparing different patterns of parental employment between countries, you must take into consideration the different financial incentives and disincentives for working. They vary by country. This is an interesting paper: http://www.york.ac.uk/inst/spru/research/childben22/22revisedsummary.pdf.
Chart 6, “cost of fulltime childcare after subsidies per month 2001” is illuminating. A couple in the US with two children are paying large sums for childcare, in comparison to other countries. (more than 600 british pounds.)
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Sorry, guys. I’ve been working for 10 hours straight on a project today. Gotta wrap it up soon, because I’m starting to dip below minimum wage.
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“At the end of the day, I value my time more than my money. So I seek out jobs that provide more flexibility.”
Me too. However, I think this is a luxury at a certain point of income. At this point in my life, I could make more money by taking on extra courses, but I really don’t have anything to do with the extra money. I’d prefer to be home with the kids, too, or simply relaxing. But I can afford to do that. But for some of my co-workers, they need the money desperately because they are in debt, or have an unemployed spouse, or have family members they support (my poor friend G is basically supporting a husband, college-aged daughter with an addiction to study abroad, and two elderly parents).
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