I'm sorry if this has it's own thread but it's been getting a lot of press so to speak in recent threads and I thought it could use it's own.

All the statistics seem to show women being paid less in the workplace for the same jobs. I'll cite some sources just to start this off in the right direction:

http://web2010.brevardcc.edu/puckettc/genderfctsht.htm
http://216.239.33.104/search?q=cache:k7H33...df/opbils30.pdf

I could only find one page that tries to debunk that this phenomenon exists, but I thought I'd throw it in for good measure. Unfortunately, you have to have a password to view it online, so I cut/pasted it. If you want to see if you can register for free to see it online, here's the link:

www.ciaonet.org/pbei/aei/oti01/fud01.html

Diana Furchtgott-Roth

On The Issues

March 2000

American Enterprise Institute



--------------------------------------------------------------------------------


The allegedly significant gap between what equally qualified men and women earn for their labor is a fiction. Its advocates continue to ignore three important factors that affect the difference between what the average male worker and the average female worker are paid.

In a speech on January 24, President Clinton declared that women "get paid only 75 percent for the same kind of work" that men do and added, "It's as if [women] were only picking up three paychecks, instead of four, in four pay periods.

"The average woman has to work, therefore, an extra 17 weeks a year to earn what a similarly qualified man in the same kind of job makes," the president said.

To solve this alleged problem, the president asked Congress to allocate $27 million to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Department of Labor and to pass Sen. Thomas A. Daschle's Paycheck Fairness Act, which would set wage guidelines for different occupations.

Unfortunately, the president is ill-served on this question by staffers who let him believe that equally qualified women make only 75 cents on a man's dollar. This is not true. Study after study shows that women who are in the same jobs as men, who have the same qualifications, and who don't cut back on their time in the work force because of child-rearing, earn practically the same amount as men-about 95 cents on the dollar. Moreover, any woman who feels that she is discriminated against has the legal right to sue.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a resident fellow at AEI. A version of this article appeared in the Washington Post on January 31, 2000.


My questions for debate is:

1. Does this problem really exist?
2. Why is it happening?
3. What can we do to fix it?



That being asked, let me just say I don't have any personal experience of this happening. In my company and others I've worked for in the past, women have made equal pay for the same jobs. Maybe it's regional, I don't know. I have only worked in two cities. But, according to the numbers, it does happen.


Edited to remove entire article. I am sorry if it is something we can't view without registration, but it is still someone else's work. Our rules state that we can not post copywritten works in their entirety. If I have left the wrong paragraphs, please feel free to quote the correct, relevant ones. - Jaime

My bad, I added one more section of it, but is still only maybe a third of the entire page. The only way I was able to get this to view without registering is a trick I learned a while back using Google. Nearly every page is cached and Google has a way of seeing the cached page if it that site is no longer hosting that page by clicking on the "cached" link below each search. I clicked the cached link and just clicked cancel on the password box. So, if anyone wants to read it in it's entirety and does not want to register, try that.

Not to any meaningful degree. From 1998: "Economist June O'Neill, formerly head of the Congressional Budget Office, calls the "gender pay gap" a myth. Compare apples to apples, O'Neill says, and women and men with the same level and type of experience, quality of education, and consistent years on the job make virtually the same money." Larry Elder

More info on this from Gender Pay Gap

Its not.

Fixing non-existent problems is just asking to get highsided by the Law of Unintended Consequences.


Just as an FYI, the "fact sheet" that makes up the first link is seriously out of date. Not only is it referring to the Clinton-Dole election, but it makes this astounding claim: However, NO women has ever gained a party leadership position in Congress. I guess Nancy Pelosi is just shammin... Another problem with the fact sheet is that it lumps some extremely varied jobs under one category, and those are the categories that have the greatest differential. "Managers" is the best example of this, as managers get paid wildly different amounts of money depending on the industry they are in, and the makeup of who works in what industry is also wildly varied. Also, those categories with the greatest differentials are also the categories where commissions are paid....

For an in-depth look at the case that the "Gender Pay Inequity" is a myth, take a gander (or would that be "goose") at this:

Congressional Testimony on Gender Pay Gap - PDF File

Well, I was hoping to get a lot more discussion out of this thread as this topic is used in nearly every argument of female rights. If it's such a problem, why no discussion? Or is it too boring? Or has it been hashed out too many times?

Although I like Larry Elder, I just cannot accept him as a "source".

One of the things I wonder about is that in the studies that have been done, which businesses are studied and where are they? In the few companies I have worked for, the starting salary of any position is posted(although it gets a little more complicated when you get into jobs that require a certain level of experience). If the woman were to get less than the salary posted, she could easily win that case in court.

I think our company does very well in hiring/paying women. We are a fortune 500 company, btw. The number of females outnumber males nearly 3 to 1 overall, however it is overwhelmingly male in the IT departments. Although, it's not because we discriminate, it's just that in the 3 years I've worked here, two females have applied, neither showed up for the interviews. Our entire HR department is female also. Our entire accounting department is female. At least in the Reno offices anyway. I don't know the numbers for the other dozen or so cities.

On one of the links I posted at the first of the thread lumped "supervisors" together. I can tell you one thing, a supervisor at Office Max, is completely different than a supervisor in a call center. Management is even a bigger gap, and the wages reflect that.

I'd love to see some raw data, instead of someone else's interpretation of it, especially when they take into account experience, overtime, family situation, etc...

I'm not saying I don't believe the studies, heck maybe I'd think it's even worse than before. I don't know why I have such a fascination with this subject, maybe it's because my mother raised me, and she has the best work ethic of anyone I know.

Hi

Since I'm one of the ones always talking about it (AA threads), I'll add my input.

First, part of the problem is that there really aren't many studies on pay difference that take all of the factors into account. The ones we do have are outdated.

Also this isn't just an American issue. Australia, New Zealand, and the UK all have studied this (seems more extensively than we have), as evidenced by my searches for studies (almost all of the first twenty links after a yahoo search in the area here from one of these three countries).

Pay Equity is an issue that's popped up in my searches (something I'm relatively unfamiliar with since it has no presence in designing AA plans). Pay Equity is basically about giving equal pay to women based upon the "worth" of the job (not the same job). Historically, the jobs that are typically held by women receive much less pay than those that are held by men...those oushing for "Pay Equity" believe that much of the pay difference can be attributed to unconscious discrimination based upon these historical differences. So the "worth" of the job, they say, should be what's important, since men and women still are fairly segregated in the workplace in terms of "fields". How one would even begin to set up a system to determine the "worth" of a job is beyond me...Just wanted to give a little background so Pay Equity isn't confused with actual wage difference within same jobs.

My arguments in previous posts relates to my experience as an AA consultant. It is our job to analyze all of a the company's employee data and that's where you can really see the discrepancies within the same (similar) job, education, etc. It would be nice if there were actual "studies" to back this up though since I can't exactly prove my experience here

Here are the relevant links I found. Believe me, there appears to be little in the area of actual research. I don't know about others, but I've based my "unequal pay" beliefs on my own experience...seems there is little else to base it on at this point...

Profile of the Gender Wage Gap by Selected Occupations - pretty self-explanatory. this was particularly telling:



Q & A - Compiance Manual Section on Compensation Discrimination - from U.S. EEO Commission - explains the "Equal Pay Act" and laws regarding pay and briefly addresses the notion that "after accounting for measurable factors that affect employee compensation, there is still a significant pay gap that could be due to discrimination."

NCWO: Facts on Women: Pay Equity - discusses both general pay differences (averages) and pay differences within same jobs/experience/education

Using Economics to Explain Gender Pay Gaps - chapter from Principles of Macroeconomics textbook...thought it was interesting if nothing else


And to address a couple other points...

Most of the information I've seen (the above information as well as AA information) looks not at titles (i.e. "managers") but at job duties to determine the "similarity" of jobs. In AA, we do use "titles" however this is only WITHIN companies (not across different companies) since we analyze data for individual companies. Does that make sense?


Starting salaries are across the board, yes. However a company can pay MORE than the minimum starting salary the pay inequities (in my experience) are typically once you are in the company (not initial starting salary)..also as you said, it changes as you get into varying experience levels and also as you have been at a company for longer periods of time.

Finally, to answer the questions:

1. Does it exist? Yes, but there isn't much information out there at this point. As I said, my personal beliefs on the subject are based upon my own experiences (what I've seen in my work as an AA consultant)

2. Why is it happening? This is, to me, the tricky part. There are probably a multitude of reasons, but I would venture a guess that it's mostly the remnants of historical pay inequities ("women's jobs" weren't "important in years past) - the gap is narrowing but it's not closed

3. What can we do to fix it? If we are really interested in fixing it, I think it's essential to use the company data collected (as required by Affirmative Action) to examine what methods will work and what is "practical". There is no easy answer, IMO. It will take a lot of effort, time, and money to fix the problem (it's not exactly fair to retract men's salaries based upon difference, so women would have to receive an increase in pay to achieve 'equality' in this instance).

I certainly don't have all the answers, but it does seem clear that pay difference ARE there and not just as an average throughout ALL jobs. I don't really have a simple solution - and that's probably why we're still seeing pay difference...there IS no easy solution!

I think that the juxtaposition between teachers' salaries on the Gender Gap Chart would actually indicate that the disparity MUST be from factors other than sex discrimination. I don't know a more sex-blind system than teaching. Everyone is paid completely according to his/her level of experience and education. Men make 827 and women 673.
Also noteworthy, the pay gap for male nurses (a very sex guided system) is much less than the pay gap for teachers -a difference of 108 as compared to 154 for teaching. Nursing, a predominantly female field, is extremely well paying as a profession. I remember graduating from college in '92, and the only people I knew that found a good job during that recession were the nurses. They started out (a decade ago) making as much as beginning engineers. I don't know the salary levels today, but I know they're still pretty high.

The important thing to look for when juxtaposing those two professions is the underlying reason behind the income disparity. Obviously, it can't be sexual discrimination because teaching is immune by design. IOW...If you work for two years and have a masters, you get paid as a two year teacher with a masters. Period. However, teaching isn't the easiest field to balance a family with (although there are other fields where it is significantly more difficult). Nursing offers considerable job and hour flexibility, and many hospitals offer on-site daycare services to their employees. Perhaps those factors would contribute to the smaller pay gap in nursing, versus the higher teaching gap.

Mrs. P,

Continuing with your theory that it CANNOT be sex discrimination, here's my best guess (for teaching). More men teach in higher income area schools (as compared to lower income area schools) and high schools (from my understanding high school teachers, on average, make more then elementary school teachers...but I could be totally wrong on that). Maybe it's just my experience (I've personally attended schools of both low and higher income areas) but there were a LOT more men in the higher income schools than lower. Same with high school (my elementary schools, all 7 of the ones I attended, had a total of 9 male teachers). My high school; had, I'd guess, about a 3-1 ratio of female to male teachers. Just a random theory based on nothing more than my own personal experience, but that could be an explanation. I'd be interested to see the numbers broken down more to see what the possible reasons could be. Maybe private/charter schools factor into this as well. My sister's charter schools (performing arts middle and high schools, 3 of them) had more male teachers than female in academic areas and about the same in the 'arts' (more females for dance/drama, more males for visual art/music)

For nursing, I just don't know what the answer could be!

You might be right, kmsouthern. I taught in a very low income area (about 7 years ago), and there were certainly a very high ratio of female teachers there. That provided a very dismal environment, so many of the teachers quit (I actually replaced one who had a nervous breakdown in the classroom). However, we were all paid by the state. Teachers are paid exactly the same salary in public schools for indigent areas as they are in good areas. Of course, if they take time off because the job is so egregious they can't take it anymore, that would certainly be a contributing factor because it would lower the amount of time and experience level on the job.

I think the pay scales for elementary versus secondary teachers are different. I don't know if it would be equitable to change that, though. A highschool physics teacher really should receive more pay than a kindergarten teacher. And you might be right about the private schools as well. The only rub there is that private schools almost always pay their teachers considerably less than public, so it would only hold true if more female teachers than males were employed in those schools.

Honestly, I believe it all comes down to a family 'juggling act'. Most women are either the primary or only caretakers of the children. Increasing divorces will only increase this income disparity. Primary or sole caretaking requires a level of commitment which isn't conducive to a successful career.

When this issue first started getting press, I noticed that those claiming inequity damaged their credibility by not having enough data. They compared women's jobs to men's in generalities. The jobs themselves were grouped such that it made no sense. I forget the details, but something like an office worker proficient in operation of all the typical office machines would be equal to any equipment or machine operator. Not enough variables were considered.
Lately, the studies and the data are better, and the researchers are not comparing apples to oranges as much as before.
The place where I just retired from has plenty of women engineers, project managers, and probably a good representative amount of technicians, all usually male dominated positions. Pay problems came up when new employees found out that they were making much less than longer term employees who were not performing as well as the new ones. Some managers got raked over the coals by HR on that issue.
A few exceptions occurred where new hires somehow negotiated higher pay than existing longer term valued employees, then proved to be lazy or ineffective.
There was, is actually, one manager who is obviously sexist and somewhat racist. He did the 180 switch when HR got on his case, and over compensated for his past sins, causing as much grief by doing that as when he under compensated.
I think the issue is more due to management ineptitude than anything else.

At a very fundamental level, I would say that generally men are more likely to put their career ahead of other considerations, while women will more often balance it against children, marriage, and other areas of their lives.

This has changed somewhat over time, and it is a generalisation anyway. But it might go some of the way to explain why men still usually get paid more for the same work.

And I think that kmsouthern is onto something with the idea that society values "men's work" and "women's work" differently.

Here in the UK, doctors and lawyers used to be predominantly male, and were traditionally very well rewarded compared to other professionals. Now, however, more than half of those entering medicine and the law or women, and coincidentally, the relative reward for doctors and lawyers has fallen back from the leading position they used to have. They are still well paid, but other professions have caught up. To some extent, this is driven by the decreasing deference towards experts that must be a healthy thing for society as a whole. However, unconscious sexism may also play a part.

Teaching is even more stark - it used to be more evenly gender-balanced, if not male dominated (in the Edwardian era) and was regarded as a profession on a par with doctors an lawyers. Nowadays, it is female dominated, and is less valued in wider society - it certainly isn't in the same mental bracket as doctors any longer.

I wonder if fire services, currently male-dominated and highly valued by society (if not highly paid), will shift in public perception as more and more women enter the job. That could be an interesting test of whether society as a whole is still "institutionally sexist" against working women.

Wow! That's SO different from what we have in Arizona. For instance, my mother works in a district (she works in special ed as an aide and does her own after-school program as well but is going to school to get her B.S.) where NO ONE wants to teach - they have early retirement plans, great pay, etc. to try to get teachers in the door. That's the only "poor" school district I know of though with better pay than "rich" districts. Maybe Bill55AZ will have some info on that as well.



That certainly is a HUGE part of it in my experience. When we did AA plans, the management people were often dumbfounded when they saw the "results" of the company data in terms of pay differences (they need to compile data for annual AA plans and that's usually the only time it ever gets a second glance). Especially in companies with no EO officer where there was just a random HR person with a workload so huge that inefficiency was a certainty.

Well, Teacher pay in the Phoenix area is pathetic for entry level. Eventually it gets better to the point that with 15 to 20 years service the pay is actually good.
The nearby rich communities, like Scottsdale, are having to cut positions (new hires, typically) while other districts can't find enough new hires.
My wife teaches at a K-8 school, and wouldn't make any more going to the High School, but would have a lower work load and more prep time. She is considering it for her last years on the job.
K-8 is predominantly female staff, altho they try to have at least one male as either principal or asst. principal. The 2 top grades generate a lot of discipline problems, so having a man around for the rowdier boys is useful.
Outside of schools, I think that part of the problem in those places that women tend to be in the majority of the staff is that many of them will quit when they get pregnant. Management knows this and are a bit gunshy about investing training, etc. in the younger females.
Back in the previous century, around 1968, my wife was told that flat out at an Insurance ageny where she went looking for temporary or part time work. She got a job as a teacher's aide based on her 2 years of college as an Education Major, and has been in Education ever since. Now with all her degrees and experience, she could be in Administration if she wanted the headaches that go with it.
She has been making more than me for a long time now.

hmmmm, where to start.....

Why not? Elder is quoting the former head of the Congressional Budget Office. Why isn't she acceptable as a "source"?

Teacher pay differentials: There are three primary reasons for the differential between men and women. First, as noted, high school teachers get paid more, and there's a lot more men teaching in high school than in K-8. Are they there because of the higher pay? I don't think so, I think they're there because it is more intellectually challenging and less emotionally demanding, i.e., more mentoring and less nurturing. The second reason has to do with the age demographics. Teaching is becoming more and more female dominated as fewer men enter the profession. You would find the same result if you made a gender based pay analysis of NASA personnel. Men would be making a lot more than women doing the same job. That's going to change real soon though, as NASA is facing a huge oncoming retirement wave where all those old guys are going to pack it in and go RV'ing. The average age and experience of male teachers continues to climb, as more men retire than enter the profession, and that keeps the pay differential. The third reason is coaching. More men coach, and they get additional pay for doing so.

Complaining about the "women's work / men's work" distinction is hooey, from an economic sense. When the jobs that constitute "women's work" are responsible for 50% of serious workplace injuries and deaths, then mayhap the pay scale will reflect that. As it currently stands, 95% of workplace deaths are men. Employees recognize that they're a lot more likely to get seriously hurt or killed working construction than working a day care, and as a result they demand more money. Another problem with the distinction is that "women's work" has traditionally demanded far less in the way of specialized skills, and if anything, that's almost universally even more the case today. The biggest exception is nursing, where the skill level demanded has increased quite a bit, and voila, so has the pay.

Finally, there's one really damning piece of evidence concerning the gender pay gap. The marketplace. If employers could get the same labor output for only 73% of the cost, the only folks you'd see in the unemployment lines would be men. That's not the reality.

Many individuals may be sexist, but the labor market as a whole doesn't give a rat's patootie. It simply wants the best labor at the lowest price, and when women provide that, they get the jobs, and when men provide it, they get the jobs.

Grace and peace, BD