The gender pay gap is standard measure of women's economic inequality. At the dawn of second-wave feminism, it was 59 cents: women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Today it's up to 77 cents, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. That's progress, right? Here's even more rosy news: women without children now earn over 90% of men's wages. So maybe it is time to stop worrying about women and economics.
Not so fast. Let's start with the 90% statistic, which describes childless women at age thirty. Conservatives like to point to that one, concluding that what ails mothers is not discrimination but their own choices.
In fact, I have argued, what the 90% statistic really means is that women, if they want equality, should plan to die childless at thirty. Such women have earnings nearly as high as men's because most have not hit either of the two major forms of workplace gender bias.
The single strongest bias is the maternal wall. Motherhood triggers powerful assumptions that mothers are less competent and committed to their jobs. "I had a baby, not a lobotomy," protested a Boston lawyer, voicing the experience of many who find that, upon their return from maternity leave, they are given less work, no work or dead-end assignments. The resulting bias is a powerful drag on women's prospects: mothers are 79% less likely to be hired and 100% less likely to be promoted. They are offered an average of a whopping $11,000 less in salary, and held to higher performance and punctuality standards than men, according to a study by Shelley Correll and co-authors.
Most women at age thirty haven't hit the other major form of gender bias either: the glass ceiling. Glass ceiling bias reflects, first, that qualities associated with leadership--assertiveness, self-confidence, directive behavior -- are linked with masculinity. So women who exhibit them often are seen as socially clueless. To compound the problem, glass ceiling bias also means that women often have to prove themselves over and over again before they are even considered for leadership positions. Contemporary studies by social psychologists show that the glass ceiling is alive and well.
So the claim that fact that childless women at age thirty make nearly as much as men does not prove that women have gained equality. Neither does the gender pay gap. Although it is the standard measure, that statistic grossly overestimates women's economic equality. Why? Because it compares men who work full time with women who work full time. This is an accurate picture of men, but it is an extremely partial description of women. Fully one-quarter of employed women work part time.
The penalties associated with part-time work are an important contributor to women's relative poverty. The penalty for working part time in the U.S. is enormous: seven times as high as in Sweden, and twice as high as in the U.K., according to Janet Gornick and Marcia Meyers. A recent report by the Joint Economic Committee documented that two-thirds of part-timers are women, and that part-timers in sales earn only 58 cents on the dollar, as compared with full timers.
The last time I looked, when one compared all employed women with all employed men, including part-timers as well as full-timers, women only earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. Now that's a sobering statistic.
The old-fashioned gender pay gap statistic embeds the assumption that it is somehow "natural" and uncontroversial to impose sharp penalties on those who don't work "full" time. But what, after all, is "full" time? As Alice Kessler-Harris pointed out long ago, its definition has changed a lot. The one thing that has remained constant is that "full time" has always been defined as the amount of time a man typically works.
From the start of the Industrial Revolution until today, men have been able to work more hours than women outside the home because they work fewer hours inside it. And women still do twice as much housework, and four times as much routine housework, as men, according to Suzanne Bianchi and her co-authors. They also do three hours of child care for each hour men do.
Of course, women could just stop changing the diapers, doing the laundry, cooking the meals. But no one wants them to, because that kind of unpaid work is every bit as crucial for sustaining a productive economy as paid work is. So it's time to document, and to challenge, the highly artificial penalty imposed on anyone who does not work a full time schedule. The recent report by the Joint Economic Committee is a good first step. The second crucial step is to change the way we measure the gender pay gap, and to compare employed men and women, rather than restricting the analysis to full-timers. Only then can we get an accurate picture of the yawning gap between the earnings of men and those women.
This piece originally was published in On The Issues:
(c) Joan C. Williams
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Sorry ladies, I'm not worried about wage gaps
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Gender pay gap reflects choices, not bias
Note: I am a *woman* who owns a business, and I can *confirm* those findings, though I doggedly tried for quite a while to pay women equally to men, despite the fact that they *consistently* cost my company more in insurance, sick leave, maternal leave, and productivity. Now my pay scale is based entirely on productivity metrics and a work-reward system. I'm happy to say three of my top *twenty* sales staff are women, the head of the IT department is a dear young - female - thing from Cambridge, etc. But ultimately...my own numbers still don't lie...ladies, you simply need to measure up to earn big boy wages. The *only* gender-gap I've ever seen is that the few women who do deserve the best wages never seem to request, let alone demand it. Man up, girls!
"...[T]o those persons who believe that women are indeed consistently underpaid, boy do I have a deal for you! Start your own firms and hire only women. If it’s true that women are consistently underpaid, you’ll be able to hire outstanding employees by paying them more than the relative pittances they currently earn, while you still profit handsomely from employing them.
And that’s not all. Being benighted male chauvinists, your competitors will not follow your example; they will stubbornly refuse to offer female employees wages commensurate with these women’s productivity. You’ll expand your operations by easily hiring highly productive, formerly underpaid workers while your competitors – made stupid by prejudice – will shrivel into bankruptcy as they lose productive employee after productive employee. You’ll simultaneously corner your industry’s market, earn handsome profits, and raise women’s wages. If you’re correct that sex discrimination is rampant in today’s labor market, you can’t lose! So get to work!"
What I've seen in corporate life is that women tend to interrupt their careers and presence in the workforce due to family issues (don't ask me why their husbandsdon't take leave instead - and I was pretty sure they didn't want me mediating a family matter), that they are much less likely to move due to two career family and risk to their husband's job sorts of issues, etc.
This is just a reality. A lot of women who want to get to the top as wage earners (80 hour weeks, foregone vacations, 50 percent plus travel away from home on business) really need to find husbands who will perform the traditional (old fashioned, I admit) wifely role.
Or they can be like our two most recent Supreme Court justices, and simply become "work nuns" - never getting married or having a family, in the interest of their work. Women of this nature will certainly be well represented in the Supreme Court.
Apples/apples and oranges/oranges.
However, no one appears to be considering the value of the intangible reward of being a good parent of either sex. You children do well in school. You have a strong, bonded and loving family. Your dog gets a bath regularly and your yard is weedless. These things do not happen if you are sitting at a desk at 8 PM preparing a business plan.
You are the CEO, CFO or Operations Manager of your little family--which is your primary business. While your employer may have other plans, they should not confuse your priorities. Both men and women need to re-focus their attention. Your employer is not going to crawl up on your lap, stick a pudgy finger in his mounh and go to sleep after saying "Love you, Mommy/Daddy." It is difficult to put a price on the priceless, so stop trying.
Your pay reflects your priorities, period.
If every single employee and all potential hires were to state unequivocably that their first consideration was their family, and while the occasional overtime requirement in an emergency would be acceptable they would not tolerate it as a matter of course, employers would pretty much have to accept the fact. No individual employer would be inconvenienced if every employer had to play by these rules.
What we need is a push across the board to strengthen families. Having more time to spend just sitting and listening to your kids without having to run to the home office and answer 50 E-mails on the weekend would be a big help. The result will be a better educated population and less need for welfare and prisons. These people have more income to spend and can keep the economy gently humming without the excesses we have seen when 100% of our attention is focused on earning more and more money.
You can realize incredible productivity gains when you build a long-term team of people who understand how to work together effectively. I think businesses would perform better if they recognized and allowed for social factors. This is not social justice. To me, it's simply good business. Treat people right and they become better employees.
Whenever I have a chance, I spread the word that 95% of earners' wages have failed to keep pace with inflation since about 2000.
When I put these two pieces of information together, I fear that the truth may be that business has used the hunger of women to earn to devalue work for both men and women.
All men are not physically better than all women. To be frank, people should be paid based on their skills and abilities. If a specific man is not able to run as fast, jump a fence as well as a woman, then she should be paid more (all other abilities/skills being equal).
A problem I see is the assumption that a woman has less abilities in these areas. An even bigger problem is that there is the assumption that a woman has less abilities in non-physically demanding professions as well. If you're interested, I can give some examples.
One other thing. I didn't see where the author said anything about women being so smart. Did I miss something?
This confuses me. Part-timers earn only 58 cents on the dollar per WHAT?. If you're talking over all, of course part-timers are going to make less than full-timers, in sales or in any other profession.
I can see taking issue with poor work assignments when returning from maternity leave, but some of that may be because the mother was out for 1-2 months and other people had to take over her responsibilities and/or start working on new projects that come up while the mother is out. When the mother returns to work should she take over the projects and work that others did for her in her absence? What if the person who took over her work did a better job? Other reasons could be that the employer may be scared to give the new mother new lengthy assignments because she may decide to be a stay-at-home mom after a while back at work, or have another child - necessitating another maternity leave.
http://thinkprogress.org/2010/08/20/chamber-apologize-women-wage/