Three-Fourths of a Paycheck
Six ways we justify the gender pay gap—and why we shouldn’tBy Kay Steiger
April 28, 2009
President Barack Obama applauds Lilly Ledbetter, right, prior to signing the Lilly Ledbetter Bill for equal pay for equal work. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)Today is Fair Pay Day. Again. It’s yet another reminder that women make, on average, about three-quarters of what men make. For women of color, that gap gets even bigger. The American Association of University Women created an interactive map where you can see exactly how bad the pay gap is in your state. The reality is that the gender pay gap has barely budged in the decades the AAUW has began studying this problem.
Every time we open up the debate about equal pay, the response is that this issue is complicated. Pundits put forth reasons explaining away why women make less than men. They scratch their heads and think about all of the reasons women are paid less. In the end, they help justify the pay gap rather than finding solutions. Here are some “reasons” for the pay gap.
Shouldn’t we be worrying about the economy and not the pay gap?
We tend to think of economic recovery and gender pay discrimination as two separate issues, but as Heather Boushey, a senior economist for the Center for American Progress Action Fund, pointed out in a recent testimony before the Equal Opportunity Employment Commission, the fact that women are earning less is extremely relevant in these tough economic times.
“As of March 2009—which is the latest data available—men have lost nearly four out of every five jobs shed since the recession began in December 2007. As of February 2009, women comprise half the labor force (49.7 percent),” Boushey said in her testimony. “This means that, in millions of U.S. households, a woman is supporting the family.”
In other words, worrying about the pay gap includes worrying about the economy, since so many households are dependant on women’s wages.
Women voluntarily take lower-paying jobs than men
This is one of the big reasons why equal pay skeptics justify pay discrepancies. Although women are dominant in service-sector jobs like teaching and nursing, it’s also the case that women are dominant in other high-earning professions. In fact, the greatest number of full-time working women (39 percent) worked in management or some other related professional field.
Additionally, the Bureau of Labor Statistics notes that “[w]omen accounted for 51 percent of all workers in the high-paying management, professional, and related occupations. They outnumbered men in such occupations as financial managers; human resource managers; education administrators; medical and health services managers; accountants and auditors; budget analysts; property, real estate, and social and community association managers; preschool, kindergarten, elementary, middle, and secondary school teachers; physical therapists; and registered nurses.”
While its true that, say, a registered nurse doesn’t make as much as a lawyer, these are all highly professionalized fields. Each requires at least four years of schooling and almost all require some kind of specialized training.
Women “take time off” to have children
Even though it is finally illegal to fire someone for pregnancy, the United States still hasn’t gone as far as actually supporting working parents. In a survey (PDF) of the “best” employers (deemed so by Working Mother magazine), nearly one quarter, or 24 percent offer four weeks of paid maternity leave or less. About half, or 52 percent, offer six weeks paid leave or less. That’s pretty good, but of these so-called “best” employees, about 7 percent offer no paid maternity leave at all. The United States remains the only industrialized country besides Australia that doesn’t mandate paid maternity leave.
While it’s really great to think that women are staying at home, caring for their children and packing lunches for their husbands going off to work, for many women that simply isn’t an option. Few families can afford to survive on one income. There are also millions of women out there who can’t afford to take time off of work following childbirth at all.
Furthermore, when even the “best” employees don’t offer paid leave longer than six weeks, it’s hard to imagine how taking less than two months away from a job really deters women from advancing in the workplace.
Women don’t ask for better pay
Linda C. Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, conducted several studies to test out how men and women respond differently to pay negotiations. In one of her studies, as reported by The Washington Post, a group of graduating master’s students approached pay negotiations differently, “Four times as many men — 51 percent of the men vs. 12.5 percent of the women — said they had pushed for a better deal. Not surprisingly, those who negotiated tended to be rewarded — they got 7.4 percent more, on average — compared with those who did not negotiate.”
Still, in another experiment conduced by Babcock, when a group of men and women were told that compensation was negotiable more women asked for increased compensation. It was at a lower rate than the men, but it was greatly improved over the first experiment where there was no suggestion of negotiation.
Social studies suggest that women just aren’t asking for increased compensation, but this seems to be just another way of justifying that women can earn as much as men, but only if they ask for it. Often women just aren’t aware of how much their compensation is in relation to their peers. Sometimes employers intimidate employees to discourage them from discussing salaries.
Women have family and household responsibilities (and presumably men don’t)
It’s true that women tend to do about two-thirds of household chores and tend to take on a lot of responsibilities of children. Employers might use having to leave early to pick up a child or caring for a sick family member as an excuse to depress pay, but there are some policy solutions that could help with that.
As Karen Kornbluh argued when she worked at the New America Foundation, flexibility for families (both men and women) is important to adapt to the current economic climate, where most mothers work. Kornbluh said in a 2005 Washington Monthly article, “The failure of the workplace to make accommodations for working parents is one of the biggest unmet demands of American voters.”
Instead of assuming parents, especially mothers, need to negotiate flex time with their employers, employers should give it. Barring that, the law should compel them to do so. Another solution is, of course, to demand that men and women treat household and child-rearing responsibilities equally. As Lisa Belkin once wrote for the New York Times Magazine, this is often challenging, and few couples of color were included in her anecdotal study.
Didn’t that Lilly Ledbetter bill the president signed fix all this?
It was wonderful to see progressives rallying around the cause of Lilly Ledbetter and talking about her story as one that’s representative of many women in America. It was also encouraging to see that the first bill President Obama signed into law was one named after Ledbetter. But the bill itself amounted to a message of, “Congratulations! Now you have a slightly better chance of winning when you sue your employer for years of discriminatory pay practices.” It merely gives women who have suffered years of making less than their male peers the option of legal recourse. The bill does nothing to prevent discriminatory pay practices from happening in the first place.
The problem here is that while you can sue for pay discrimination, there’s no law in place that actually addresses pay discrepancies in the workplace. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which mandates employers pay equally for equivalent work. This helps end pay discrimination for women jobs that are male-dominated or for men that are in jobs that are female-dominated.
The Paycheck Fairness Act is designed to strengthen the Equal Pay Act, signed into law in 1963. But over the years, the way courts have interpreted the law has tipped the burden on the employee and not the employer. By strengthening the law, employers will pay their employees equally; if not out of some altruistic desire for pay equity, than because they don’t want to face lawsuits and government intervention.
Kay Steiger is an associate editor at Campus Progress.
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Comments
In addition to the current economy, this is why many women – especially moms – are starting their own businesses. We were surprised to find in surveying our business-owning members that they don’t feel pay discrimination personally because they feel they are in charge and responsible for how much they make.
They support the act, but really aren’t holding their breath that it will make a difference, so they are making a difference for themselves on their terms.
— Moms In Business Network - Apr 28, 03:44 PM - #While I do agree with you that there are wage discrepancies which we should work to fix in women’s paychecks, I believe a different focus on the problem can be just as beneficial. It simply is a fact that women are typically in and out of the workforce much more often than men, in order to care for their families. They are not easily able to follow the traditional promotional cycle that is prevalent in our workplaces today. With the increasing role of women in the workforce, we cannot simple standby and watch this any longer. Women should not have to choose between successful careers (with equal pay to their male counterparts who stay in the traditional workplace cycle) and being good mothers. In the Family Policy Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis we believe one solution to this problem would be in encouraging policies which would increase flexibility for both men and women in the workplace as well as promoting flexible and portable benefit systems. In this way, women would not have to sacrifice so much to take care of their families and would be easier able to retain their positions and hence higher pay in our workplaces.
— Terry Neese - Apr 29, 02:54 PM - #While I do agree with you that there are wage discrepancies which we should work to fix in women’s paychecks, I believe a different focus on the problem can be just as beneficial. It simply is a fact that women are typically in and out of the workforce much more often than men, in order to care for their families. They are not easily able to follow the traditional promotional cycle that is prevalent in our workplaces today. With the increasing role of women in the workforce, we cannot simple standby and watch this any longer. Women should not have to choose between successful careers (with equal pay to their male counterparts who stay in the traditional workplace cycle) and being good mothers. In the Family Policy Center at the National Center for Policy Analysis we believe one solution to this problem would be in encouraging policies which would increase flexibility for both men and women in the workplace as well as promoting flexible and portable benefit systems. In this way, women would not have to sacrifice so much to take care of their families and would be easier able to retain their positions and hence higher pay in our workplaces.
— Terry Neese - Apr 29, 02:54 PM - #So why exactly shouldn’t we justify the wage gap when statistical analysis seems to point to women’s CHOICES?
I read this post looking for a meaningful and scientific argument. I didn’t find any!
— Tom - May 20, 05:16 PM - #