Myth: The Wage Gap is Caused by Men’s Higher Pay for Dangerous Jobs (wage gap series, part 10)
| May 9th, 2005(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)
Over on Amanda’s blog, reader “JenK” writes:
Men are more willing to take on dangerous jobs so can find better paying jobs than those who are not willing to risk their lives.
This is an argument I’ve seen before. When anti-feminists explain why the gender wage gap doesn’t exist or is justified, they frequently claim the wage gap is reflects men getting paid more for hazardous jobs or dangerous jobs. Often men’s rights activist (MRA) Warren Farrell is cited. The following arguments are typical:
- John Leo: Farrell argues that many men outearn women by a willingness to take risky and dangerous jobs as well as work that exposes them to stress and bad weather…
- Arrah Nielsen (from the IWF’s website): The real reason than men tend to out-earn women is the choices they make. Men are far more likely to take unpleasant and dangerous jobs, what Farrell calls the “death and exposure professions.” For example, firefighting, truck driving, mining and logging — to name just a few high-risk jobs — are all more than 95 percent male. Conversely, low risk jobs like secretarial work and childcare are more than 95 percent female.
- Glenn Sacks: Of the 25 most dangerous jobs in the United States (according to the U.S. Department of Labor), all of them are overwhelmingly or exclusively male. Over 90% of American workplace deaths and serious injuries occur to men. It is not unfair in the least that dangerous jobs pay more than safe jobs at the same skill level.
The anti-feminist argument here sounds logical and just. It’s true that men are much more likely to die or to be injured on the job than women. Surely no one would be willing to risk their life without getting paid a premium for it; and no reasonable person would argue that extra pay for extra danger is unjust. So how could feminists object to a “danger premium” that raises men’s wages?
The problem is, there is no premium for dangerous jobs. And since the “danger premium” doesn’t really exist, it can’t explain the wage gap.
This post will first look at some general evidence, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that high pay doesn’t equal high wages. Next, I’ll discuss the dubious right-wing assumptions implicit in the belief that dangerous jobs are paid for with higher wages. Finally, I’ll briefly discuss some of the peer-reviewed economic studies showing that high risk isn’t associated with high pay (and is even associated with lower pay, for non-union workers).
There is no premium for dangerous jobs.
Let’s look at some graphs (all graphs in this post were taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website). Here are some of the most dangerous industries to work in in the USA, based on on-the-job deaths:
Just looking at that graph should make people suspicious of the “high risk = high pay” myth. Yes, construction workers and miners earn decent pay, but agricultural workers? They face the highest risk of death, and get paid less than almost any other class of workers in the USA. From a BLS page entitled “lowest paying occupations in 2002“:
If danger jobs really paid a premium, we wouldn’t expect the most dangerous industry in America to be the second lowest-paid. Indeed, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics investigated job traits that are associated with wage premiums, they found that “Job attributes relating to … physically demanding or dangerous jobs… do not seem to affect wages.” Here’s a bar graph. As you can see, what pays most is specialized knowledge. The very tiniest bar, all the way over on the right, that’s actually slightly negative? That’s the “death and exposure” effect on wages Warren Farrell is talking about.
The right-wing economic assumptions behind the anti-feminist economic theory
Many anti-feminists are conservative or libertarian in viewpoint (the IWF, for example, exists chiefly to put a “good for women” face on whatever the Republican party’s current talking points are). However, some MRAs - including Warren Farrell and Glenn Sacks - think of themselves as liberal on many issues, despite their opposition to feminism. This makes their easy acceptance of right-wing economic assumptions implicit in the “high risk = high wages” theory somewhat surprising.
The key right-wing assumption - one frequently used to argue against policies such as the minimum wage and worker protection laws - is the belief that the free market produces the best possible outcome for workers. Obviously, workers would never accept jobs that risk life or injury without getting paid extra for it, right?
Well, no.
Believing that high risk is paid for by a wage premium means making a lot of assumptions; and if even one of those assumptions is off-base, then risk and wages might not be connected at all. From an article by economists Peter Dorman and Paul Hagstrom:
The theoretical case for wage compensation for risk is plausible but hardly certain. If workers have utility functions in which the expected likelihood and cost of occupational hazards enter as arguments, if they are fully informed of risks, if firms possess sufficient information on worker expectations and preferences (directly or through revealed preferences), if safety is costly to provide and not a public good, and if risk is fully transacted in anonymous, perfectly competitive labor markets, then workers will receive wage premia that exactly offset the disutility of assuming greater risk of injury or death. Of course, none of these assumptions applies in full and if one or more of them is sufficiently at variance with the real world, actual compensation may be less than utility-offsetting, nonexistent, or even negative - a combination of low pay and poor working conditions. [Source: Dorman and Hagstrom, “Wage Compensation for Dangerous Work Revisited,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review vol 52(1) Oct 1998]
What would make a labor market less than perfectly competative? Many things. Feminists and liberals are likely to think of the effects of discrimination and persistant unemployment, which may leave some workers without the option of refusing to take a low-paying, high risk job. There are also industry premiums - workers do not move freely between industries, and some industries simply pay higher than others, in a pattern that cannot be reliably accounted for by skill requirements, education, risk, etc..
And of course, workers often lack the ability to accurately access risks. For instance, an agricultural worker may assume that she or he (most likely he) isn’t doing anything risky if his job doesn’t involve operating heavy-duty farm equiptment; but he’s far more likely to be killed on the job if his duties involve driving. And the construction worker hanging from a girder thirty stories above the ground? He’s much less likely to be killed than the construction worker who stays on the ground driving a pick-up. (Leigh & Garcia, “Some problems with value-of-life estimates based on labor market data” Journal of Forensic Economics, Spring-Summer 2000 v13)
Because workers do not move freely from one industry to another, differences in how much different industries pay may prevent wages from being perfectly competative. (As I’ll explain later this post, this is a particularly important factor when looking at wages and risk).
The point is, the assumption that the marketplace compensates workers for risk is, in the end, another example of blind ideological faith in the market to always produce the best outcome. We should be skeptical of such assumptions.
What academic studies have found
Several academic studies have found a significant connection between risk and higher wages. These studies generally don’t include agricultural workers - which is possibly a problem, since this cuts out the US workers who face the highest risks for the lowest pay. Furthermore, these studies usually don’t account for the differences in pay between industries - meaning that they can easily mistake the higher industry wages in an industry like construction or mining, with higher pay for risks.
How do we know that higher average pay in those industries aren’t premiums paid to workers in physically risky jobs? By comparing employees who face comparable levels of risk in different industries. A secretary working for a mining firm is not more likely to die on the job than a secretary working for an elementary school, for example. But when economists J. Paul Leigh and Jorge A. Garcia compared clerks across industries, they found that the so-called “danger premium” paid to construction and mining workers applied even to clerks facing no danger. The standard economic theory - stating that firms pay a premium to workers facing a higher risk of death or injury - cannot explain why a construction firm would choose to pay a low-skill clerk much more than an insurance firm would.
Dorman and Hagstrom’s analysis (pdf link) found that if industry wasn’t accounted for (and agricultural workers weren’t included), higher risk seems to be associated with higher wages. But once other factors were accounted for, there was almost no association between risk and pay. And what little association existed was negative - that is, workers who face a higher risk of death actually get paid lower wages than similar workers facing less risk.
This “negative premium” - workers getting paid less for facing risk - only happens to non-unionized workers. This result is not easily explained by conservative economic assumptions. It is, however, not unexpected to left-wingers, who would expect that worker bargaining power would have more to do with wages than risky work conditions.
Conclusions
First conclusion: The anti-feminist argument that the gender wage gap is (partly or fully) caused by justified higher pay for men who take on riskier work is not true. Evidence shows that taking on risky work isn’t associated with higher pay.
(Note that a related argument made by some MRAs - that sexist occupational segregation leads to men being more likely to be injured or killed on the job - holds true. That is sexist, and unfair. Men’s greater likelihood of workplace injury and death has nothing to do with the wage gap, but that doesn’t mean it’s not unjust.)
Second conclusion: The widely-shared conservative assumption that the market produces just and fair outcomes is not supported by looking at how the market compensates for risk. Workers who risk their lives often receive very low compensation, and for non-unionized workers they may be paid even less than similar workers in less risky jobs. Quoting Dorman and Hagstrom:
In plain terms, nonunion workers in dangerous jobs are, in many cases, simply unlucky; they have found their way in to situations of high risk and low pay and would presumably move to a better job if they could. …
From the perspective of public policy, dropping the assumption that risk coefficients fully reflect workers’ desired tradoffs strengthens the case for regulatory policies to promote safe working conditions… [and there is a basis for] assigning a higher priority to policies that target the conditions of the less-compensated.
The bottom line: Neither the anti-feminist, nor the conservative, assumptions about risk and pay hold water. The wage gap between men and women is not fair or justified; and the market is not fairly compensating those workers (mostly men) who face the highest risk of death or injury at their jobs.
May 9th, 2005 at 1:07 am
If danger jobs really paid a premium, we wouldn’t expect the most dangerous industry in America to be the second lowest-paid.
Why not? There is no necessary correlation between these two concepts.
The dangerous jobs are also the jobs with fewer skills involved. This can be explained by a simple comparison of the differential costs in danger to two professions. If accountancy and lumberjacking start out at given levels of risk and danger to incumbents, and accounting takes 5 years to teach and lumberjacking takes six months to teach, where does it make sense to allocate resources on making the job more safe? Multiple that by the length of human history.
So it doesn’t follow that the highest paid jobs will be the most dangerous jobs. It does follow, in a reasonably free labor market, that danger is a factor which will contribute to a job’s compensation. Two identical jobs, add “and you get shot at every couple of weeks” to one of them, and we’d expect the compensation to go up.
The test of your theory is not in any of the supporting evidence you present. The test is to examine the salaries paid to workers in various dangerous fields over time and see if there is a relationship between increasing (or decreasing) occupational safety over time and declining wages. For example, did coal miners get paid more (in relation to other forms of work) back in 1850 when the fatality rate was probably ten times that of today? I don’t know what the test would show, but that’s the test you’d need to perform to validate your theory.
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 1:43 am
I never claimed that the highest paid jobs will be the most dangerous jobs; please take your straw man and shove it into a corn field, where it will perform a useful function and help farmers. ;-P
I did argue that if there’s a danger premium, then the most dangerous industry in the country should not be the second-lowest-paid. At that point, you’re really stretching it to claim that there’s any positive relationship between wages and danger. You can try special pleading about low skill levels, but it’s not like agriculture is the only low-skilled industry in the USA. If there’s a risk premium, why doesn’t agriculture pay significantly higher than low-skilled, not-nearly-as-dangerous industries?
Actually, I suspect that you wouldn’t be able to hire anyone to get definitely shot at (assuming real bullets) at any wage level. (There are jobs that make being shot at more likely, but even at those jobs - 7/11 clerk, say - there’s a real chance that any particular clerk will never be shot at).
But the point is, you’re talking pure theory, unmitigated by real-world evidence. Which is pretty typical of libertarian economics, in my experience. The fact is, in real-world high-risk jobs, the compensation does not go up.
I don’t understand. Why do you think a multivariate analysis with the standard tests for statistical significance is not “a test of my theory”?
The test you suggest, while interesting, would be impossible to actually do. We don’t even have a decent continuous data set for workplace deaths going back to the 1970s, let alone to the 1850s; death rates would be impossible to quantify in a way that would allow us to compare apples to apples.
But even if we could quantify death rates, you’d also have to control for factors such as union laws, union density, wage laws, unemployment levels, freedom of employee movement, etc. Which means we’d be back to performing a multivariate analysis - which you don’t seem to consider a legitimate means of testing the risk/wage hypothesis. So we’re back at square one.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 4:36 am
[…] ge gap, and it has nothing to do with ‘dangerous jobs’
1115634995 Yes, there really is a […]
This comment was written by Mischief to Data » Blog Archive » Yes, there really is a gender wage gap, and it has nothing to do with ‘dangerous jobs’.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 7:29 am
I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the attitude Robert’s giving off about “low skill” jobs like lumberjacking or agriculture. Sure, niether of these jobs are rocket science and in theory most people could learn them, but it was Barbara Ehrenreich who noted that the jobs Americans consider “low skill” can actually be very difficult. Acutally, I don’t think I’d ever discribe lumberjacking as “low skill.” To put it bluntly, I think your average agriculture worker or lumberjack could learn how to do my physics homework before I could learn how to farm or fell trees.
Plus, there’s something really small and mean about tying the level of workplace saftey investment to the amount of training required for the job. Ideally, everyone would get the safest conditions possible for thier job even if they didn’t spend 5 or 6 years in college-style job training.
This comment was written by K.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 7:54 am
excellent piece, Mr. Ampersand
one thing i was a bit curious about, however, was the grouping of such disparate fields as farming, fishing, & forestry - it would be interesting to see these groups broken out & see what correlations appear
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btw, Robert: your example is one of apples & oranges - i’m assuming by “lumberjack” (not a term frequently employed by forestry professionals, btw) you mean to refer to some nebulous unskilled worker employed on a timber harvest site. and you’re comparing them to a certified accountant?
hate to break it to you but being a skilled forester or timber harvester is hardly something that can be taught in 6 months (quite often timber companies will require anywhere from 2-3 years experience - & that’s not counting time spent in licensing & certification for various skills). and here we’re just talking about large-scale (ie, corporate) forestry. i think most small-scale & independent forestry workers would laugh themselves silly at the notion that their experience & knowledge somehow occured in the space of a few months. the same can be said for farming. i confess i don’t know much about commercial fishing, but i doubt it’s that easy to pick up.
.
i’m always amazed at how many people, especially those sitting comfortably at their computers, seem to think that all manual labor is “unskilled” & therefore “easy” (ie, anyone could do it)…
This comment was written by jam.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 8:29 am
Jam- You’re absolutely right about ignorance many have of what exactly “unskilled” jobs are like. My husband’s union (LIUNA) has strict requirements about skill aquistion, experience and pay. And let’s not forget that many skilled professions put up artifically high barrriers to acquiring credentials in order to exclude competition. Also, our ignorance and prejudices about any line of work can make it have less value. For example, 5 years seems like a long time to me to become a bean counter. To pretend that sexism doesn’t play a part in exclusion from some jobs and low pay and respect for others is disingenuous. Just compare your concept of a butler to that of a maid and you start to get the picture.
This comment was written by Elena.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 8:32 am
jam and amp,
Thanks for correcting Robert.
I worked one summer helping a guy cut down and/or prune huge trees.
The work required an ability to judge angles and velocity and then know how to tie off various parts of the branches coming down, so that they wouldn’t kill those of us on the ground. Plus there was the added skill of cutting into the branch at the correct angle to send it on its way.
Robert, after I saw a two hundred pound piece of lumber fly by me at thirty miles an hour, I appreciated the great skill of the foreman and knew that it would take me months and months to learn what he knew. The foreman’s skill inspired awe. He never missed
And I have an advanced degree and an IQ of “genius.”
Manual labor is manual; not brainless.
This comment was written by Jay Sennett.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 9:02 am
A large part of the wage differential is explained by the fact that women, at least a large perecentage of them, leave the work force for childrearing, and thus have discontinuous career paths (which is penalized even when male workers have this), and also thus do not have as much experience to list.
The only way to free women is to make sure they never bear children.
There is some discrimnation, as well, but it’s not as prevalent as people like to imagine, in most jobs.
This comment was written by Mike.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 9:51 am
Mike writes:
Hmmmm. No. The only way to free women is to make sure we support them in their child bearing endeavors. At all. Period.
As for women not having experience t0 list (presumably because they are mothers?), how is running a household any different from running a small business?
This comment was written by Jay Sennett.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 9:56 am
Mike:
This post is only one of a series of posts I’ve written about the wage gap. I wrote about motherhood and the wage gap in this ealier post.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 9:59 am
>
No… that’s ‘a’ way - not the ‘only’ way.
Another way would be for the other parent to take equal responsibility. (radical concept I know)
Another way would be for there to be free quality childcare for all parents.
Another way would be to reframe what we value as ‘experience’.
Another way would be for us to restructure who has responsibility for raisding children (it takes a village an’ all…)
I’m sure others can come up with several more options other thasn telling women they should never become parents. After all, men don’t make a choice between career or family do they?
This comment was written by Spicy.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 10:24 am
I do want to point out two things that are tangential to your argument. Okay, they are really totally off topic, so sue me! :)
One is that women participate in high risk jobs in greater number than men in the shadow economy that exists because of immigration restrictions. That is, women who are trafficked to the US from other countries in order to earn hard currency in the garment industry, as domestic workers, and in the sex industry, are in very risky work situations because of their illegality and are underpaid or unpaid because of that illegal status as well. I think the right word is exploited. Some illegal work is more profitable because of the risk, but not the illegal jobs that women typically do.
The second thing that occurred to me that is both women and men do take jobs in which they are likely to be in the line of gunfire. We are currently involved in two wars overseas and both men and women continue to enlist in the armed forces and to take jobs in the civilian workforce in Iraq. So such jobs do exist, and people of both sexes are taking them in ever larger numbers. There is a premium involved in the risks people face in those jobs.
This comment was written by balabusta.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 11:21 am
I’d be very curious to see this, too because I highly suspect that commercial fishing would account for the bulk of the fatalities/ injuries in this group… not your typical field laborer. Commercial fishing is the most dangerous job in the world. But there is also a huge wage gap within the industry, itself. Deckhands on a commercial trawler/ crab boat will make very good money (actually a percentage of the catch) in a very short amount of time. But workers gutting fish for 18 hrs a day on a factory processor make borderline minimum wage. Which job do you think is primarily filled by illegal immigrants and 3rd World citizens? Not the high paying one, I assure you. But there is a higher level of skill & experience needed to work on deck than gutting fish, and a slightly higher risk of death/injury above deck than below.
I think you’re underplaying the unpleasantness factor. The weakness in the men’s rights’ argument is in assuming that danger & risk are inherently perceived as a negative to both sexes; and that compensation alone motivates people to put themselves at risk. This is not true. Society tends to glorify most dangerous jobs and I believe men are just as attracted to the higher social status as the better money. People want to become firefighters and work in construction not just because those jobs pay well, but also because those jobs and the results of those jobs are highly visible to society.
Mental/ emotional satisfaction in a job should not be overlooked as a motivating factor. And a big part of that non-monetary compensation comes from social status and to some personalities, the thrill of danger.
This comment was written by MustangSally.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 11:29 am
Men’s Rights Movement, Pt. 5–The Conclusion
Alright, back to business. Sorry this is up late, but I took the day off work and I slept all morning. Pt. 1, Pt. 2, Pt. 3, and Pt. 4. Do men’s rights activists have legitimate complaints? I would say…
This comment was written by Pandagon.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 12:10 pm
I think there’s something to this. Certainly it’s an argument I’ve heard many times as to why people go into teaching and nursing (and consequently why the salaries are so low for “skilled professions”.)
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 12:11 pm
Bless you Amp, for this post.
If there is one thing I’m sincerely tired of, it’s white-collar anti-feminist men like Warren Farrell, who spent a summer or two working as a “construction helper”, or whose daddy bought them a Laborer’s card to keep their asses doing somthing for the summer instead of lounging around the house playing video games during summer break, pontificating on why women don’t earn as much, and how women who do dangerous jobs don’t really do them, we sit around giving ourselves manicures while the men handle the “tough stuff” for us. He can kiss my Sicilian ass. I do this for a LIVING. Not summer fun. I EARNED my J.W. card, and I’m out here for keeps. I’m a bona-fide blue-collar woman, and I’m tired of his ilk co-opting a working-class voice when it’s convenient.
The fact is, in seventeen years on the job, I haven’t seen any “coddling” of females; he pulled that straight out of his ass, because it feeds into pre-existing stereotypes and bigotry. Women simply can’t get away with that shit. In fact, the only people who can get away with hiding out when the going gets tough, are sons and nephews of contractors (or high-ranking office personnel in the shop). Period. Everyone else earns their keep.
I highly recommend that everyone visit Confined Space every Friday, for a good overview of who is getting killed on the job, along with the where and the how. Do it. Every Friday. It’s a sobering look. Welcome to my world.
There is one reason and one reason only that I am paid a high wage. I belong to a labor union! Yes, I work hard. Yes, I am educated, experienced, and skilled. But the real reason for my pay is because I am organized. Union construction workers are highly paid because we fought for that pay and those benefits, on the jobsite, in the streets, on the picket line, in the voting booth. Do you like weekends? Thank a union member.
Now, with that said, there’s still a wage gap in construction, and it’s not related to childbirth. Most women in construction have their children before entering the trades, so we aren’t taking any more time off than the men. There are jurisdictions that are more advanced in terms of acceptance of women on the job, but there are a helluva lot more jurisdictions where women are first choice on the layoff list—not because they aren’t good workers, but because the contractors and/or foremen believe that the men “really need the job”, while the women always have the option of finding a man to support them. I’m still optimistic; I think that the more women enter the trades, the closer we get to “critical mass”, where we can be seen as common workers and not an anomaly, the sexism will decrease in intensity. It’ll get better.
This comment was written by La Lubu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 12:41 pm
I think the solution of not having children is that it’s the only one that currently exsists in this world, not an ideal one. Universal Health Care, joint parenting, et cetera would be nice, but I’m certainly not holding my breathe. I am fully aware that I have a choice of a good family or a good career, not both, and am consciously choicing to not have kids (or a husband, sheesh, what a liability they are). And for that, I will fight first for being able to have that choice (birth control, abortions) and then fight second for universal child care (although, I think that’s important and ultimately better for everyone). Because I think I have a better chance at keeping bc then getting universal health care.
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May 9th, 2005 at 12:52 pm
*sorry*
Universal CHILD care, not health care. Although, I’d like universal health care too.
This comment was written by Antigone.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 1:37 pm
I have a great career and a great family life. My husband and I are self employed and share house/kid duty about 50/50. It can be done. although I admit I’m very lucky.
This comment was written by Elena.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 1:38 pm
If the wage gap was primarily cause by men taking more dangerous jobs, why is it that when you compare the salaries of men and women in the same field with the same experience and job performance ratings, men frequently get paid higher?
I know are certain amount of that gap comes from women being a bit “socialist” in their salary negotiations but I have to admit to being absolutely mortified when I came into management and saw the differences in salary between staff of different sexes at the same level/same level of experience (mind you, not as disgusted as when I found out a guy who was denied a promotion to my level for performance issues and had less significantly experience than I did had a salary a good $15K/year more than I was making and that wasn’t because I’m a pansy negotiater).
This comment was written by Ol Cranky.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 2:08 pm
In many of these high-risk jobs, there’s sexism, no?
Law enforcement is considered dangerous, though not among the most dangerous jobs and women are treated like pariahs there. Often in male-dominated jobs, women are treated very poorly on the basis of gender. At the very least, they are viewed as outsiders encroaching on men’s turf.
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May 9th, 2005 at 2:24 pm
There are jurisdictions that are more advanced in terms of acceptance of women on the job, but there are a helluva lot more jurisdictions where women are first choice on the layoff list…not because they aren’t good workers, but because the contractors and/or foremen believe that the men “really need the job”?, while the women always have the option of finding a man to support them.
This, I believe, is why the “pink collar” jobs pay as little as they do - the single women who traditionally held them were never expected to support a spouse or dependents on that income.
This comment was written by Jeff.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 2:29 pm
Hell yeah, the most dangerous occupations pay real good, they shore do. I should know. My job, land surveyor, has an on-the-job death rate the same as that of policemen. And look at us with our gold-plated plumb bobs and our shiny Cadillacs and all, we’re rolling in the dough!
But statistics show my current job has only sixty percent the death rate of a job I used to have, convenience store clerk (125% of minimum wage if you’re lucky). As we all know, there simply aren’t any female convenience store clerks because, heh heh, there’s a job that takes a man ’cause the little ladies are just plain too delicate for rugged work like that.
This comment was written by W. Kiernan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 2:33 pm
It can be done. although I admit I’m very lucky.
It has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with picking a partner who will share in the work, and in not falling into stereotypes that get away from that.
I’ve seen plenty of posts on other feminists’ blogs where women admit they’re hesitant to marry and/or have kids with their boyfriends because they aren’t sure he’d do at least 50% of the work. Well, hell, why are you with him then?
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 3:52 pm
Lack of better options? Easy tendancy to abuse for dinners and movies?
This comment was written by Antigone.Easy out clause if there are problems? General desire to keep my stuff seperate?
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May 9th, 2005 at 3:56 pm
Lack of better options?
Than staying with somebody who you know deep down is happy to buy into sexism when it means sticking you with the “girl work”? Wow. Great option.
This comment was written by mythago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 4:29 pm
I so wish I had time to read this whole post. I read the headline and the first few paragraphs. First thought that came to mind was — I did not get the effin memo!!! I did not realize my job paid better than, oh Jennifer Garner’s job or that other scum-feeding lawyer down the street who does not have to do a “friendly fire” investigation in Falluja! Armed with a pen and a law clerk — military lawyers investigate various mishaps, while getting shot at by Iranians, Jordanians and Syrians who are not happy that they can no longer systematically kill people for disagreeing with their policies like the Germans did over Europe.
Danger pay my ASS!
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May 9th, 2005 at 5:29 pm
So—did anyone catch the two-week series where Mallard Fillmore made the point ad nauseum that the liberal media was suppressing Warren Farrell and only John Leo had the guts to talk about the end of the wage gap? Man, that duck ain’t funny, but he sure knows the value of repetition. I was waitin’ for amp to take on the duck.
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May 9th, 2005 at 5:55 pm
I don’t see why anyone would think higher wages correlates to more dangerous jobs. If history teaches us anything its that the lowest paying jobs are dangerous because the people that do then are desperate for wages. Look at the history of coal ming for Gods sake, or factory work. In fact millions of women work in sweatshop in the third world under ridiculously unsafe conditions because that is their only job choice. Not to metion migrant farm workers in this country, or people that work in slaughterhouses. I would imagine many or even most of the injuries sustained by migrant farm workers go unreported so that we don’t have a good measure of how dangerous this work even is. And what about the dangers of prostituion? Also as far as state or city jobs go, I would imagine firerfighters don’t make tons more than school prinicpals, teachers, or beaurocrats. Of course the only way to settle this is to actually crunch the nubers but I can’t imagine that what they say is true.
This comment was written by LC.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 6:26 pm
A couple of things.
1. The so-called market theory of safety and health has a number of corollaries. First, that we don’t need the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because the market will take care of safety. If a jobsite is dangerous,the workers will just move to a safer job, or demand higher wages. The dangerous employer will thenbe forced to pay higher wages to attract workers, to the point where he is no longer competitive and has to make his workplace safer or go out of business.
Second, that all workplace accidents are therefore the fault of the worker for not just quitting and moving to another, safer , job.
Of course, this is all ridiculous. as Amp emphasizes, this is only theory, dependent on a number on assumptions that don’t exist in the real world.
2. This article is based on fatalities. Women suffer “only” 8% of all workplace fatalities. Injuries are a slightly different story. According to the BLS, women account for 35% of all workplace injuries:
Most of the injuries in “education and health services” are actually in health care where women make up the vast majority of hospital and nursing home workers.
Musculoskeletal injuries (MSDs), particularly back injuries, are epidemic in health are, particularly nursing homes. MSDs accound for one-third of all injuries and illnesses and most musculoskeletal disorders in 2003 were among the heavily female nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants. Many of these MSDs are permanently disabling, career ending injuries for which workers compensation is totally inadequate. The Bush administration’s repeal of OSHA’s ergonomics standard in 2001 was particularly harmful to women. (More on nursing homes here.
It’s also interesting to note that assaults account for almost 3% of injuries suffered by women, but just over 1% of injuries suffered by men. Assaults and violence are the second leading cause of death for women. Until recently, they were the leading cause.
This comment was written by Jordan Barab.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 8:05 pm
I think amp has debunked the strong case that holds danger is the only reason for pay disparities. (was anyone actually making that claim?) I do not think he’s debunked the weak case, that danger is a factor in pay.
The weak case is enough to debunk the slogan “equal pay for equal work.” If job B has a 15x greater chance of death than job A, it’s not equal work.
Figuring out the multiple causes of pay disparity is hard, and it’s valuable that amp is trying.
I’m not sure childcare is low risk. Farmers may be underpaid, but a heck of a lot of them are millionaires. A bureau of labor statistics graph isn’t specific enough for the kind of nuanced contextual inquiry we need here.
Men choose jobs in part based on pay, risk, status among coworkers, status in the community, whether the job is fun, whether they are good at it, to meet chicks, to get out of the house… it’s complex, but it can be studied. Women, similar, not identical weighing of choices.
This comment was written by arbitrary aardvark.I’m guessing people who are primary caretakers for young children are more risk averse.
A significant factor in the pay disparity is sexual harrasment.
A few risky jobs are firefighter, ninja, panhandler, race car driver, austronaut, crack dealer, whore, cop, king, president. I think it’s fair to say these jobs show gender disparities beyond what is explainable by risk assessment alone.
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May 9th, 2005 at 8:46 pm
Yes, but the academic studies I cited do provide nuanced contextual inquiries.
It’s impossible to entirely prove a negative, so I can’t prove that danger never contributes to wage disparities. All I really do is point out that the evidence doesn’t support the people who claim that such a thing is happening.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
May 9th, 2005 at 11:11 pm
Risk Aversion or Discrimination? Understanding the Gender Pay Gap Using Matched Data from May 2004 has something to say about this issue.
It is, in all likelyhood, a must-read for everyone interested in this issue.
This comment was written by Richard Sharpe.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 7:58 am
For those unwilling to read the paper, the paper concludes, in part:
It seems that the emperor has no clothes.
This comment was written by Richard Sharpe.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 8:07 am
“preference.” Interesting word. Some people around here think that women simply prefer to not take tradeswork into consideration. But there’s more here than meets the eye.
When I entered the trades, the usual working hours were 8AM-4:30PM M-F. That has slowly morphed into 7AM-3:30PM, M-F; and some areas it’s 7AM-5:30PM, M-Th. And yeah, this has had an effect on the number of women who can consider going into construction.
I live in a city of 120,000 people, which by Internet standards is a very small town. By Illinois standards, it’s a decent size city. There is one child-care facility (three locations) that opens before 7AM. Just one. That facility, and a couple of others, are the only ones open after 6PM (most facilities require you to pick up your child before 5:30PM). There is only one child-care facility open on Saturday. There are no child-care facilities open on Sunday. None.
What this means, is that single women, or women with husbands that work difficult hours, or on the road, or who are in the military, or whatever, are unable to choose this line of work. “Flex-time” is not an option in my field. There have been cases of contractors adjusting the hours for male journeymen whose wives do shift-work, and thus had to take their kids to the SCOPE program (before and afterschool care within the public school system; the hours don’t begin until 7:30AM), but no contractor has ever made the adjustment for apprentices (male or female) because apprentices need supervision by journeymen (translation? someone would have to be paid overtime).
Single women have always been the largest group of women interested in tradeswork, and the largest group who’ve stayed. But not without a scramble. I’ve seen women drop out of the apprenticeship program because try as they might, they couldn’t solve the child-care scramble. For a while, my solution was to have my retired mother be my child-care provider. Now my mother is terminal, and that is no longer an option. I’ve been using the one child-care facility that opens before 7AM. They don’t accept kids older than seven. What will I do when my daughter turns eight? I don’t know yet.
The trades have had a difficult time retaining skilled women. A common scenario is a woman who has been in ten-fifteen years starts taking night classes and gets a degree, then gets out of the trades. Why? Well, because contractors aren’t promoting us to foreman’s positions; we get scads of opportunities to work for (white) male foremen younger than our old t-shirts (not much of an exaggeration, unfortunately). If you aren’t a foreman by the time you’re forty, your earning potential will plummet. There is plenty of documented eveidence of age discrimination in the construction field. The Labor Paper in Peoria had an article about it; unfortunately it is not available online.
We are also laid off first. I’m not kidding about the “but the men really need the job” attitude. Check out a book by Susan Eisenberg (a journeyman wireman) called “We’ll Call You If We Need You”. It’s an in-depth account of the struggles facing women in construction. See also another book by Victoria King (another journeyman wireman) entitled “Manhandled: Black Females”. It delves into racism as well as sexism in the trades, but Ms. King, like Ms. Eisenberg, still advocates for women entering the trades. Both were single mothers. Neither still works in the trades (I believe Susan Eisenberg is teaching now; Victoria King is an attorney).
Most of us who came into the trades and stayed come from a less-privileged background, so it takes a while for us to…not notice the discrepancies, we notice them right off the bat!…..but to assign them a value. Once we start comparing what our pension statements look like in comparison with our brothers, and how often we are laid off in comparison….we start looking for alternatives. That, and most women have to wait until their kids get older (and can watch themselves) before taking night classes. Some tradeswomen find their alternative in Civil Service positions. Some aim for administrative positions in their Local, or in their International. And some just get out, with most telling other women not to bother.
Not me. I still think this is an excellent way for women to make a living. It’s the best alternative if college is too costly an option for you. But job hours incompatible with child care options is a barrier. A huge barrier.
I’ve been lucky. For one thing, I had my child at an extremely advanced age by Illinois standards…32. And I’ve already attained journeyman status, and know a lot of the ins-and-outs. I can try to negotiate “flexible hours”, if need be (and file a grievance if the contractor in question provided that benefit to male journeymen, but won’t for me). My journeyman status also means I have the option of applying for Civil Service positions. I came into the trades during a decent economy, and so haven’t had a long-term layoff until recently. When work gets slow, faces on the job get more white and more male. Call it discrimination (because it is), or if the D-word makes you uncomfortable, call it the “halo effect”. There is a reason white male apprentices have an easy time finding mentors, and get invited out for after-work extracurriculars. There is a reason white male journeymen have an greater chance of staying when work gets slow. Hey, who wants to lay off a buddy? But the folks you don’t know so well? (That’s why I always advise female and apprentices of color to get seriously involved in the Local, in the labor community, and in political activities sponsored by the labor community…..it’s about the only way to jump-start a real professional relationship with one’s co-workers, that is anywhere near being on-par with what the white guys naturally fall into).
Hey, what’s life without the Struggle, right? But that doesn’t mean we have to fall into the “three monkeys” routine and act like all “choices” are equal, or even that they are really choices.
This comment was written by La Lubu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 10:21 am
I love those that claim that it’s women’s choices about employment preferences that are one of the major reasons why women aren’t paid at the same levels as men.
For a start, women’s socialisation herds them into professions that are considered more ‘gender typical’, which also tend to be paid less (the reasons for such are a matter for another time). There is no such thing as ‘free’ choice, we all make choices based upon the cultural biases we have internalised, like any other good member of society. It’s like telling a girl “you can only be a teacher, you can only be a teacher” throughout her like, and then when she becomes a teacher, and complains about not being paid as much, then she is told “well, it’s your own damn fault for becoming a teacher”.
But even in professions where women predominate, there is a heirarcy in place. If you look at female dominated academic departments as an example, even though sociology as a discipline has a nearly 70% female graduation rate, but yet most of the senior, and well paid, positions are occupied by men. So, women are not only positioned hierarically between different professions, but within the same professions they are also positioned similarly.
I am actually about to start working for an initiative that is active working to increase the numbers of female faculty and researchers in the sciences and engineering. One thing you definitely learn right off the bat is that the reasons for pay gaps and employment gaps are multitude and varied (as is evidence by the above example of socialisation), but the gap is very very real, and the only difference between those that have closed the gap and those that certainly even close to such, is merely the degree of the gap.
Yes, things have improved (marginally) but anyone that honestly thinks that things are equal had really stop putting their heads in the sand.
(oh, and La Lubu, good to see someone else from IL! *smile* Plus its really wonderful to see a woman succeeding like you have!)
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 10:45 am
(Richard, would you mind if I quoted from that email you sent me? Let me know.)
Richard, I had some criticisms of the study by Black and company you link to, and of the conclusions you’ve apparently drawn from the study.
1. The study isn’t about “risk” as I’ve used the term “risk.”
I’m not sure that you understood what Black et al study you’ve linked to actually says. It has virtually nothing to do with “risk” in the sense of risk of death or injury; the risk your study talks about is the risk of wages falling after taking a white-collar job. (The Black et al study covered only white-collar employees, few if any of whom face significant risk of deadly job-related accidents).
2. The study’s results aren’t applicable to the US labor market.
It’s a little bizarre to apply a study about risk of white-collar wage cuts to the US, because large employers in the US don’t typically cut white-collar wages, as far as I know. I’ve worked in white-collar jobs all my life, and I don’t recall once taking “is this employer likely to cut my wages after hiring me?” into account when taking a job.
Indeed, Black et al flatly state in their conclusion that their results may not apply to the United States:
(They go on to point out that overall trends in the US and Norway are similar - that is, the wage gap has narrowed over time in both countries. That similarity, however, doesn’t change the fact that their data may not be applicable to the US labor market).
3. Where this study is about occupational segregation, it agrees with what I’ve said in the past; where it’s about discrimination, its findings are dubious.
The Black et al study is mainly about the controversy over whether occupational segregation (which means, the way men and women tend to work in different jobs) is the main reason for the wage gap (as I claimed in this post), or whether a substantial portion of the wage gap is caused by women getting paid less than men for substantially identical jobs. The Black et al study agrees with me that occupational segregation accounts for much more of the wage gap.
Then there’s the separate question of whether occupational segregation is caused by discrimination, by sexism, by pure worker choice, or some combination of the three factors. Here Black et al are simply bizarre. On page 3, they write:
Another, much more relevant possibility is that firms discriminate not by paying equally capable women less than men (pay-level discrimination), but by segregating who they hire into what positions by sex (hiring-level discrimination). In other words, to some extent, the sorting is done by firms when they hire and when they promote. If firms do this, then on paper women will be “less capable” than men, because they will not have job titles and job experience to match men; however, this doesn’t at all eliminate the possibility that the job market discriminates against women by sorting them into lower-paying jobs.
Black et al do not seem to seriously examine this possibility at all, and so cannot say if firm-level sorting is occurring, and how much of the wage gap might be due to such sorting.
Furthermore, there’s the matter of how sexism may constrain the choices women and men make, which I discussed in this post. Even insofar as the wage gap is due to choices made by women (and, clearly, some portion of the wage gap is caused by this factor), it’s assuming far too much to conclude that these choices have nothing to do with sexism. Black et al don’t address the question of broader social sexism at all. That’s fine - no study can discuss everything - but it also limits how broad a conclusion you can draw from their work.
Finally, “In order to treat measures of variability in profits as a proxy for risk,” they had to make a chain of dubious assumptions, none of which seemed fully supported by data. Indeed, on table 5 (which is essential for their profit/risk connection), you can see that once they controlled for both job and industry, their results are no longer statistically significant. (They mark statistically significant results with a **).
4. This study doesn’t include dummies to measure the impact of industry-level wage biases.
Although they include a lot of information about industries, which is good, they don’t include any dummy variables accounting for industry-level pay differences. As the studies I discussed in my post show, at least in the USA, not including those dummy variables leads to inaccurate results when looking at risk (in the injury/death sense) and gender. Does it lead to inaccurate results when looking at risk in the wage cut sense? I don’t know, and since this study didn’t account for this factor, we can’t eliminate the possibility.
5. This study, which doesn’t appear to have yet been accepted for publication or to have gone through peer-review, makes inappropriate conclusions.
For example, Black et al write:
If the wage gap is “exacerbated” - which means made larger - by industry sorting, that suggests that women are sorted into lower paid industries and occupations, not higher paid ones. Is this a wording error - did they actually mean to say “lower” and not “higher”? Or are they saying that the gender wage gap is exacerbated in a counterintuitive manner? I’m not sure which they meant.
I’d really like to see where this paper ends up being published, and what sort of changes the peer review process causes. I’m guessing that bizarre statements like the one I just quoted will be explained or corrected; that the fact that some of their important results were not statistically significant will be pointed out more clearly; and (I hope) the weakness of their case for concluding that firm-level discrimination is ruled out will be made more clear.
* * *
Bottom line:
The paper you cite has nothing to do with “risk” in the sense I was discussing, is not really relevant to the US labor market, hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and has questionable (and sometimes not even statistically significant!) results supporting questionable conclusions.
If your goal was proving me wrong, I don’t think you’ve succeeded very well.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 11:01 am
Sarah, thanks! Women in academia don’t really have it much better than I do. My last next-door neighbor was a PhD. in Business Administration, with over twenty years of teaching experience, with publication up the ying-yang. The university she formerly worked for saw fit to hire a young (white) man, sans PhD, not published yet, for a teaching position and pay him more money. That was the last straw for her; she now works at another university, in another state.
I remember reading an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the difficult time women have getting tenure. Again, people who are happy with the status quo make the assumption that it is because of temporarily leaving the work force to have children, but the same conditions are operative in the lives of women who either had their children beforehand, or who don’t have children. No matter our actual parental situation, it is practically universally assumed that we will be mothers, and that therefore we will drop out of the workforce.
The Building and Construction Trades department of the AFL-CIO has (finally!) saw fit to launch a committee for Women in the Trades, to address the problems of recruitment, retention, and leadership of women in the trades. I’m anxious to see what the committee comes up with.
This comment was written by La Lubu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 11:45 am
Ampersand says:
Thank you for asking, but yes I do mind. Until we have gone around the issues for a while, and I have had a chance to think about them further and deeper, I would prefer email correspondence.
This comment was written by Richard Sharpe.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 11:52 am
Ampersand writes:
Firstly, I would like to point out that despite some of the issues (errors) some of which I noted, they deal with the issues with a lot more rigour than is evident, for the most part, on this blog.
Secondly, I don’t think the issue is actual “risk” but the perception of risk, and the differing ways in which males and females respond to the perception of risk. A well known result from other areas is that young males (in particular) discount risk, on average, and females are much more likely to be risk-averse, on average.
Lastly, one common tendency I see in many responses to these articles is to automatically label outcomes they dont like as being the result of discrimination without being prepared to look at what actual processes are operating, and to what extent the gender-gap can be explained natually and not as the evil female-exploiting proclivities of white males.
This comment was written by Richard Sharpe.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 12:39 pm
Yes, that’s true. Are you seriously suggesting that a blog should deal with social science and economics issues with the same degree of rigor evident in papers written for peer-reviewed academic journals?
A better question is, does the paper you cited deal with these issues with more rigor than the peer-reviewed papers I cited? I don’t think it does. However, it has not yet been through the peer-review process, and in fact states that it is only a working draft. It is therefore very possible that the paper will be improved in the future.
The paper you cited dealt with real (albeit dubiously measured) risk. It did not include any direct measures of perception of risk. Nonetheless, I agree with you that this is an important distinction to keep in mind; you’re right to bring it up.
Returning to the MRA and anti-feminist arguments I was responding to, however, clearly their claims assume that we’re talking about actual risk, not just perceived risk. When Glenn Sacks writes “It is not unfair in the least that dangerous jobs pay more than safe jobs at the same skill level,” his statement only makes sense if he’s referring to actual risk, not just perception of risk. So I don’t think you can rescue their arguments by saying that “the issue is… perception of risk,” because that’s not the issue they were talking about.
By using the passive voice (that’s bad prose, by the way), you’ve made it impossible to know if what I’ve written is included in your statement. But regardless of what you intended, most readers will assume your criticism was meant to include what I’ve written in this discussion. So I’m going to respond as if it were a critique of what I wrote.
I think there is clear-cut evidence of discrimination in labor markets in the USA, some of which I’ve discussed in this post. In fact, I spent years of college studying the processes accounting for the gender gap; and any fair reading of my views makes it clear that I don’t think discrimination accounts for 100% of the wage gap.
In regards to studies such as the one by Black et al, I don’t assume that they prove discrimination and sexism matters in the labor market. I just point out that they don’t disprove that discrimination and sexism matter in the labor market.
Anything more than that you read into my words is the result of your own bias, not the result of an accurate reading of anything I’ve written in this thread.
Needless to say, I’ve never said the gender gap is caused by “the evil female-exploiting proclivities of white males,” per se. I doubt any serious feminist economist has ever said such a thing. That you think in such stereotypical and shallow terms (not just here but also in the email you sent me, which you’ve wisely asked me not to quote), however, says a lot about the low quality of your thought process, and how non-serious you are about attempting to have a respectful exchange of views.
Feminists are not the simplistic stereotype you imagine we are; and by bringing up such tedious stereotypes, you’re wasting my time. Please attempt to provide posts more worth reading in the future, by 1) cutting out the feminist-bashing stereotypes, 2) cutting out condescending remarks (e.g., “the empress is naked,” and 3) cutting out the reliance on the passive voice.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 2:16 pm
Richard Sharpe, I have a few observations:
1. What subjects are considered worthy of study, and what studies get funded, has a lot to do with who is already in a position of power. As a female journeyman, I would love to see some in-depth studies on why so few women enter the trades, and what we can do to increase the number entering, staying, and getting promoted. But this is not considered to be a subject worthy of study. Women have been working in construction on a regular basis since 1972 (apprenticeships are covered under Title IX), yet it is only now, in 2005, that the AFL-CIO has committed to pushing this particular envelope. Right now, women in my trade represent one percent of all the workers. In the construction field at large, we are three percent. That two percent difference can basically be chalked up to the Laborers having a higher female percentage on road crews, which as publically-funded projects, are required to have their workforce resemble (somewhat) the population. Road projects are very visible to the public, hence enforcement of the “quota” (6.9% if you’re curious) is not as lax as it is behind the walls of publically funded building sites. If it wasn’t for the Laborers, the percentage would stay around one percent. This is not considered to be a problem by many; in fact many people in my area think fewer women should be in construction, as it is a well-paying job that should be occupied by a man. Women don’t really need to earn that much money, is the common belief. Thankfully, not just the AFL-CIO, but many individual labor unions (such as my own, the IBEW) and even contractors’ associations, are beginning to wake up to the fact that by creating artificial barriers that keep women out, they are shooting themselves in the foot. The times, they are indeed changing….they could certainly pick up the pace a bit.
2. What do I mean by artificial barriers? Well, for one thing, like the child-care grind. Greater availability of child care, and employment hours that coincide with available child care (since latchkey-kid arrangements, like how I grew up, are now illegal) will remove that barrier. Other artificial barriers are assumptions about what women can or should do, assumptions about how the job dynamic will change if women enter, assumptions about the type of work women will take on, hours of apprenticeship classes, lack of orientation programs (the jobsite is quite a bit different from other work environments, on several levels), lack of effective recruitment programs (my Local’s recruitment program consists of a small ad in the back of two area newspapers. If you don’t read the paper, you’ll never know when apprenticeship applications are being taken), limited time-frame for applications (as opposed to open applications, with periodic testing whenever a certain number of people have applied to make the expense worthwhile), etc.
3. Talk of the level of “risk aversion” being linked to sex is specious, at best. I don’t know where you live, but I live in one of the more conservative, traditional parts of the U.S. Even here, I see a significant number of women, especially under forty, who take on all kinds of “risky” avocations, giving precious little thought to their likelihood of broken bones, scrapes, or worse. The local BMX track is probably at least a third female, for example. And as for vocations, the military is a pretty risky endeavor, yet has many more times the number of female applicants as the average trade. Why? Better recruitment, retention, and advancement strategies. Also, better support and orientation systems. A short look over the past few decades of history should prove that when barriers come down, female participation increases, including in nontraditional areas. This has nothing to do with nature, and everything to do with nurture.
4. Please point me in the direction of the fire-breathing feminists who are exposing the inherent eeee-vil of white males. In my post, you’ll notice I mentioned one aspect of the dynamic, the halo effect. The motivation of most of the people who are actively, de-facto discriminating isn’t to shut the door on women (some of them do take exactly that stance, but they are the minority), but to give others who resemble them opportunities. They see young white men coming up in the trades who remind them of their younger selves, and they pave the way forward for those individuals. For the most part, they aren’t even aware that they aren’t behaving equally to all the apprentices. The feeling of discrimination can be subjective, on the part of both the discriminator and discriminatee. The effects can be objectively measured. One notable job of a few years ago had the travelers (first layoff, as by contract–the travelers must go before the Local hands) and the three females on the job laid off first (I was not on that job). Two of the women were apprentices. One of them had the highest grade point average in her class. Both were always there on time, ready to work, doing their job, no problems. Both had good apprenticeship reports. They were laid off before two (white) males who literally showed up if and when they felt like it. Not calling in absent for days. These white guys were kept for several weeks like this, to give them a chance to “straighten up”. You can tell me this is just an anecdote, and it is. But it’s also an anecdote writ large, across the nation, as is evidenced in Ms. Eisenberg’s book. I’m still waiting for the study to come along, so stories like this (complete with the employee records and apprenticeship records to prove it) can be entered as actual evidence. The hard-copy evidence is available. Someone has to want to look.
5. And for more reading, Richard, feel free to check out my post on the topic: Gendered Bodies, Gendered Minds. Just as prejudice can be learned, it can be unlearned. You have to want to unlearn it.
This comment was written by La Lubu.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 2:52 pm
Ampersand says:
I don’t think the MRA groups actually know what is going on. They appear to be, for the most part, floundering around making noise trying to absolve themselves from their part in the tragic personal situations they find themselves in.
However, it seems to me that in this topic you have not handled their argument properly by dismissing it without any discussion of whether it is all bogus or only partially bogus. You rightly point out that there are industries where there is high risk but where there is no income premium, but it seems to me that there are other industries where there is risk and there is a risk premium to be had, which are also predominantly occupied by men. It is not the level of risk that is at issue here, rather it is the level of the premium available and what percentage of the wage-gap that can be explained by this argument.
In addition, you never quantify the actual wage gap you are arguing for here, it seems to me*, and leave us to infer that you are refering to the 75 cents in the dollar claim (that we hear so frequently in the press, and which seems very outdated). Now maybe that is because you are simply reacting to the arguments of the a group of people who don’t have very many interesting things to say, and if that’s the case, then I am in the wrong place.
You also say:
But, even here you make it possible for your readers to walk away with the impression that it accounts for, say, 95% of the wage gap. However, people like Marie Drolet at Stats Canada, and others point out that some (large) portion of the gap is explainable, and she goes to great lengths to explain her methods. Sure, her articles are not peer reviewed, but I don’t think that means we can dismiss them.
Finally, discrimination is, I suspect, a bad word to use in the context of these discussions, because it carries so much emotional baggage, but it is also used as a technical term in some of the papers I have seen. However, I can’t suggest a better term. The problem is, though, a great many of the your readers will walk away with the perception that the reason they are working in the lower end of the restaurant industry (pick any you like) and are earning a fraction of what a CEO does is due entirely to active discrimination all their lives.
* Of course, this could be because I have not read your postings closely enough, even though I did read them all.
This comment was written by Richard Sharpe.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 3:22 pm
La Lubu, I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve written here. Good writing about labor issues, with concrete detail, is in far too short supply.
This comment was written by Brian Vaughan.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 5:13 pm
Well, there are always individual exceptions, so I try to avoid absolutist statements. For almost all practical purposes, however, I think the risk/wage connection MRAs believe in is entirely bogus.
And why do those industries pay the so-called “risk premium” even to people who face no extra risk, such as secretaries? And why does the risk premium lose all statistical significance once industry differences in pay scales (which are well-documented, and which don’t exist exclusively in high-wage industries) are controlled for?
Interesting point.
It’s true that I don’t pick one figure (60%? 75%? 85%?) and argue that it’s the One True Number. That’s because I don’t think any One True Number exists. As I wrote in part one of this series, there are simply too many ways to measure the wage gap. To quote myself:
From my perspective, all that really matters is: do unfair factors, such as sexism and discrimination, account for a significant portion of the wage gap? If so, then that’s a problem which needs addressing.
Other questions - like what is the True Wage Gap Number, or Precisely What Percent of the wage gap can be accounted for by non-sexist factors - are interesting, but not nearly as important.
I think that reports from Stats Canada - and, for that matter, studies from the US Federal Government - maintain high standards and have an internal review process similar to peer review. (Anyhow, it’s not fair to imply that I said that all non-peer-reviewed studies should be dismissed; that the study you relied on was not peer reviewed was only a small part of my overall critique, most of which you didn’t refute).
I think you underestimate my readers intelligence (possibly you’re stereotyping feminists again?). I think most of my readers understand that many factors - including luck, race, gender, class, ablebodied/disabled status, body type, choice constraint, and other “unfair” factors, and also including “fair” factors like choices, effort and skill - determine how much money most people earn. (Although there are always individual exceptions).
I don’t know of any feminist who’d say that choices, effort and skills matter so little that they basically don’t matter at all. On the other hand, it’s common for anti-feminists and MRAs to claim that gender accounts for 2% or less of the wage gap, which is essentially saying that it doesn’t matter at all. It seems to me that the extremists are to be found mainly on that side of the debate, not on mine.
This comment was written by Ampersand.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 5:38 pm
La Lubu,
damn girl, colour me more impressed by the minute :)
But you are right, it is funny how academia gets painted as a bastion of liberal bias where one would expect the most gains to have been acheived there (this is aside from one of my lesbian professors recently having her office door plastered with homophobic slurs). But in reality it’s not much different on the whole (there are exceptions of course, but they are just that though; exceptions).
We are actually noticing that something quite insidious is going on right now. With the swing to a more conservative political mileau and the budget crunches for public tertiary institutions occurring there has been a upswing in women being denied tenure, particularly so if they have a more liberal, feminist, queer or non-white bent.
I can speak specifically of the woman that used to be my dissertation advisor, so last year got her tenure denied. She had a number of articles published, had a number of others and a book pending, and was consistently rating as the top teacher in our department. but because she had requested two extentions on the tenure process because she had had three kids during that time with her husband, this was all seen as ‘evidence’ of a perceived lack of committment to academia. Of course, the fact that one of the senior white professors was overheard saying “I know this [the increase in non-white and female professors] is going to happen, but I am going to resist it as long as possible” AND most of the male professors have kids of their own (oh, but guess what? Wives at home! How handy …), don’t have ANYTHING to do with it.
My advisor is now looking elsewhere than academia, and I don’t blame her. I have been told by a multitude of female professors (some post retirement) that unless I really really want to be an academic, I should avoid it and the tenure process like the plague. And that’s what I am doing; once my doctorate is done I am look research and real world consultancy positions.
But La Lubu, if you’re ever up Chicago way and want a beer … :)
This comment was written by Sarah in Chicago.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 8:07 pm
Well, there are always individual exceptions, so I try to avoid absolutist statements.
I just wanted to thank you for this priceless gem. Can I quote you?
Death to all fanatics!
This comment was written by Robert.Report this comment to the moderators
May 10th, 2005 at 8:13 pm
Sarah, I don’t quite get what you’re saying.
It sounds to me like your professors’ peers were correct - she isn’t committed to academia. She decided that being a mother was more important, and she didn’t have someone at home willing to shoulder a larger share of the parenting burden, the way some of her peers did. There’s an interesting discussion to be had