(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.

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

In this post, I’ll address a very simple question: what evidence is there that economic discrimination against women currently exists in the USA? Reading the works of conservatives like Christina Hoff Sommers, one gets the impression that economic discrimination against women might not exist at all, nowadays. Unfortunately, that’s not true.

This post won’t even come close to describing the hundreds of academic papers and news reports which have found evidence of discrimination against women. Instead, I’ll be looking at just a few examples that clearly demonstrate that economic discrimination against women, contrary to the claims of the anti-feminists, is a real problem.

Audits

What happens if two otherwise identical people, one male and one female, apply for the same job? This is one of the clearest ways of showing discrimination. If discrimination never happens, then otherwise identical men and women would get identical results in the job market.

Of course, in the real world, no two people are ever identical. But researchers can fake it. For instance, economist David Neumark[1] conducted an “audit study.” “The purpose of an audit study is to provide much more direct evidence on discrimination than is provided by other empirical methods.” Male and female job applicants, chosen for similar characteristics, and trained to act in similar ways, applied in pairs for waiter positions in restaurants in Philadelphia. The applicants used fictional resumes that had been designed to show equal qualifications for a waiter position.

The results? 85% of the job offers from high-price restaurants (where wages are correspondingly high) were made to male job applicants. In contrast, 80% of the job offers from low-price, low-wage restaurants were made to women. This is clear evidence of sex discrimination in employment - evidence which might explain how it is that waitresses in the United States are paid only 75% of what waiters make.

Job Applicants Without Sex

Another interesting question is, what would happen if employers hired people without knowing their sex? If the anti-feminists are correct and sex discrimination doesn’t exist, then this would make no difference - employers would hire the same people whether or not they knew the sex of job applicants.

Of course, since employers quite reasonably want to interview people before hiring them, it generally never happens that people are hired without the employer knowing their sex. An interesting exception to this rule is major symphony orchestras. Most major symphony orchestras now practice “blind auditions,” in which musicians audition for a spot in the orchestra from behind a screen. Symphony directors choose which candidates to hire without knowing the sex of the person auditioning.

The economists Claudia Goldin and Cecilia Rouse, in a paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research,[2] asked an interesting question: do female musicians have a better chance of being hired when the judges don’t know their sex? Using data from actual audition records, they found that blind auditioning “increases by 50%” a woman’s odds of getting past preliminary auditions, and by several times increases the chance that a woman will win the final round of auditions. As much as 55% of the increase in women in symphony orchestras since the 1970s is due to the use of blind auditions.

Pay Differences Among the Highly Paid

Anti-feminists often complain that feminists don’t account for important economic factors - such as “occupation, age, experience, education, and time in the work force”[3] - when comparing male and female pay. Curiously, however, the anti-feminists themselves ignore many studies that account for all these factors and more, and still find a wage gap. Moreover, they often include economically irrelevant factors - such as comparing only the wages of very young women and men, as if discrimination among people ages 33 and up isn’t something we should be concerned with. (To read more about this, click here.)

One of the best studies of the sort the anti-feminists urge, considering as many economically relevant factors as possible, was done by the economists Robert Wood, Mary Corcoran and Paul Courant.[4] By looking at a very specific and detailed sample of workers - graduates of the Michigan Law School - they were able to examine the wage gap while matching men and women for many other possible explanatory factors - not only “occupation, age, experience, education, and time in the workforce,” but also childcare, average hours worked, grades while in college, and other factors.

The result? Even after accounting for all that, women still are paid only 81.5% of what men “with similar demographic characteristics, family situations, work hours, and work experience” are paid.

Department of Labor Audits

Federal contractors are periodically examined by the Department of Labor to see if they are complying with federal laws requiring equal treatment of female and male employees. According to the National Committee on Pay Equity, the DOL still needs to order companies to halt their unequal treatment of women. The NCPE website gives some examples:

• Texaco, which agreed to pay $3.1 million to 186 female employees who were found to be systematically underpaid compared to their male counterparts.

• Trigon Blue Cross Blue Shield, which paid $264,901 in back pay to 34 women managers who were paid less than male managers of equal qualifications and seniority.
• US Airways, which agreed to pay $390,000 in back pay and salary adjustments to 30 women managers who were paid less than their male coworkers.
• Corestates Financial Corp., which agreed to pay nearly $1.5 million in back wages and salary adjustments to women and minorities. The Labor Department found instances in which employees with more seniority or better performance reviews were paid less because they were women or minorities.

EEOC lawsuits are also worth considering. According to HR Magazine (May 2005), “At least 24,000 sex discrimination complaints have been filed with the EEOC each year since 1998, and the dollar figure for settlements during the same time period has nearly doubled. In 2004 alone, the EEOC resolved more than 10,000 sex discrimination complaints in favor of the charging party and recovered $100.8 million in monetary benefits for charging parties and other aggrieved individuals (not including monetary benefits obtained through litigation).”

Women get less credit for their work.

It’s long been believed by feminists that women often need to accomplish more than men in their field to be given the same credit. A recent study of scientific credit, published in the journal Nature, seems to prove the feminists right.[6]

What the Nature study did was examine 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. Publication in peer-reviewed scientific journals is often considered to be the most objective and “concrete” sign of accomplishment in the sciences. These factors were then compared to how an actual scientific review panel measured scientific competence when deciding which applicants would receive research grants. Receiving grants like these are essential to the careers of scientific researchers.

The results? Female scientists needed to be at least twice as accomplished as their male counterparts to be given equal credit. For example, women with over 60 “impact points” - the measure the researchers constructed of scientific productivity - received an average score of 2.25 “competence points” from the peer reviewers. In contrast, men with less than 20 impact points also received 2.25 competence points. In fact, only the most accomplished women were ever considered to be more accomplished than men - and even then, they were only seen as more accomplished than the men with the very fewest accomplishments.

Other studies have found similar results. [7]

Discrimination against female consumers.

Most research on economic discrimination has been concentrated on work and working. However, there are other kinds of economic discrimination which should be considered, such as discrimination against consumers. In her book Why Women Pay More, Frances Cerra Whittelsey detailed many examples of women being charged more than men for the same products and services (for example, for dry-cleaning a plain cotton shirt).

Whittelsey’s book in some ways implies that part of the problem is that women may not negotiate as well as men (for instance, she includes some good advice on how to negotiate prices when buying a car). Professor Ian Ayres, of the Northwestern University School of Law, used audit testing to examine this question.[8] Testers of different sexes and races were trained to use a single, uniform negotiating strategy for all car negotiations. Professor Ayres measured both initial offers, before any negations had begun, and final outcomes of negotiations.

The results? White men consistently got far better deals than white women, black women or black men - even though all of them used the same negotiating strategy. According to Professor Ayres, “white women had to pay forty percent higher markups than white men; black men had to pay more than twice the markup; and black women had to pay more than three times the markup of white male testers.” A black woman walking into a car dealership, and negotiating just the same as a white man, ends up paying $900 more for her car.

Footnotes:

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

On page 16 of the anti-feminist economics handbook Women’s Figures, the authors explain that “if women were only paid seventy-four cents on a man’s dollar, then a firm could fire all its men, replace them with women, and have a cost advantage over rivals.” This argument - or some variation of it - is commonplace among anti-feminists (for another example, see Warren Farrell’s discussion in his book The Myth of Male Power).

This argument sounds logical enough - so long as we assume that no other factors aside from the wage gap are operating. But in the real-world economy, other factors are always operating. (Curiously enough, this flawed logic can be used to “prove” not only that discrimination against women doesn’t exist, but also that racial discrimination doesn’t exist, and furthermore that neither racial nor sexual discrimination has ever existed.)

Some industries have, in effect, saved money by gradually replacing a male work force with a female work force. But there are many reasons employers might retain a male workforce, even though the pay gap means that men are paid more on average.

Why employers would retain a male work force.

If the only thing in the world to think about was the gender pay gap, no doubt many employers would look for ways to immediately replace their male workforces. But that’s not how things work in the real world. Employers have many compelling reasons not to fire all the men; here are just a few.

• To deliberately replace male workers with female workers in order to save money (rather than letting market forces do the same thing more gradually) is a sure way to get sued.

• The female workforce is not infinite; there aren’t enough women to fill all the jobs in the US currently held by men, in addition to the jobs women already have.
• Many industries have union contracts to contend with.
• The transition costs of replacing all one’s male employees (especially in male-dominated workplaces) may well be higher than the costs of the wage gap; hiring and training new workers is very expensive.
• Those transition costs are even higher when you consider how unhappy and unmotivated the men will be to train their female replacements.
• Customers in some industries may prefer to be waited on by men (customer-level discrimination is one theory as to why high-price restaurants prefer male servers).
• The employer may simply be prejudiced, and thus willing to pay the extra price to avoid employing women in some positions (this is conservative economist Gary Becker’s theory).
• The employer has community relations - and customer relations - to worry about.

For all these reasons and more, the fact that men still find employment is no proof that discrimination doesn’t exist.

Chicken and egg: women replacing men just as wages drop.

Even though employers have strong motivations not to replace male workers with female workers, it still has happened occasionally - although not in the tidy and unrealistic way pay gap critics suggest. When it happens, it’s not a conscious process, but rather the normal workings of a free-but-imperfect market (which makes it hard to recognize that such a thing has happened until it’s over). So in the 1980s, for example, insurance companies cut wages (or allowed inflation to lower wages), and over the same period insurance adjusters changed from a mainly-male occupation to a mainly-female occupation.

Historically, this process has happened many times; for instance, schoolteacher wages dropped as towns discovered that hiring a schoolmarm was cheaper than hiring a male teacher. Similarly, secretarial wages plummeted as that occupation became female-dominated. In a well-documented example, bank tellers changed from a male-dominated to a female-dominated occupation as wages (and prestige) dropped.

So which comes first, wages dropping, or women joining an occupation? This is a chicken-and-egg question. The adjustment from a male workforce to a female workforce is gradual; both changes happen together. A vicious cycle is formed; as more women join the occupation, wages get lower; and as wages get lower, fewer men apply for the job, increasing the proportion of women.

A misunderstanding of what the wage gap actually measures

Finally, the why-don’t-they-fire-all-the-men argument is based on a severe misunderstanding of the wage gap. Contrary to this argument’s assumption, the wage gap does not primarily measure difference in pay between women and men in identical jobs. Read my earlier entry What Causes the Pay Gap? for more information.

Postscript: James (of Hobson’s Choice), responding to Duane (of The Forest for the Trees) in the comments to an earlier post, took a different approach to rebutting this same argument. I hope James won’t mind if I reproduce his comments here:

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

So suppose you want to look at the wage gap. The best thing to do is to consider only what happens to young workers without children, right?

This myth, based on an unpublished study by economist June O’Neill, has mainly been propagated by two members of the right-wing Independent Women’s Forum, Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba. A typical example, from an ILF webpage, says: “The ‘wage gap’ frequently mentioned in the press is the result of a crude comparison. This ‘gap’ refers to the average wages of men and women, without regard to important factors such as age, education, occupation, or experience. When those key variables are considered, women earn essentially as much as men. Data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth, which does consider these key variables, reveal that among people ages 27 - 33 who have never had a child, women’s earnings are close to 98 percent of men’s.”

(By the way, counting both age and experience, as these folks advocate, is double-counting; age should not effect how much people are paid, except as a proxy for experience).

What other studies say

In fact, it’s not true that studies that account for age, education, occupation and experience - what economists call “human capital” favors - find no wage gap. Blau and Kahn accounted for all these factors and more, but a pay gap still remained. Wood and colleagues’ study of lawyers accounted for all of those factors and more, but again the pay gap wasn’t eliminated. Other scholars who have accounted for human capital differences but still found a substantial pay gap include Bellas, Wellington, Hampton & Heywood, Weinberger, England, Reid & Kilbourne, and Duncan (complete citations to all of these studies can be found at the bottom of this post).

What they miss by ignoring women over age 33

One important difference is in Furchtgott-Roth/Stolba’s unexplained decision to limit their study only to people ages 27-33. As the National Committee on Pay Equity asked, “where does that leave working women who are younger than 27 or older than 33?” It leaves them completely unexamined by the Furchtgott-Roth/Stolba study - which is very convenient, for right-wingers who want to minimize the pay gap.

This method of looking only at young women’s wages is hopelessly flawed. Discrimination in the workforce usually is a matter of “cumulative causation.” Among other things, this means that the effects of discrimination add up over a lifetime. So, for example, losing a single job offer or promotion usually won’t make a big difference; but dozens of such small losses over the course of women’s careers eventually add up to a big wage gap.

This is important, because it means we should expect the pay gap between men and women at the start of their careers to be small. The effects of discrimination build up gradually over time, and only becomes sizable once women have been in the job market long enough for the impacts of dozens of individual instances of discrimination to add up. So when Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba look only at the pay gap among young workers, they’ve selected workers who have not yet been in the workforce long enough to have experienced the worse of the pay gap.

For an example of what I mean, consider the U.S. government’s wage gap figures. Usually we see these presented for everyone in the labor force over the age of 16, but the numbers are also available broken down by age. What we find is that the wage gap gets larger as women get older - just as the theory of cumulative discrimination would predict. When we look only at workers age 16 to 24, the wage gap is 93% (that is, women are paid 93% of what men are paid, on average). But when we look at workers ages 45 to 54, the wage gap is 70%.

In short, Furchtgott-Roth and Stolba haven’t really shown that the wage gap doesn’t exist. All they’ve shown is that the wage gap is at its smallest among young workers - something that feminist economists have known for decades.

References:

(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.

(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.

(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 »

(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)

(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…)