This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

Sometimes ya gotta fisk. Such as when John Stossel writes about the wage gap between women and men.

Feminists keep demanding new laws to protect women from the so-called wage gap. Many studies have found that women make about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns. Activists say the pay difference is all about sexism.

Sure, I’d agree with that. But I’m probably defining “sexism” more broadly than Stossel. Stossel, I suspect, is defining “sexism” to mean “direct employer discrimination.” That’s certainly part of how sexism produces the wage gap, but it’s not the whole story.

For me, probably the most important kind of sexism going into the wage gap is the sexism of unquestioned assumptions; unquestioned assumptions about who does the housework, unquestioned assumptions about who does the child-rearing, unquestioned assumptions about innate ability, and most of all, unquestioned assumptions about how jobs are designed for people with wives at home.

I call this last factor the “Father Knows Best” economy; most jobs implicitly assume that workers have wives at home who are taking care of the kids and house, so that these responsibilities never need to be accomidated for by the employer. Maybe that assumption made sense half a century ago, but it doesn’t make sense now; and by continuing to implicitly make this assumption, our economy is making it unfairly difficult for caretakers (who are usually mothers) to have careers.

“No matter how hard women work, or whatever they achieve in terms of advancement in their own professions and degrees, they will not be compensated equitably!” shouted Rep. Rosa DeLauro, D-Conn., at a “wage equity” rally in Washington, D.C.

But how could this be possible? Suppose you’re an employer doing the hiring. If a woman does equal work for 25 percent less money, businesses would get rich just by hiring women. Why would any employer ever hire a man?

And if we extend Stossel’s logic, we can see that wage discrimination has never happened. After all, in the 1950s, why would anyone have hired a man when women would work cheaper? Why did anyone hire white people in the 1950s, for that matter, when they could have hired blacks cheaper? If we took Stossel’s logic seriously, we’d have to conclude that no discrimination existed in the 1950s. Or any other time, for that matter.

Stossel’s big mistake is assuming that if sexism is behind the wage gap, then it must be entirely a matter of women being paid 25% less than men for identical jobs. But actually, most economists who study the wage gap believe that it’s caused, to a significant extent, by occupational segregation, which means women and men are sorted by the market into different jobs - and the women’s jobs, on average, pay less.

Even if we put Stossel’s big error aside, employers still have good reason not to fire all men on Monday and then hire all women at lower wages on Tuesday: crippling transition costs, fear of discrimination lawsuits, the lack of enough women in the workforce to replace all men, desire to cater to customer prejudices, etc.

Despite all this, the market does sometimes make the sort of adjustment Stossel is discussing. In the 1980s, for example, insurance companies lowered wages (or allowed inflation to lower wages), and over the same time 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 much cheaper than hiring a male teacher. Similarly, secretarial wages plummeted as that became a female-dominated occupation. In a well-documented example, bank tellers changed from a male-dominated to a female-dominated occupation as wages (and prestige) dropped. (Currently, I suspect the same process is happening to cantors.)

Martha Burk, chair of the National Council of Women’s Organizations, gave me this simple answer: “Because they like to hire men, John. They like to hire people like themselves and they darn sure like to promote people like themselves.” In other words, men so love their fellow men that they are willing to pay a premium of, say, $10,000 on what would otherwise be a $30,000-a-year job, just for the sheer pleasure of employing a man. Nonsense. It’s market competition that sets wages.

Burk is correct - that sort of direct discrimination does account for part of the wage gap. But it would be a mistake to claim that it accounts for the whole wage gap (of course, I don’t assume that Burk’s full view is represented in this 25-word quote).

In dismissing Burk’s argument, Stossel assumes that either the (more-or-less) 25% wage gap is caused entirely by employers hiring women at 25% lower wages for the exact same job, or that the wage gap is caused entirely by market competition. But this is a straw man; no feminist economist would claim that all of wage gap is caused by men preferring to hire men, even if it means paying $40,000 instead of $30,000.

When discussing direct employer discrimination, it’s more realistic to discuss elements like selective hiring, training, promotion ladders, and other things that are a good deal more complex than John Stossel’s vision of the labor market seems to allow for. Given two equally able applicants for a $40,000 job, one male, one female - which one will employers tend to prefer? Once hired, who is more likely to get mentored? Who is more likely to be given the assignments that lead to promotion? Who is more likely to be percieved as doing good work, all else held equal?

Next comes the obligatory citation of Warren Farrell.

Farrell spent about 15 years going over U.S. Census statistics and research studies. His research found that the wage gap exists not because of sexism, but because more men are willing to do certain kinds of jobs. “The average full-time working male works more than a full-time working female,” Farrell said.

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 noticeable difference from the 76% figure for weekly full-time wages - but it still leaves the majority of the pay gap unaccounted for.

Farrell illustrates his findings at lectures by asking men and women to stand in answer to a series of questions about job choices, such as whether they work more than 40 hours a week, outdoors or in a dangerous job. Again and again, more men stand.

Gee - people who like Farrell’s writings enough to attend Farrell lectures, by an amazing coincidence, have job preferences that correspond with Farrell’s expectations. What stunning evidence!

Despite Farrell’s emphasis on “dangerous jobs,” the evidence of a wage premium for things like on-the-job danger or working outdoors isn’t very convincing. For example, the Bureau of Labor Statistics looked at actual wages and job conditions to calculate what job characteristics are associated with higher pay. The graph below shows what they found. The bar that’s furthest to the right - the bar that’s actually slightly negative - represents factors like on-the-job danger and outdoor work. As the BLS says, “Job attributes relating to … physically demanding or dangerous jobs… do not seem to affect wages.”

Danger and outdoor work have a lot to do with Warren Farrell’s stereotypical view of masculinity - but virtually nothing to do with the wage gap.

Suppose two people have equal potential, but one takes on more demanding, consuming, lucrative jobs while the other places a higher priority on family. The one who makes work the focus will be more productive for an employer than the one who puts his or her home life first. The latter will get more of the pleasures of family. So he (and it tends to be “he”) will make more money, even though she would be equally productive and equally rewarded if she made the same choices.

There’s just so much illogic here to be unpacked, I feel like the wardrobe wrangler on a Cher concert tour.

First of all, notice that taking care of children and home is described just as “the pleasures of family.” Well, taking care of children is extremely pleasurable and rewarding work - but let’s not forget that it’s still work. And it’s unpaid work.

Second, it’s true that there’s a wage penalty paid by primary caretaker parents (usually mothers). But why are jobs and careers designed in such a way that primary caretakers are punished? (Remember what I said about the “Fathers Knows Best” economy). And isn’t it possible that in a less sexist society, any parenting wage penalty would be split more evenly between women and men?

Third, Stossel is forgetting that high-paying jobs generally provide pleasure and satisfaction, as well. It’s a pretty safe bet, for example, that John Stossel finds his job provides him with emotional satisfaction and a feeling of accomplishment - despite the high pay. The higher-paid people are, the better the odds are that they have highly satisfying jobs performed in cushy conditions - the exact opposite of what Stossel is suggesting here.

One irony is that some people, especially young women, may make the choices that lead to the pay gap precisely because they have been taught the job market shortchanges women. Women who see the market as hostile may put their hearts into their homes instead of their careers — thus making less money.

Because goodness knows, there was absolutely no wage gap before feminists started talking about the concept.

I’ve written in more detail about most of Stossel’s arguments before. If you’re interested, check out these earlier posts:

• Myth: The Wage Gap is Caused by Men’s Higher Pay for Dangerous Jobs.
• Myth: If women really got paid less for similar work, then employers would replace all of the male workers with female workers.
• The Motherhood Myth.
• Myth: The Wage Gap Only Exists Because Men Work More Hours.
• What Causes the Wage Gap?

Thanks to Outside the Beltway for the link, and “Alas” reader “Barry” (no relation :-P ) for the tip.

This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

This post was removed by request of the author.

[This was originally a comment left by La Lubu on an earlier post; I’m “promoting” the comment to be its own post. –Amp]

“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 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 AP story shot around a bit early this week:

White women with BA’s lag in pay, census finds

Washington - Black and Asian women with bachelor’s degrees earn slightly more than similarly educated white women, and white men with four-year degrees make more than anyone else.

A white woman with a bachelor’s degree typically earned nearly $37,800 in 2003, compared with nearly $43,700 for a college-educated Asian woman and $41,100 for a college-educated black woman, according to figures being released today by the Census Bureau. Hispanic women took home slightly less at $37,600 a year[….]

A white male with a college diploma earns far more than any similarly educated man or woman - in excess of $66,000 a year, according to the Census Bureau. Among men with bachelor’s degrees, Asians earned more than $52,000 a year, Hispanics earned $49,000 and blacks earned more than $45,000.

This story was actually better than some, because it didn’t bury the fact that regardless of race, women as a group earn far less than men.

So why are black women and Asian women with degrees earning more annually than white women? As far as I can tell, it’s because white women, on average, are more likely to be part-time workers. As Tiffany at Blackfeminism.org pointed out, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research took a closer look at the data. They found that when the comparison was limited to only those women who work full-time, year-round, the “white disadvantage” disappeared:

According to recently released 2004 data from the U.S. Census Bureau, African American women working full-time, full-year earn $26,992 in median annual earnings, compared with $32,036 earned by comparable white women workers.

Among those with a bachelor’s degree alone, African American women earn $38,160 compared with $40,700 earned by comparable white women. African American women are also less likely than white women to hold bachelor’s degrees or higher, with only 16.7 percent of African American women holding bachelor’s degrees in 2004, compared with 24.6 percent of white women.

Asian American women, in contrast, earned more than white women even when comparing year-round, full-time workers. This may possibly reflect higher average educational attainment among Asian American women than white women. However, Asian American women - like Latinas, Black women, and American Indian women - are more likely to live in poverty than white women. And in turn, white women are more likely to live in poverty than white men.

I’ve already seen some anti-feminists argue that the same thing is true of the wage gap between men and women - that is, the reason women appear to earn less is that men work more hours than women. It’s true that men work more hours; however, the wage gap is much larger than can be accounted for just by the difference in work hours. More here.

A good article on anti-pregnancy discrimination in USA Today (although I do have a couple of nit-picks). Here are some key passages:

Pregnancy discrimination complaints filed with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) jumped 39% from fiscal year 1992 to 2003, according to a recent analysis of government data by the Washington-based National Partnership for Women & Families. During that same time, the nation’s birthrate dropped 9%.

The surge in pregnancy complaints makes it one of the fastest-growing types of employment discrimination charges filed with the EEOC … outpacing the rise in sexual harassment and sex discrimination claims.[…]

The rise in pregnancy discrimination cases is important now because more women of child-bearing age are in the labor force: Women make up about 47% of the total labor force, and they’re projected to account for more than half of the increase in total labor force growth from 2002 until 2012, according to the Department of Labor.

And more working women are having children at a later age, when careers are better established and more is financially at stake. In 2000, the average American woman having her first child was almost 25 years old. In 1970, the average age was 21.4 years for a first birth, according to a 2002 report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.[…]

“We’ve seen an explosion, a huge increase in cases,” says Mary Jo O’Neill, a regional lawyer with the EEOC. “The kind of cases we’re seeing are very blatant, cases where managers say, ‘We don’t want pregnant women working here.’ ”

Several factors may be behind the trend:

* More pregnant women are staying in the workplace rather than going on early leave. More women are working while pregnant, and they’re working further into their pregnancies. In the decade before the 1978 passage of the Pregnancy Discrimination Act, more than half of employed women quit their jobs when they became pregnant, according to the National Partnership for Women & Families analysis of government data. The non-profit education and advocacy group also found that, by the early 1990s, that number dropped to 27% of pregnant women.

The discrimination is more prevalent because there are so many more women who are working pregnant,” says Debra Ness, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. “People think pregnancy discrimination is a thing of the past, that it doesn’t happen anymore. But it does.”

* Productivity pressures and the economy. The sluggish economy in recent years has pushed employers to lay off workers and stress productivity, leaving fewer employees doing more work. Employers may see pregnant workers … with pending maternity leave and their possible need for more flexible work arrangements in the future … as a liability.

“Pregnancy is expensive for employers,” says Veronica Duffy, an employment lawyer in Rapid City, S.D., who has represented pregnant women filing discrimination claims. “And as health insurance costs rise, costs become more of an issue. Employers are driven to discriminate.”

* Stereotypes about pregnant women persist. Mounting research shows that women who become pregnant are viewed as less competent in the workplace … a view that is held by both male and female co-workers.

In one study published in 1993 in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, pregnant and non-pregnant women performed tasks that were rated by college students drafted for the research. While both subjects performed the same, those who were pregnant consistently received lower performance ratings. They were viewed as overly emotional, often irrational, physically limited and less than committed to their jobs, according to the report.

In another study, pregnant women were interviewed about their own experiences on the job. About half said their supervisors’ reactions to their pregnancies were negative, according to the report published in 1997 in the Journal of Business and Psychology.

They also reported intrusive comments from co-workers, including such comments as, “Why are you eating so much?” and, “Do you have stretch marks yet?” About half of pregnant women managers said subordinates became upset or hostile.

“When women become pregnant, they’re seen as putting personal life ahead of work,” says Jane Halpert, an associate professor of industrial and organizational psychology at DePaul University who worked on the studies. “There’s a whole set of separate attitudes that show up at work when you get pregnant.”

It’s worth reading the entire article, which also includes several real-life stories of pregnant women who have experienced discrimination.

The article suggests a couple of times that maybe the poor widdle employers are just confused and don’t understand the regulations, because state and federal regulations sometimes don’t match. That strikes me as bullshit; if, as the EEOC rep said, “The kind of cases we’re seeing are very blatant, cases where managers say, ‘We don’t want pregnant women working here,’ ” then what’s going on isn’t innocent, well-meaning managers not understanding subtle nuances of the law.

The article also conflates employer eagerness to get rid of pregnant employees due to the medical expenses of pregnancy and infants with “Productivity pressures and the economy.” Actually, that should be seen as a separate issue. Employers - rather than the government - are (sometimes) expected to pay medical costs in the United States. In every other first-world country, the government picks up such expenses. Employers in other first-world countries, all else held equal, feel much less pressure to discriminate against pregnant women.

Via LA Mom.

Demi at Pilgrim’s Progress links to LA Mom, who in turn links to this photo-essay (with music) of the working environment at Motherhood magazine.

As Demi writes:

There is no reason whatsoever to think that every office couldn’t look something like that. The babies would be a “distraction”? No more so than the usual, trite sexual tensions, politics and “banter” in the “ordinary” office. Breasts showing during feedings? Why not? That’s what they’re there for, what they were made for. Cleavage is distracting, too, and serves no purpose *but* to distract. After some time, you won’t even notice the little bit of boobage flashing now and then.

Our economy - and, in particular, our workplaces - are still modeled on the “Father Knows Best” model, in which all workers are implicitly assumed to have wives at home, taking care of the babies. This model of the workplace is costly to women who’d like (or need) careers but are economically punished for being mothers, and also costly to men who’d like (or need) careers but wind up being alienated from a family they barely ever see.

Some individuals successfully opt out of the “Father Knows Best” economy, of course. But most don’t. The workplace makes default assumptions about family life that haven’t been true for decades. We should change that default assumption to something more suited for the 21st century.

• WISELI has a useful list of links (mostly newspaper articles) about the controversy. Not all the links are persistant, alas, but the Boston Globe and Harvard Crimson links all seem to be good.

• A good Slate article argues that Summers deserved to be criticized. It also reviews (very briefly) some of the clear evidence that yes, Virginia, discrimination does exist.

• PZ Myers, who actually has a science background, comments. Plus he wins my heart by reproducing a Calvin and Hobbes cartoon.

• A good post and discussion at Dispatches From the Culture Wars (which I also linked to in my previous post). I disagree with 75% of what was said here. Both Summer’s critics and his defenders need to keep in mind that we don’t really know what Summers said (there is a tape recording, but Summers has refused to release it).

Percentage of Women on Physics Faculty by Country

Remember, it’s all in the genes - culture has nothing to do with it!

Graphic comes from here, and via Sean at Preposterous Universe.

Sean also has a good post about the Summers controversy. I particularly liked the distinction Sean made between “discrimination” and “systematic bias.”

For anyone who’s been following the story of Harvard president Lawrence Summers’ recent “maybe it’s in the genes” speech: Hee hee hee.

(To be fair, Summers has now apologized for his remarks.)

Quoted with permission from The Economic Emergence of Women, by Barbara R. Bergmann (second edition, Palgrave, forthcoming in 2005)

From a column in today’s Washington Post:

Remember, this sort of thing never happens anymore, and hasn’t happened for decades, if you listen to the anti-feminists. That aside, three things are particularly striking about this:

First, Viacom isn’t worried about emailing a request for collusion in breaking anti-discrimination laws to three Republican sentator. Viacom sees no danger anyone in that corner will object, I presume.

Second, a Washington Post columnist reprints the Viacom email and says nothing about the illegal sex discrimination.

And third, this is one hell of a great job, and it’s open to applicants only through back channels. And only if they’re male, of course. It’s the old-boy network in action (in this case a little oddly, since the VP who wrote the request is a woman).

• New to the blogroll: The Secret of This Girl, an enjoyable blog by a british feminist.

• Speaking of the blogroll, I’ve cleaned it up a bit and made many changes in the past several days (deleting dead blogs, adding new blogs, reoganizing a bit). Also, check out the new “partial birth abortion” catagory, containing loads of “Alas” PBA-related posts in a single link.
• An interesting essay in “Brain, Child: The magazine for thinking mothers” asks if there is any common interest that all mothers can be said to share. Via Arts and Letters Daily.
• Biz Femmes Speak! review of “The Corporation” the movie, comparing the recent documentary film to the book it’s based on. According to Biz Femmes, the book argues that our legal system is structured in such a way that makes corporate evil-doing inevitable; the movie, which (according to the reviewer) takes a more simplistic “corporations do evil things” approach, sounds less interesting.
• Atrios points out that Sheri Drew, the women the Republcan party chose to deliver the opening invocation at their convention, has compared supporting same-sex marriage to supporting Hitler. No, really.
• Interesting New Yorker character study about someone who gave away millions of dollars to charity - and then, feeling he hadn’t done enough, decided to give away a kidney. Via wrongheaded.
• Ms Musings reports on MIT’s first female president - and on women, Title IX and sciences generally.
• Astarte of XX pulls a lot of US goverment data together for a fabulous post on Pay Equity and Social Constructs. Well worth reading for anyone interested in the pay gap issue.
• Also on XX, Trish Wilson points out that - contrary to what what marriage movement scholars like Elizabeth Marquardt often suggest - fatherlessness isn’t as horrifying as it’s been cracked up to be.
• Unfutz once again has a weekly report of what the electoral college prognostigators are saying. It’s a good week for Bush, who is still behind but is making solid gains in the polls. I predict he’ll pull ahead next week, courtesy of an adoring media and the post-convention bounce.

Read, as they say, as Amp would say, the whole thing.

(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: