JMJ Dwight Llano
12 – BBA 10 – 18– 19
English Ms. Piodena
The Simple Truth about the Gender
Pay Gap
The gender pay gap is the gap between what men and women are paid. Most
commonly, it refers to the median annual pay of all women who work full time
and year-round, compared to the pay of a similar cohort of men. Other
estimates of the gender pay gap are based on weekly or hourly earnings, or are
specific to a particular group of women.
No matter how you analyze it, the gender pay gap is real, persistent, and harmful
to women’s economic security.
Quick Facts
The gender pay gap is the result of many factors, including occupational
segregation, bias against working mothers, and direct pay discrimination.
Additionally, such things as racial bias, disability, access to education, and age
come into play. Consequently, different groups of women experience very
different gaps in pay.
Women’s Earnings as a percentage of White Men’s Earnings,
by Race/Ethnicity, 2018
Employer practices — such as using prior salary history in setting current pay
and prohibiting employees from discussing their wages — compound the
problem.
The gender pay gap varies substantially from state to state, due to such factors
as:
The primary industries in the state and the opportunities they create;
Demographics such as race/ethnicity, age, and education level;
Regional differences in attitudes and beliefs about work and gender; and
Differences in the scope and strength of state pay discrimination laws and
policies.
Pay Gap Information by State and Industry
In 2018, the state with the largest gap was Louisiana, which had a gender pay
ratio of 70%; the state with the smallest gap was California, with a gender pay
ratio of 88%.
The gender pay gap occurs across almost all occupations and industries:
Male-dominated industries tend to have higher wages than industries and
occupations made up mostly of female workers;
In a comparison of occupations with at least 50,000 men and 50,000 women in
2017, 107 out of 114 had statistically significant gaps in pay that favored men;
six occupations had no significant gap; and just one had a gap favoring women.
In some occupations, women collectively are receiving billions less than they
would with equal pay; for instance, women working as physicians and surgeons
are paid $19 billion less annually than if they were paid the same as men in
that occupation.
Deborah J. Vagins |
[Link]
Gender pay gap is worse than thought: Study shows women actually earn half the income of
men,” NBC announced recently in reference to a report titled “Still a Man’s Labor Market” by
the Washington-based Institute for Women’s Policy Research, which found that women's income
was 51 percent less than men’s earnings.
The "Gender Pay Gap" Isn't What You Think It Is
What do you think of when you hear the phrase “gender pay gap”? Perhaps you think of a man
and woman who work exactly the same job at exactly the same place, but he gets paid more than
she does. This sort of discrimination has been illegal in the United States since the passage of the
Equal Pay Act in 1963.
This methodology takes no account whatsoever of a whole host of factors that might explain this
discrepancy.
But that is not what is generally meant by the phrase “gender wage gap.” Instead, the commonly
reported figure—that a woman earns 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man—is derived by
taking the total annual earnings of men in the American economy in a given year and dividing
that by the number of male workers. This gives you the average annual earnings of an American
man. Then you do the same thing but for women. The average annual women’s earnings come in
at about 80 percent of the average annual man’s earnings. Presto, you have a gender wage gap.
That’s it, honestly. It isn’t much above back-of-a-cigarette-box stuff. This methodology takes no
account whatsoever of a whole host of factors that might explain this discrepancy. It ignores the
fact that according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), in 2017, men worked an average of
8.05 hours in an average day compared to 7.24 hours for women.
True, women are more likely to be raising children, taking care of elderly family members, or
doing housework, leaving them with fewer hours in the day for paid employment. But this does
not alter the essential fact: that people working fewer hours, on average, can be expected to earn
lower incomes, on average.
Not Exactly Apples-to-Apples
And there are differences in the type of work men and women do, which bears on their earnings.
BLS data shows that, in 2017, 94 percent of child day care services workers were female, the
highest percentage of any category, and that the mean annual wage of childcare workers was
$23,760. By contrast, just 2.9 percent of workers in logging were women, the lowest share of any
category, and the mean annual wage here was $42,310.
They have simply assumed a cause and carried out a slightly grander version of the back-of-a-
cigarette-box calculation to support it.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research study fails to account for these differences. Indeed,
its authors are airily dismissive of analysis that takes into account “occupational differences or
so-called ‘women’s choices.’”
Its headline claim is that the 80 cents figure is wrong; in fact, women earn more like 49 cents for
each dollar a man earns. The authors, Stephen J. Rose and Heidi I. Hartmann—listed in that
order because that is how it is presented on the cover of their report, not because of sexism—
arrive at this conclusion by taking a longitudinal dataset from 2001-2015 and measuring average
annual earnings across the period for people who worked any amount during any of these years,
and then comparing the overall averages for male and female workers, as well as for different
subsets of men and women. Workers who were employed full-time for the entire 15-year period
are lumped in with those who worked only part-time or occasionally.
Rather than starting with an observation (that 80-cent statistic) and examining possible causes,
Hartmann and Rose have simply assumed a cause (rampant sexism) and carried out a slightly
grander version of the back-of-a-cigarette-box calculation to support it. This isn’t how social
science research should be done. It is exactly the wrong way round.
A New Study Out of Harvard
Remember, if we truly want to measure the impact of sexism on male and female relative
earnings, we want to look at men and women doing exactly the same job at exactly the same
place. Fortunately, a new study by Valentin Bolotnyy and Natalia Emanuel of Harvard
University—again, listed in that order because that is how they are presented in their paper—
does just this.
And yet, even here, Emanuel and Bolotnyy find that female train and bus operators earn less than
their male counterparts.
They look at data from the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA). This is a
union shop with uniform hourly wages where men and women adhere to the same rules and
receive the same benefits. Workers are promoted on the basis of seniority rather than
performance, and male and female workers of the same seniority have the same choices for
scheduling, routes, vacation, and overtime. There is almost no scope here for a sexist boss to
favor men over women.
And yet, even here, Emanuel and Bolotnyy find that female train and bus operators earn less than
their male counterparts. From this observation, they go looking for possible causes, examining
time cards and scheduling from 2011 to 2017 and factoring in sex, age, date of hire, tenure, and
whether an employee was married or had dependents.
They find that male train and bus drivers worked about 83 percent more overtime than their
female colleagues and were twice as likely to accept an overtime shift—which pays time-and-a-
half—on short notice and that around twice as many women as men never took overtime. The
male workers took 48 percent fewer unpaid hours off under the Family Medical Leave Act each
year. Female workers were more likely to take less desirable routes if it meant working fewer
nights, weekends, and holidays. Parenthood turns out to be an important factor. Fathers were
more likely than childless men to want the extra cash from overtime, and mothers were more
likely to want time off than childless women.
“The gap can be explained entirely by the fact that, while having the same choice sets in the
workplace, women and men make different choices.”
In other words, the difference in male and female earnings at the MBTA was explained by those
“so-called ‘women’s choices,’” which Hartmann and Rose so easily dismissed.
“The gap of $0.89 in our setting,” the authors concluded, “can be explained entirely by the fact
that, while having the same choice sets in the workplace, women and men make different
choices.”
The “gender wage gap” is as real as unicorns and has been killed more times than Michael
Myers. Yet politicians feel the need to genuflect before this phantom figure. President Obama’s
White House was obsessed with that ridiculous 80-cent number. Let us substitute the quest for
phantoms with serious research into the causes of relative incomes.
[Link]
choices-of-men-and-women/
John Phelan
John Phelan is an economist at the Center of the American Experiment and fellow of The
Cobden Centre.