Recently my favorite blogger, Derek Thompson of The Atlantic, cited the commonly-heard statistic that women earn 77 cents for every dollar men earn and asked his readers to answer a simple question: “Is the U.S. Economy Sexist?”
Thompson helpfully pulled together some of the most insightful answers from his comment section, but after reading through all of them, I’m left feeling even more bewildered. Does the pay gap really exist, and if it does, should it matter?
The pay gap shows women do earn less than men… when you look at the entire workforce overall. The starting point for any discussion of the gender pay gap is a look at the aggregate difference in wages across all industries. The data seems to show that indeed women are paid less than men in similar occupations. Here’s Bryce Covert of ForbesWoman:
The wage gap also holds true no matter what industry or occupation women enter. In the Bureau of Labor Statistic’s list of nearly 600 occupations, women make more than men in only seven of them, and in those the difference can be as slight as a couple of dollars a week. Plus women make less than men in every single one of the BLS’s 13 industry categories. Women will be paid less no matter what career choices they make.
But as soon as you start talking about “career choices,” making an apples-to-apples comparison gets tougher and tougher.
- Men work more hours per day. According to the Bureau of Labor statistics, among full-time workers (those usually working 35 hours or more per week), men worked longer than women — 8.2 hours compared with 7.8 hours.
- Men suffer 92% of the nation’s fatal workplace injuries. Men work in more dangerous occupations, which increases compensation for some blue collar work performed by men.
- There is one huge caveat to that last figure, though. Government statisticians don’t include injuries to sex workers in their BLS data, as they’re not part of the formal economy. It’s possible that if you included them, the percentage for women would go up. (But then if you started including gunshot wounds and stabbings of the nation’s mostly-male professional criminals, that could tilt the numbers back in the other direction.)
- There are more male workaholics than female ones. One study counted that over 80% of the people who work 50-hour weeks are men.
- The BLS reports that 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers.
- Women don’t negotiate for pay as aggressively as men, for fear of being viewed negatively.
- Women are more likely to take parental leave due to childbirth and kiddo-raising.
- Female wage earners are more likely to choose favorable non-cash forms of compensation that men care less about. Women, particularly those with children, may be willing to sacrifice salary for better healthcare benefits or more flexibile work hours while men still care more about maximizing their salaries.
- When things get bad, such as during the most recent recession, men try to find work as quickly as possible even if it means taking a pay cut. While women are more likely to stay out of the workforce until the time is right.
One of Derek Thompson’s own commenters, EconDoc, summarized how hard it is to capture a diverse range of human behaviors, situations and choices with a single, all-encompassing pay gap figure.
I’ve never found a comparative pay study which is very satisfying, either academic or journalistic, although some are better than others. The questions are usually too broad, the relevant data isn’t available, the question is exceedingly hard, and too often reports are politically motivated.
What you see frequently depends on where you sit. It’s not just that there’s a pay/employment distribution it’s that there are distributions of distributions. Are we comparing men vs women? Urban men vs women? Urban, private sector men vs women? Urban, private sector, college-educated men vs women? And so on. We might also find that upper-income men earn more than upper-income women but lower-income women earn more than lower income men. It’s a very tough question as to whom we should even be looking at and depends on what specific policy we’re examining. You can ask “Is the economy sexist” but everyone is going to be answering their own personal permutation of that question.
So is the 77 cents-on-the-dollar figure a result of discrimination, life choices or differing work patterns? Probably some of it is a lagging indicator of historical discrimination (but the GAO report was vague on exactly how much that accounted for. I’m not attacking feminism here — feminism is responsible for the progress of women in the workforce, and that’s been an unequivocally good thing.
I’m not really interested in arguing over historical trends. My point is that all the arguing over the gender pay gap misses one of the biggest current trends among the most dynamic workers in our economy: Studies have found that young, childless women in large cities (versus rural areas and smaller cities) have been earning more than similarly-aged single men since at least 2000.
The analysis was prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who first reported his findings in Gotham Gazette, published online by the Citizens Union Foundation. It shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women now hold 51.4 percent of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1 percent in 1980. Another study in 2010 also found similar data regarding subsets of young, single, educated women in major cities earning more than their male counterparts:
In 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group. In two cities, Atlanta and Memphis, those women are making about 20% more. This squares with earlier research from Queens College, New York, that had suggested that this was happening in major metropolises. But the new study suggests that the gap is bigger than previously thought, with young women in New York City, Los Angeles and San Diego making 17%, 12% and 15% more than their male peers, respectively. And it also holds true even in reasonably small areas like the Raleigh-Durham region and Charlotte in North Carolina (both 14% more), and Jacksonville, Fla. (6%).
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The figures come from James Chung of Reach Advisors, who has spent more than a year analyzing data from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. He attributes the earnings reversal overwhelmingly to one factor: education. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. This is almost the exact opposite of the graduation ratio that existed when the baby boomers entered college. Studies have consistently shown that a college degree pays off in much higher wages over a lifetime, and even in many cases for entry-level positions. “These women haven’t just caught up with the guys,” says Chung. “In many cities, they’re clocking them.”
Women now make up 59 percent of college admissions, but according to Jennifer Delahunty, the dean of admissions and financial aid at Kenyon College, gender balance “is the elephant in the room.”
The problem hasn’t gone away. A typical female applicant, she said, manages the process herself—lines up the interviews, sets up a campus visit, requests a visit with faculty members. But the college has seen more than one male applicant “sit back on the couch, sometimes with their eyes closed, while their mom tells them where to go and what to do. Sometimes we say, ‘What a nice essay his mom wrote,’” she said, in that funny-but-not vein.
To avoid crossing the dreaded 60 percent threshold, admissions officers have created a language to explain away the boys’ deficits: “Brain hasn’t kicked in yet.” “Slow to cook.” “Hasn’t quite peaked.” “Holistic picture.” At times Delahunty has become so worried about “overeducated females” and “undereducated males” that she jokes she is getting conspiratorial. She once called her sister, a pediatrician, to vet her latest theory: “Maybe these boys are genetically like canaries in a coal mine, absorbing so many toxins and bad things in the environment that their DNA is shifting. Maybe they’re like those frogs—they’re more vulnerable or something, so they’ve gotten deformed.”
Hanna Rosin’s controversial article for The Atlantic, “The End of Men,” struck a nerve in 2010. After all, if men are losing out to women, why are our corporate boardrooms and government institutions still dominated by men? Rosin’s answer is that the period of male dominance in management and leadership may be coming to an end. We’re on the cusp of changes that will topple the old Man Men paradigm.
Rosin’s argument centered around the fact that male-centric jobs (manufacturing, construction) are seriously threatening the role men have long held in the home and in communities, but she also combines an analysis of our economic recession with a sort of evolutionary argument about how males evolution hasn’t kept up with society at large.
Dr. Roy Baumeister, a psychology professor from Florida State University and author of “Is There Anything Good About Men?” has explored how male behaviors affect socities. In a speech to the American Psychological Assocation in 2007 he argued that the dominance of a few powerful men at the top of the food chain says nothing about the overall socio-economic wellness of men in our culture.
When I say I am researching how culture exploits men, the first reaction is usually “How can you say culture exploits men, when men are in charge of everything?” This is a fair objection and needs to be taken seriously. It invokes the feminist critique of society. This critique started when some women systematically looked up at the top of society and saw men everywhere: most world rulers, presidents, prime ministers, most members of Congress and parliaments, most CEOs of major corporations, and so forth — these are mostly men.
Seeing all this, the feminists thought, wow, men dominate everything, so society is set up to favor men. It must be great to be a man.
The mistake in that way of thinking is to look only at the top. If one were to look downward to the bottom of society instead, one finds mostly men there too. Who’s in prison, all over the world, as criminals or political prisoners? The population on Death Row has never approached 51% female. Who’s homeless? Again, mostly men. Whom does society use for bad or dangerous jobs? US Department of Labor statistics report that 93% of the people killed on the job are men. Likewise, who gets killed in battle? Even in today’s American army, which has made much of integrating the sexes and putting women into combat, the risks aren’t equal. This year we passed the milestone of 3,000 deaths in Iraq, and of those, 2,938 were men, 62 were women.
One can imagine an ancient battle in which the enemy was driven off and the city saved, and the returning soldiers are showered with gold coins. An early feminist might protest that hey, all those men are getting gold coins,half of those coins should go to women. In principle, I agree. But remember, while the men you see are getting gold coins, there are other men you don’t see, who are still bleeding to death on the battlefield from spear wounds.
That’s an important first clue to how culture uses men. Culture has plenty of tradeoffs, in which it needs people to do dangerous or risky things, and so it offers big rewards to motivate people to take those risks. Most cultures have tended to use men for these high-risk, high-payoff slots much more than women. I shall propose there are important pragmatic reasons for this. The result is that some men reap big rewards while others have their lives ruined or even cut short. Most cultures shield their women from the risk and therefore also don’t give them the big rewards. I’m not saying this is what cultures ought to do, morally, but cultures aren’t moral beings. They do what they do for pragmatic reasons driven by competition against other systems and other groups.
So if the 77-cents-on-the-dollar really means something and men are winning the gender war, who’s losing it? Over the past 50 years, a starggering 17.5 percent of working-age men have simply stopped working and dropped out of the labor force. It’s hard to imagine that such a large group of economically-broken-down men is good for anyone.
As Baumeister puts it:
A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers.
Culture is not about men against women. By and large, cultural progress emerged from groups of men working with and against other men. While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish. The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality. Men created the big social structures that comprise society, and men still are mainly responsible for this, even though we now see that women can perform perfectly well in these large systems.
What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally.
Of all the wars we fight (on Afghanistan, Drugs, Iraq, Cheetos), the gender war is the most pointless because it asks all the wrong questions. Women aren’t the enemy of men — other men are the enemy of men.
