(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

This is a very common argument. In this view, the pay gap is only still around because women only recently entered the workforce; as such, women haven’t had as much time to work their way up the employment ladder to the well-paid positions. There’s no need to “do” anything about the pay gap; if we just wait, it’ll go away by itself.

What I always want to know is, exactly how long must we wait until we can admit that this argument no longer makes sense? The Equal Pay Act of 1963 was forty years ago, for goodness sake! A woman who had been in the workforce five years when the Equal Pay Act was passed might well be retired by now, and the pay gap still hasn’t gone away.

Work experience doesn’t account for the pay gap.

The fact is, workplace experience makes a very large difference - but it doesn’t make all the difference. The economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn (Journal of Labor Economics, January 1997) calculated the impact of a number of factors on the wage gap. The largest factor (other than “unexplained”) was labor force experience; the average female worker has 12.79 years of full-time experience, while the average male worker has 17.41. This difference accounted for between 26% and 30% of the total wage gap - meaning that even though work experience is the biggest factor in the pay gap, it still leaves most of the pay gap unaccounted for.

Another approach was taken by the economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant (Journal of Labor Economics, 1993). They examined one profession (lawyering) in great detail, following the careers of female and male graduates of the University of Michigan Law School. Fifteen years after graduation, the women in their sample were earning 61% of what men earned. A lot of that difference is because many women had taken time off from work, or worked fewer hours, in order to raise children. But even when work experience and hours were accounted for, women still earned only 82% of what men earned. Again, even after you account for experience, there’s still a large pay gap between men and women.

Why assume that workplace experience isn’t affected by sexism and discrimination?

When anti-feminists say that workplace experience shows that discrimination doesn’t exist, they’re sneaking an unjustified assumption into the argument. Because part of the pay gap can be accounted for by experience, that part of the wage gap doesn’t, they say, have anything to do with discrimination. But is it logical to believe that discrimination wouldn’t have any effect on work experience?

As the economist Francine Blau and her colleagues point out, these arguments “neglect the feedback effects of labor market discrimination on the behavior and choices of women themselves. For example, women have traditionally received lower returns to labor market experience than men. The lesser amount of work experience which they have accumulated may be due in part to their response to these lower returns.” (On page 192 of Blau, Francine, Marianne Ferber, and Anne Winkler’s1998 book. The Economics of Men, Women and Work, third edition.)

In other words, there’s a vicious cycle at work here. If women are discriminated against at work, so they get less pay for what they do, that means women will be less motivated than men to work, and will therefore wind up with less work experience. So while the pay gap is partly caused by women’s lesser work experience, at the same time the pay gap partly causes women’s lesser work experience.

(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

Myth: The pay gap only exists because women take time off from work to raise kids.

This is a common belief, especially among anti-feminists. Typical is Patricia Hausman’s article on The National Review’s website, which claimed that “it is not being a woman, but being a mother, that causes noteworthy differences in earnings.” In Ms. Hausman’s view, sexism doesn’t harm women; instead, “females make trade-offs between high wages and other rewards in life.”

Motherhood doesn’t account for all of the pay gap.

Hausman is simply wrong to say that motherhood accounts for all “noteworthy differences in earnings.” Motherhood makes a difference, of course; many mothers spend a few years (and sometimes longer) out of the workforce. When a mother returns to the workforce, she of course has less work experience than her male co-workers, and understandably gets paid less.

But how much difference does that make, exactly? The economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn calculated the impact of a number of factors on the wage gap (Journal of Labor Economics volume 15, pages 1-42.). The largest factor (other than “unexplained”) was labor force experience; the average female worker has 12.79 years of full-time experience, while the average male worker has 17.41. This difference accounted for between 26% and 30% of the total wage gap.

Another approach was taken by the economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant (Journal of Labor Economics, volume 11, pages 417-441). They examined one profession (lawyering) in great detail, following the careers of female and male graduates of the University of Michigan Law School. Fifteen years after graduation, the women in their sample were earning 61% of what men earned. A lot of that difference is because many of the mothers had taken time off from work, or worked fewer hours, in order to raise children. But even when the mothers were excluded from the sample, women were still paid only about 80% of what men were paid.

Why assume the “motherhood penalty” has nothing to do with sexism?

It’s true that motherhood makes a difference in wages. But why assume that difference has nothing to do with sexism?

There’s no reason to narrow the discussion to the narrow question of employer discrimination, overlooking ways that the larger society is sexist. Many feminists believe that in a non-sexist society, fathers and mothers would share equally in childcare; and therefore, any “parenting wage penalty” would be split equally among men and women. The fact that women are virtually the only ones hit by the parenting wage penalty doesn’t prove that sexism no longer exists; on the contrary, it shows that sexism still matters, and has a big negative impact on women’s wages. (It also has a negative impact on men’s contact with their families.)

The American job market was designed for men - in particular, it was developed in a society in which workers were men who had a wife at home to take care of the kids. Society has changed, but our jobs haven’t, and that works to the disadvantage of all working mothers (and to mothers who would like to work, but can’t find a job that will give them the flexibility they need to combine work and motherhood). Isn’t it sexist to expect mothers to fit into a work system that was designed for Father Knows Best?

Critics of the wage gap, like Ms. Hausman, claim that mothers freely choose to sacrifice work for family, but how free a choice is that? Mothers don’t have the option of simply ignoring their children’s needs (not only would that be inhumane, it’s also illegal). Even if a father is present, he may refuse to do half of the childcare - or his boss may not be willing to give him the time off. Nor is it practical to just say that “women shouldn’t have children if they want to work” - most families can’t afford to have mothers not work, and our society can’t survive if no one is producing the next generation.

Finally, to whatever extent some women freely choose to stay out of the labor market, the choice isn’t made in a void. The fact that women - even non-mothers - get rewarded less for wage-work than men means that women give less up if they choose to trade off paid work for motherhood. Women’s lower pay means women have less reason to stay in the paid work market; it also means that when a married couple decides that the lower-paid spouse should give up work for children, the spouse who happens to be lower paid will almost always be the wife. Economists call this a “feedback effect”; it’s likely that women earn less because they work less, but it’s also likely that women work less because of lower earnings.

To sum up, motherhood can account for a significant part of the wage gap. But motherhood doesn’t account for all of the wage gap. Nor is it safe to assume that the “motherhood penalty” has nothing to do with discrimination or sexism.

Edward Said has died of cancer. Here’s a short Guardian obit, and a longer New York Times obit.

(Via Jimmy Ho)

I don’t really have anything to say, but I recommend the Head Heeb’s post. And Moorishgirl has compiled many interesting Said-related links.

(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

This is a myth which is frequently repeated by anti-feminists on the internet. Although exact details vary, the argument is generally that the pay gap is a statistical illusion that has nothing to do with discrimination against women. Women are paid less because they work so many fewer hours; if US government statistics took account of hours worked, the wage gap would disappear. So the critics say.

There are two big flaws in this argument. First of all, the numbers don’t add up - taking account of hours worked does make the pay gap a little smaller, but not that much smaller. Second, the argument implicitly assumes that how many hours we get to work isn’t affected by discrimination; but there’s no reason to believe this is true.

How big a difference does hours worked make?

It is true that men work more hours than women, on average (at paid jobs, anyhow - but keep in mind women work many more unpaid hours at home). But the difference isn’t that large, among men and women who work full-time.

According to the US government’s Monthly Labor Review (April 1997, pages 3-14), the average full-time year-round woman worked 40.8 hours a week in 1995. Men, according to the same source, worked 44.5 hours - a significant difference, but not a huge difference (and not nearly as large a difference as anti-feminists sometimes claim). How much does that affect the wage gap?

Fortunately, we don’t have to do the math ourselves - the US Department of Labor has done it for us. According to a DOL web page in 2001 - a web page that, unfortunately, has since been taken down by the Bush administration - comparing only hourly wages, women were paid 83.2% of what men were paid in 2000. 83.2% is a noticible difference from the 76% figure for weekly full-time wages - but it still leaves the majority of the pay gap unaccounted for.

Is hours worked really a discrimination-free zone?

When anti-feminists say that it’s better to compare hourly wages, they’re sneaking an unjustified assumption into the argument. Because part of the pay gap can be accounted for by different hours worked, that part of the wage gap doesn’t, they say, have anything to do with discrimination. But is it really true that how many hours people work can’t be affected by discrimination?

Most people, after all, don’t have that much choice in how much they work. Once you’ve got a full-time job, whether you work 41 or 45 hours a week is as much up to your employer as it is up to you - and it’s quite possible for the hours assigned to be affected by discrimination.

In the eighties, for instance, I worked for a temp agency in NYC which discriminated against its black temps by giving white temps more and better assignments. (I found out when the Times printed a expose of the practice, after which I stopped accepting jobs from that agency). Presumably I earned more than black and latina counterparts that year in part because I worked more hours; but my working more hours was itself a result of discrimination.

The assumption that hours worked can’t have anything to do with discrimination is unrealistic. If discrimination exists in the job market, it potentially has effects on all aspects of the job market - including how many hours a week people work.

Which does not leave much time for web-surfing.

Nonetheless, here are a few things I’ve read that you might want to read too.

• Regarding the same sex marriage (SSM) debate, John Snead points out this heart-wrentching article, which goes to the heart of the SSM debate: Should lesbian and gay couples have an equal right to form legally recognized families?
  I am a widow. The law doesn’t say so. My tax form doesn’t say so; neither do any of the countless forms that I fill out that include marital status say so. But every time I check off the box that says single I want to scream and white it out and write, “widow”. But I am a Lesbian who has lost her female partner so in most places I am not accorded the status of “widow”. When it came time to settle my partner’s estate, I was a class D beneficiary — no relationship what so-ever-a roommate, a friend, the lady next door.

  It does not seem to matter that we lived in a monogamous loving relationship for 31 years or that we co-parented 3 wonderful children. It does not seem to matter that those children have severe developmental disabilities… after all I am not a legal widow anymore than I was a legal wife or a legal co-parent.

• Camassia has written a good response to my earlier thoughts on gender roles.
  Part of what Eve is arguing for, I think, is that we’re going to have gendered ideals anyway, so we should make them benevolent ones. Ampersand seems to be rebelling against the whole idea, seeing that a ideal always means a hierarchy based on how well you achieve that ideal. I sympathize with Ampersand but I incline towards Eve’s fatalism. In my school days, in Northern California in the ’70s and ’80s, the children were really a lot more intolerant than the adults, so I don’t think they learned it from them. Short of divine intervention, I don’t see anything stopping human social climbing. (Probably one reason I keep seeking divine intervetion!) But on the other hand, the society we live in today probably would have seemed impossibly egalitarian in the feudal past, so maybe I’m too pessimistic.
• Open Source Politics has a good post on the ridiculous “partial birth abortion ban.”
  If this ban becomes law, it will remove medical judgment completely. The House of Representatives has decided, against the advice of the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, that D&X is never medically necessary.

  Of course it isn’t medically necessary — almost always, if you can do a D&X, you can do a D&E. The problem is that D&X sometimes is medically preferable, when it poses less danger to the patient than the alternative procedure does.

  I would point out, however, that it’s not at all clear that the ban limits itself to banning D&X abortions, although the pro-life leadership is selling the ban that way.

• Remember Afghanistan? We went to war to free Afghanistan. Check out this short op-ed in the Times.
  rom some of the most desperate corners of Afghanistan, about 45 brave women have embarked on a cause that hardly seems on Washington’s powerful radar. President Bush’s speech to the United Nations yesterday barely mentioned Afghanistan’s struggle to build what he calls a “decent and just society.” Yet recently, these Afghan women endured great risk in that very cause. They traveled to Kandahar, now considered a dangerous city, deep in Taliban territory. There, they crafted an extraordinary document they have called the Afghan Women’s Bill of Rights.

  The document sets somewhat different priorities than the American Bill of Rights adopted more than 200 years ago. For Afghan women, the first amendment would guarantee an education. Then came health care, personal security and support of widows. Freedom of speech was number five, followed by freedom to vote, with a guarantee of constitutional rights to “widows, disabled women and orphans” coming much later.

• DIF Wallpaper Stripper is, in my opinion, the single best invention ever. Just thought I’d mention.

On the Oberlin alumni mailing list, I’ve often debated my old friend Bob Hayes, who is as far right as I’m far left. This morning Bob accidentally emailed something to the Oberlin list that was meant for a role-playing game list he also participates in. I thought y’all might enjoy the exchange that followed… even though I think Bob got the better of me.

My email to the list, quoting Bob’s mis-sent email:

Then Bob’s response to the list:

Geeky, us, yes.

(By the way, when I emailed Bob asking permission to post this on my blog, he responsed “Knock yourself out, orc-hugger.”)

Ten days ago, I asked y’all for help with a sketch of a drawing I’m doing for a magazine. Believe it or not, it’s still in the sketch phase.

Still, it’s much closer to being done now, I think. I took a bunch of suggestions, so thanks to everyone for their help.

(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

First of all, let’s dispel one common misunderstanding: the pay gap between women and men is not primarily caused by unequal pay for identical jobs. This does occasionally happen, but equal pay laws have by and large eliminated this form of obvious wage discrimination.

So what does cause the pay gap? There’s no simple answer to that question, because all sorts of factors go into creating the pay gap - and, making things more confusing, the different factors inter-relate. Let’s look at what some of those factors are.

Occupational Segregation

First, occupational segregation, in which women and men, due to social structures and also hiring discrimination, are “steered” into certain jobs. This causes some jobs (like child care worker) to be female-dominated, while other jobs (like truck driver) are male-dominated.

For example: In Philadelphia, social scientists sent fictional, equally-qualified resumes to different restaurants. The only important difference between the resumes they sent out was if the name at the top was a woman’s or a man’s. They found that snootier, higher-paying restaurants preferred to hire men, while low-paying places (diners and the like) preferred women. In this way, women were steered into a lower-paying job category: that’s job segregation.

Why does “occupational segregation” matter? It matters because workers in “women’s jobs” are paid less than workers in “men’s jobs.” As journalist Naomi Barko put it, “the biggest reason for the pay gap is not discrimination against individual women but rather discrimination against women’s occupations.” The more women work in a job, the lower the pay in that job is likely to be. (Paradoxically, this means that some men - men in female-dominated workplaces or job positions - are in effect paid less because of discrimination against jobs done by women!)

How much lower is the pay in “women’s jobs”? Different economists have calculated it different ways. The economist Paula England looked at data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (a U.S. government study that measures changes in people’s lives over time), and found that if a white woman in an all-male workplace moved to an all-female workplace, she’d lose 7% of her wages. If a black woman did the same thing, she’s lose 19% of her wages. The economists Deborah Figart and June Lapidus found that if female-dominated jobs had no wage penalty, women’s median hourly pay nationwide would go up 13.2% (men’s pay would go up 1.1%, due to raises for men working in “women’s jobs”).

Different Choices

As anti-feminists often point out, women and men often make different choices: in college major, in hours and years worked, and in what jobs to take. It’s not true that these “free choice” factors account for all of the wage gap, but they certainly account for some of it.

It’s often claimed that these “free choice” factors have nothing to do with sexism (usually this claim is made by people who want you to believe that the wage gap is nothing to be concerned about), because the choices are made by women, not by women’s employers. The reality isn’t so clear-cut, because the choices women and men in our society make aren’t made free of sexism.

For example, full-time year-round women workers work fewer hours than their male counterparts. In 1995, among workers who usually work full-time, men worked 44.5 hours per week on average while women worked 40.8 hours a week on average. Put another way, women worked 92% as many hours as men. (Source: Rones et al).

Anti-feminists claim that this shows that women make less money than men because they choose to work less. This is partly true, but it’s not the whole story. In reality, employers have at least as much to do with how many hours a particular full-time employee works as the employee’s choices. It is employers who decide who is and who is not offered overtime, for example. So while critics of feminism assume that how many hours one works is entirely the employee’s choice, actually we have no way of knowing how much of women’s fewer hours is due to women’s choices, and how much is due to discrimination in who is offered hours of work.

Another example is caretaking. Women are expected to be caretakers - both of children and of any other relatives in need of aid (elderly relatives, for example) - and to do the majority of the housework. This isn’t an example of employers discriminating against women, but it is a society-wide sexism that contributes to the wage gap. The person doing the lioness’ share of the unpaid caretaking work has far less time available for paid work; if men and women divided unpaid caretaking work equally, the paid work would be a lot more equal too. (Like many instances of sexism, this arguably harms both sexes: men are harmed by this same sexist belief because they are expected to work more and robbed of equal contact with their family.)

Nonetheless, even single women without children earn less than similar men, on average. (See, for example, Wood et al’s study of similar male and female lawyers).

Men Get More Credit for Their Work

Men’s work tends to be evaluated as higher-quality than equally-good or better women’s work. This can impact who is offered mentoring, who is assigned a job assignment, who is offered a promotion, and so on - and all of these factors in turn have an effect on the pay gap.

For example, one study of credit in the sciences, published in Nature, looked at productivity (measured in terms of publications in scientific journals, how many times a person was a “lead author” of an article, and how often the articles were cited in scientific journals) and sex. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding on research grants. The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit.

Other studies have found similar results (see the bottom of this post for some citations). Men are simply given more credit for their work than women are.

Feedback Effects

To whatever extent some women freely choose to stay out of the labor market, the choice isn’t made in a void. The fact that women - even non-mothers - get rewarded less for wage-work than men means that women give less up if they choose to trade off paid work for motherhood. Women’s lower pay means women have less reason to stay in the paid work market.

This manifests itself every time a married couple, for whatever reason, has to decide to prioritize one spouse’s pay (and career path) above the other’s. If a couple has to choose whether or not to move to further one spouse’s career, all else being equal they will make whichever choice favors the higher-earning spouse. Similarly, if one person needs to take time off from work to take care of parents, grandparents or children, it makes sense for it to be the lower-paid person. But in most cases, the person with lower pay will turn out to be the woman.

Furthermore, the effect is additive - if a woman makes a sacrifice even once in her career for the couple’s best interests (say, giving up a good entry-level job because he’s been offered a good job in another state), then that’ll lower her pay for the rest of her work life - meaning that the next time such a decision has to be made (and the next, and the next…), her lower salery will seem even more expendable.

Economists call this a “feedback effect”; it’s likely that women earn less because they work less. But it’s also likely that women work less because they earn less.

Cumulative Causation

In 1944, inspired by race riots in Detroit, the influential economist Gunner Myrdal published An American Dilemma, which introduced the concept of “cumulative causation” in discrimination. Although Myrdal was discussing race, the same basic insight can be applied to the wage gap between men and women.

So what does “cumulative causation” mean, in this context? Among other things, it means that the effects of discrimination add up slowly over a lifetime. So, for example, losing a single job offer or promotion probably won’t make a big difference in the short run; but dozens of such small losses over the course of women’s careers eventually add up to a big pay gap.

The economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant examined this question in detail, by looking at the work history of male and female lawyers over time. What they found is that at the start of their careers, women lawyers earned 93% of their male counterparts; but after fifteen years, the women were only earning 61% of what the men made. Even after accounting for hours worked, motherhood, education, and many more factors, women were still being paid only 82% of what similar men took home. (Trish Wilson recently posted more information on this).

Tomorrow I’ll post more on the wage gap, concentrating on refuting some particular anti-feminist arguments. Click on the link below to see the list of references for this post.
Read the rest of this entry »

• Eve Tushnet has a couple of excellent replies to my post on the SSM debate. The permalinks are bloggered right now, but maybe they’ll be fixed by the time you read this; the first post is here, the second here. Otherwise, just visit Eve’s site and read through the September 23rd entries.

  I’d like to respond to Eve sometime this week, but time is really tight so I can’t promise.

• Trish Wilson, somewhat inspired by my posts, wrote a good post on the wage gap. And her post on wealth is a must-read, too.
• Via Trish, I read this excellent post on Keywords about race and the wealth gap. Nothing is more important for understanding the economics of black and white in the USA today than wealth; do read this post.

(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

Changes in the pay gap over time.

In 1972, women working full-time year-round earned 57.9% of what men working full-time year-round earned. In 1999, measured the same way, women earned 72.2% of what men earned. Many people, when they see this data, think that it means that women’s pay has been steadily climbing. But the real story is more complex then that; women’s pay hasn’t risen steadily, and not all of the closing wage gap is because women’s position has improved.

In 1951, women actually earned 63.9% of what mean earned - so women in 1972 actually earned less, compared to men, then women in the 1950s did! Using 1972 as the base year isn’t totally fair, because 1972 had the biggest pay gap between women and men of any year of the last 50 years. But throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the pay gap was always between 58% and 60% - while in the 1950s, the pay gap was usually closer to 64%. So it’s not true that the pay gap has been steadily getting smaller in the last 50 years.

The pay gap didn’t really change much until the 1980s. In 1981, the pay gap was 59.2%; in 1990, it was 71.6%, a change of over 12%. In 1999, on the other hand, the pay gap was 72.2%, a change of less than 1% since 1990.

So the pay gap was more-or-less stable from the 1950s until the 1980s; shrunk quite a lot in the 1980s; and stayed pretty much the same during the 1990s.

Women’s rising pay or men’s shrinking pay?

Women’s pay has been going up over time; however, women’s wage growth doesn’t account for all of the shrinking of the pay gap. From 1979 to 1989, the median woman’s hourly wage went up 52 cents (in 1997 dollars). During that same time period, the median man’s hourly wage went down $1.32. From 1989 to 1997, women’s pay went up only 8 cents, while men’s pay fell 88 cents.

What this means is that most of the reason the wage gap is smaller now than it was in 1979 is that men, on average, are being paid less.

Another way of looking at this is to ask: what would have happened to the pay gap if men’s average wages hadn’t fallen? In 1973, an average women’s hourly wage was 63% of an average man’s hourly wage; by 1997, an average women earned 79% of what an average man earned in an hour (a rise of 16%). But if men’s wages hadn’t dropped since 1973, an average woman in 1997 would have earned 67% of what an average man earned in an hour - a rise of only 4% since 1973.

(Data on the pay gap and men’s shrinking pay comes from The State of Working America 1998-1999, by Lawrence Mishel, Jared Bernstein and John Schmitt. Graphic from epinet.org)

Cut on the Bias quotes from a Ronald Reagan apologetic, written in 1978:

Reagan’s logic here is terrible. First of all, he’s assuming that the account of events in the New Testiment is necessarily accurate - but there’s no reason (aside from religious faith) to make that assumption. Secondly, even assuming the NT’s general accuracy, there’s an obvious third possibility besides “messiah” and “charlatan” - Jesus might have been sincere but mistaken about who he was.

Susanna compares Reagan’s logic to C.S. Lewis, but I have a hard time imagining Lewis putting forth an apologetic this unsophisticated. Reagan’s work seems more comparable to Josh McDowell’s.

For the coming week - two weeks? month? - there will be rather a lot of posts here which are reprints of things I wrote before starting this blog. Meanwhile, the time that I would otherwise have spent happily blogging will be spent on such joyful tasks as scraping wallpaper paste off of various walls.

I hope people find this an acceptable compromise - I don’t want to put the blog on hiatus altogether, but I definitely don’t have much time for blogging right now.

(I don’t know what Bean has planned, of course - she’s a woman of mystery! - but she’s busy working on the new house too, of course, plus her day job is keeping her extra-busy lately. Which is too bad, since it means that the really cool idea she told me about for a series of posts probably won’t happen for a while.)

(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)

There are a literally unlimited number of ways one could go about measuring the pay gap between men and women. Here’s six ways, for example.

1. Compare wages among young workers only, excluding mothers. (98%)

2. Compare hourly wages among all workers.
3. Compare weekly wages among all full-time workers. (76% - pdf file)
4. Compare annual wages among all full-time, year round (FTYR) workers. (73% - pdf file)
5. Compare total annual income (wages plus benefits, pension, perks and bonuses) among FTYR workers.
6. Compare total income over the course of an entire work life.

I’ve arranged this list in order of how big the wage gap is. So if you measure by method number 1, you’ll find a relatively small wage gap - which is why conservatives so often use this method. Measuring with method number 2 will find a larger pay gap than method 1, number 3 will be larger still, and so on until method number 6 - which will find the largest pay gap of all.

The choice of where to measure is, to some degree, arbitrary; no one way of measuring is absolutely correct. Usually, when you see a pay gap figure in the newspaper, it’s measured by the third method I’ve listed - it’s comparing average weekly wages for full-time working women to average weekly wages for full-time working men. The reason most people use this figure is because that’s the way the U.S. government measures it, which means the figure is always conveniently available.

Each of these ways of measuring the pay gap includes and leaves out different things. For instance, if you just compare weekly wages among full-time workers (which is how the government does it), you leave out the value of benefits like medical insurance - but since men are more likely to be in jobs that pay benefits, not including benefits underestimates the size of the pay gap.

On the other hand, a conservative might reply, even among full-time workers men work more hours on average than women, so the weekly wage comparison overestimates the wage gap. (I’ll be responding to this argument later in this series).

The point is, no one way of measuring the wage gap is perfect, or can cover everything. The wage gap is useful as a broad indication of problems that exist in our economy, and as a way of examining how women’s relative pay has changed over time - but it’s not a precise measure.

More on the wage gap tomorrow.

(EDIT: In my first draft, I somehow wrote the same thing, slightly rephrased, for methods one and two. I went back and rewrote them to correct this error…)

You know, “marriage” is one of those words I can never remember how to spell. Is it “marriage” or “marraige”? Sometimes I suspect that other bloggers have this problem too, which is why they refer to it as the “SSM” debate.

Anyhow.

Eve Tushnet writes:

When social conservatives start talking about the need to teach gender roles, I reach for my gun. People who believe in the importance of teaching “gender roles” create a social context in which unathletic and non-masculine boys are given beatings by their peers.

I think about the years in which I didn’t go a single day without fearing that someone would beat me up, and rarely went an entire week without being physically brutalized by someone (usually, but not always, a boy). After a few years, I internalized so much loathing that I’d stand in front of the mirror, yell at myself, and punch myself in the face; I didn’t even require a bully to be present to get beat up.

And the beatings happened for one reason, and one reason only - because I was unable to decide for myself what was valuable about me as a male. Instead, the people who think it’s important to teach gender roles got to decide - they created a social context in which the punishment of gender role deviants was not only acceptable but encouraged.

Boys will be boys.

Girls will be girls.

And those who don’t fit into the binary will be taught/punished.

Fuck that.

So, to answer Eve’s question, I’m laissez fair when it comes to children’s gender roles. What’s important is providing every child with the individual liberty to act like themselves. If that self fits in with Eve’s conception of proper “gender roles,” fine - but if not, that should be fine too.

The belief that there is a correct “gender role” which must be taught inevitably leads to child abuse, in my opinion.

What always strikes me about the “children must be taught proper gender roles” folks is their lack of faith in the innateness of gender. If masculinity and femininity are really inborn traits, as these folks claim, then why worry about teaching gender roles at all?

Senator John Cornyn argues that the Supreme Court shouldn’t force SSM onto unwilling states. I agree, if only because I think the backlash from such a Supreme Court decision would fuel the anti-gay-rights movement. For years, the anti-gays have lost every argument and cultural debate on this question; despite their best efforts, lesbians and gays are far more accepted now than they were twenty years ago, and overt homophobia has become almost forbidden. All the trend lines indicate that the folks who favor equal rights are the ones with the wind in our sails, while the folks who oppose equality have been losing their wind for a generation.

I think that without a Supreme Court decision to rail against, the anti-equality movement will die out sooner and more completely.

The Senator also writes:

Of course, nobody in the pro-SSM movement is talking about imposing on churches’ rights, either.

However, what the Senator is talking about is picking and choosing which religions’ marriage ceremonies will be recognized by the state. If the Senator has his way, all of the Catholic Church’s marriage ceremonies will be granted state recognition, but only some Reform Jewish marriages will be given the same recognition. In practice, the state will be saying that Roman Catholic beliefs are superior to and deserve more respect and support than Reform Jewish beliefs.

Probably that doesn’t make the Senator - who I’m willing to bet is not Jewish - nervous, but it does bug me.

Some of the anti-SSM marriage folks are now turning to the argument that (in Eve’s words) “marriage is how we reconcile the opposite sexes.” I’m very sorry to hear that Eve, who is (I think) unmarried, has no close male friends nor any good relationships with any male relatives, and exists in a state of permanent war with all men. I assure her, however, that this is not the case for all humanity.

To make this argument work, the SSM (same sex marriage) opponents are regressing more and more to pure sexism; their view of the sexes seems to have frozen somewhere around 1952. To see what I mean, read this piece by Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

Is it really necessary to explain why this is nonsense?

When I want to find friends in a strange town, I’m far better off dropping by the local science-fiction club - which is likely to be half female (despite the stereotype, fandom isn’t male-only) - than I am trying to join the local all-male club. For that matter, I’m far better off looking for the local chapter of NOW, which might be 100% female.

The point is, if I search for friends based on my interior life - my enjoyment of science fiction, or my commitment to feminism - I’m far more likely to find people I share things in common with. According to the rabbi, I should just look for an all-male group and I’ll automatically be among my peers - but in reality, men aren’t all the same, and we don’t all have the same interests.

Not all men enjoy watching football and Mike Tyson. Not all women want to spend all day trying on outfits in the mall (and not all men find trying on outfits a bad time).

The Rabbi believes that “two men have a lot more in common than a man and a woman.” Well, which two men and which woman? I suspect I have a lot more in common with Eve Tushnet than I do with (say) Ghengas Khan or Mr. Spock. I know I have a lot more in common with Sarah, my housemate of 14 years, than I do with most men I meet. (I think I may even have a little more in common with her than I do with Charles, Sarah’s husband).

The basic point is, do you think that men and women are individuals, with individual traits (some of which are gender-typed, some of which are not), or robots whose every trait and interest are determined by their genitals?

Apparently, SSM opponents think the latter. How odd.

(In case anyone’s interested, by the way, the Rabbi’s overall argument is that attraction is the key to romance, and that common interests are therefore unimportant. His entire argument thus rests on the unlikely assumption that attraction and common interests are mutually exclusive, so if the one is important the other is not.)

In the end, this debate really comes down to equal treatment under the law. Which is why SSM opponants say it’s about the children; no, it’s about society; no, it’s about preserving heterosexual monogamy; no, it’s about reconciling women and men; etc etc etc, blah blah blah.

The SSM debate is about equal rights under the law. And SSM opponants are determined to avoid that real debate, because they don’t have any decent arguments in support of lesbians and gays having unequal treatment. That is, in my view, the bottom line.

The Modulator is amused by my blogroll’s political classifications. (I should mention that the blogroll is my fault, so if you hate it don’t blame Bean).

Kathleen Parker is complaining about double standards among both feminsits and conservative women’s groups:

I’ve got several problems with this.

First of all, Parker seems to assume that all feminist groups (and conservative women’s groups) are interchangeable. For instance, one of the feminist groups she criticizes for attacking Schwarzenegger but not Clinton is CodePink. But CodePink didn’t even exist during Clinton’s administration, so blaming them for not leaping on Monicagate seems unwarranted. Similarly, did the California Federation of Republican Women really criticize Clinton for his treatment of women? Parker doesn’t say, but without establishing that, criticizing the CFRW for their double-standard is premature.

Second, even looking at feminist groups that existed during Clinton’s reign, the idea that they didn’t say a word about Clinton is an antifeminist myth. NOW, for instance, criticized Clinton in harsher terms than any other liberal group I know of: “[Clinton] seems to be a man who divides women into two unfortunate traditional categories: women he must treat with respect like Janet Reno, Madeleine Albright and Ruth Bader Ginsburg, and those he can use and toss aside like tissue paper. We would like better options for president in the future.”

The real complaint seems to be that NOW and other feminists criticized Clinton but did not call for impeachment. But how is that hypocritical? Plenty of right-wing politicians have committed adultery without NOW calling for their impeachment, after all.

Third, there’s an important difference between a candidate for office and a sitting President. Asking “is this candidate a person of good character or a scumbag?” is reasonable during an election, when such criticism might have the practical effect of keeping a scumbag out of office. Once a scumbag is in office, however, yelling “scumbag” over and over won’t change who is in office. When dealing with a sitting president, it makes more sense to criticize his policies than his character, because the policies are much more susceptible to change.

Linked via Sara at Diotima.

There’s lots of fuss in the media about agricultural subsidies… but over at TomPaine.com, in his weekly critique of newspaper stories, economist Dean Baker disagrees.

Hey, if nothing goes wrong, I’ll be a co-homeowner about eight hours from now.

UPDATE: Nothing went wrong.

So the New York Times has editorialized against NOW’s decision to endorse long-shot candidate Carol Moseley Braun for president.

From the Times’ editorial:

Is it really that “hard to see” the important principle that the Presidency shouldn’t be a white-men-only club? As Moseley Braun has said, it’s time to rip the “men only” sign off the Oval Office’s door. Since the Times sees the value in symbolic candidates, they should have no problem seeing the symbolic value of a black woman running for the nation’s hightest office.

Well, maybe it is hard to see why ripping that “men only” sign down is an “important principle” - if you’re a member of the exclusive club of white men who has reached the highest ranks at the Times.

There are a number of replies to the Times posted on NOW’s websites. NOWPAC has a detailed - and I think sometimes over-the-top - response. Here’s one of the good bits:

Kim Gandy, the president of NOW, wrote a short response which the Times printed. What I enjoyed more, though, was the page of responses from other folks to the Times. This, for example, comes from a letter by Virginia Kallianes of New York:

From Gay Bruhn, president of Illinois NOW:

And this letter from Irene Weiser of New York:

• Quote: “Nanny and Me: For your caregiver and child—courses in Spanish that lovingly teach your Latina nanny the customs and daily practices of Jewish culture.” - Found on a Gymboree bulliten board in L.A., quoted in The Atlantic Monthly.

• Check out “Nobody Died When Clinton Lied,” a website of anti-Bush signs an anonymous “freewayblogger” has been displaying on the I-5 in California. My favorite: “Dulce et Decorum est por Haliburton Mori,” which translated means “It is sweet and proper to die for Haliburton.”
• Pretty good comic strip (is it still a strip if it’s a page long?) in the New York Times making fun of the RIAA lawsuits. Via Boing Boing.
• Mudron of the Pants Press Sketchblog posts a nice (if gory) illustration s/he has drawn of a scene from Peter Pan.
• Emma at The Oregon Blog has a good, multi-part interview up with Phil Busse, progressive candidate for mayor of Portland.
• Quote: “We’re not only dismantling our schools and services, we’re doing it before a fascinated nation. Oregon is now on the narrow edge between being a state and being a Fox-TV reality show.” - David Sarasohn (quoted on The Oregon Blog).
• Jeremy at Refference has posted the first two parts of a discussion of “Why Aesthetics Matter” - and more specifically, why we should use aesthetic reasoning in politics. It’s interesting stuff, although I find the discussion of abortion politics in part II unconvincing. Via Crescat Sententia.
• Whisky Bar (which I’ve just added to the moderately right-wing section of my blogroll) links to a good New York Times op-ed on Israel/Palestine, and has an even better discussion of the op-ed. If Israel doesn’t find an acceptable way to disentangle itself from Palestine quickly, the issue will switch from “Palestinian independence” to “one vote per citizen for everyone Israel rules over.” And Israel will like that debate even less than it likes the current debate.

  Frankly, I’d prefer advocating for Israel extending citizenship to everyone in the occupied territories. Lefty advocacy for a Palestinian state sometimes seems counterproductive; I understand advocating for Palestinian freedom, and yet it seems unlikely that a Palestinian state would be one with many freedoms for women or homosexuals.

• Trish Wilson has a new home for her blog. Update your bookmarks and sidebars!
• I think I’m done posting about the Record Industry for now. But go ahead and check out this excellent post on the subject at John & Belle Have a Blog, as well as this equally good followup. S/he is arguing - and I agree - that the current industry is very inefficient at delivering music to consumers.
• Y’all remember the Nike case - in which Nike was sued for false advertising over their claims that their third-world workers are treated well? Nike has now settled out of court, agreeing to pay $1.5 million to the Fair Labor Association to make the lawsuit go away.
• It’s tempting to respond to Matt Yglesias’ criticism of NOW for (gasp!) endorsing Carol Moseley-Braun for president, but Matt’s post so lacks any reasoning or argument that there’s nothing to rebut. Perhaps Matt just considers his own views self-evident?

  I blogged earlier why I thought the NOW endorsement makes sense. NOW’s Kim Gandy points out two additional reasons I hadn’t considered; first, that Moseley-Braun’s presence may help with getting out the black female vote, which helps all democrats (I’m not sure this will work, but I guess it’s worth a shot); and second, that having Moseley-Braun in the campaign and the debates forces the other candidates to address NOW’s issues more than they would otherwise.

• Kieran at Crooked Timber has a brilliant response to the “Aoccdrnig to a rscheearch at an Elingsh uinervtisy, it deosn’t mttaer in waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht frist and lsat ltteer is at the rghit pclae.” thing that’s been floating around.
• Confined Space has a good post about the amendment to the Texas constitution limiting medical malpractice awards, or as Molly Ivans calls it, th e”Polluters and Predators Protection Act.” Via Nathan Newman.
• Would you like to be able to see through even the smoothest fallaciloquence? Would you like to know if your pigritude is overdone, or if you’re merely mitescent these days? Check out the Compendium of Lost Words, a list of over 400 rarely-used English words. Via Green Fairy.
• This Esquire article, about the media and public reaction to the folks who jumped from the World Trade Center on 9/11 - and, in particular, about one famous photo of a jumper - was absolutely fascinating. I read it a few days ago, and it keeps coming back to my thoughts. Via Crescat Sententia.
• Another quote from that Atlantic review of Arlie Hochchild’s new book:
  In a capitalist society work dictates the schedules, the deadlines, the urgency; product life cycles supersede family life cycles at every turn. … In a study Hochschild did at Amerco, a Fortune 500 company, she found that many employees with twenty or more years at the company were on their second or third marriages. “To these employed,” she wrote, “work was their rock, their major source of security. They were getting their pink slips at home.”