Example 1: Take two electrical engineers; both 32 years old, both in the industry at the same firm since graduating from the same college with the same BA BS in EEE. One – not naming names here – has worked at the company the entire ten years. The other – again, not naming names – has taken about a year of parental leave, and also spent about a year working part-time while their kids were little. So between an engineer with ten years’ experience and one with in effect 8.5 years’ experience, who, all other things being equal should get paid more?
Example 2: Take two 25 year olds. One became an oilfield worker – a field involving a lot of brutally hard work, dominated by men, and with perennial shortage of workers with immense demand (especially in North Dakota), driving up wages. One went into social work – a field involving significant work, sometimes a state license, dominated by women, and a perennial glut of workers, driving down wages. With all other things equal, who should get paid more?
Example 3: Take two accountants – one male, one female. They have identical qualifications, identical experience, identical job reviews. Who do you think makes more? Statistically, the difference is within the realm of statistical noise, nationwide.
Example 4: Take a low-income couple. He works as a security guard, doing his best to pick up 50 hours a week to make ends meet. To avoid having to pay daycare, she stays at home with the kids and is counting the days til their youngest is at kindergarten so she can get a temp office job, or a part-time job at Target. This one’s a no-brainer, right?
Example 5: A female business analyst with ten years’ experience is working with a male business analyst working his first job. Who makes more?
Example 6: A brother and a sister – fraternal twins – graduate from high school. He goes into car mechanics. She goes into daycare.
Now – compare the “men” in the above examples with the “Women”. In aggregate, the guys make about 50% more than the women.
Is it because the men in the five examples are benefitting from sexism? Or because of the…:
- Career choices each of them made: Men are more likely to go into technical fields, highly-physically-demanding jobs that pay a premium, dangerous jobs that pay a premium, or to work while their spouses take time off or stay home.
- Life choices each of them made: Women have babies. That’s the way biology made the species – so sue us. No, that’s a figure of speech. But women are more likely to take time off from work to do it. Should men be penalized for working while women are, well, not?
This last cuts both ways, by the way; when my kids were little, I made a conscious choice to seek out jobs that offered flexibility in hours and schedules, so I could spend more time with them. This pretty inevitably led to contracting, which gave me flexibility and decent money – but cut down the chances for linear, corporate “career advancement”. Am I lagging behind other people in my “age cohort” in that career? Probably not – I switched careers – but if I were still a technical writer, those years that I spent focusing on other things would probably have had me lagging. (Technical writing, by the way, is a field where women make more than men, on average. Why? Because they’ve been doing it longer, and they dominate the field, and they tend to go into it for a career, as opposed to men (like me) who see it as a stepping-stone to elsewhere. Not because female tech writers are sexists. Although some are. Oh, the stories I could tell But won’t. Because most tech writer stories are really really boring.
Of course, the whole “gender wage gap” isn’t so much about facts as about waving a bloody shirt to try to shore up Democrat numbers in a year that’s looking very bad for them, and to draw attention away from the fact that this past five years have been little better for women, economically, than for African-Americans.
And how about from the viewpoint of a traditional conservative pro-familiy family.
Man and wife make a mutual decision. Their kids come first, so the man will work full time while the mother stays at home first, then just works part time. Its not a man vs woman thing. Its best for the family. The father doesn’t think “heh, I get to further my career while the old lady stays home”. He thinks “I need to work hard to support my family. I do this for the kids, not for my career”.
And Carney said (I’m paraphrasing to make Obama look bad) the reason women in the White House are paid way less than men there are, is that Obama hires men for the good jobs, and women for more menial duties.
Living through this right now. I work for a global financial services company and my #1 minion has been out of college for 10 years and with me for 7, during which time she’s received one promotion and had two kids (we’re in a “flat” structure where there isn’t much promotion opportunity and the maternity leaves had no impact on the promotion). Her job level is rigorously mandated by corporate policy and is gender-blind. A man in her job would be in the same salary band, adjusted for experience. In her time with me she has received excellent performance reviews, steady raises and an annual bonus based on her’s and the company’s success (even in the years when she had maternity leave). She earns a tidy sum and has been worth every penny. My boss and I were in the process of promoting her (with her full knowledge and support) to a new, strategic marketing position. Last week she announced that she was quitting, not for a better job but because she couldn’t stand how much time she was spending away from her kids and the new job was only going to make things worse. She’s going to spend time with her kids and try to do some consulting on the side (her husband is a school teacher). I don’t know what this will ultimately do to her career opportunities, but my boss is a woman and at a VP level and she took two extended leaves to care for her daughter over the years. For the short-term, at any rate, she will be taking a substantial hit in her earnings, but there’s no doubt in my mind that it will be worth it.
FYI, my “Night Writer” name began when I was freelancing, calling on clients in the morning and writing at night so that we didn’t have to pay daycare while my wife worked her second-shift job.
One minor quibble; EEs typically earn a BSEE, not a BA. Along the same lines, I had friends who got the BA in Chemistry instead of the BS because it required less math. I wonder if the honest 95% figure narrows even more once you correct for that one. There is a difference between students who can, and can not, handle calculus, after all.
And in my own family, my wife was finally starting to get some decent raises as a technical writer when we had our first child–and then when we calculated (per NW) the actual profit of her working after taxes, tithe, daycare, vehicle costs, work wardrobe, formula, and the like, we figured out that she’d be getting about a buck an hour to be separated from our daughter, and if she attained the average wage, she’d be taking home the princely wage of…..maybe….seven bucks an hour.
At least until the second child came along, at which point the net gain would be negative. Plus, there is an important element of infant care that my wife can do and I can not.
You know an EE with a BA? I suppose there’s such an animal, but I’ve never met one. According to a quick Google, Yale says it’s a degree that “is suitable for a career outside technology […]”. So what’s the point?
Of course, it’s not always the case that women make less, it’s often political. When I was at IBM we had a few women IC designers who made some serious money simply because they filled the “diversity quota”, not because they were better than their colleagues. You should have seen the stink about that when our new manager mistakenly sent out the spreadsheet showing the department’s salaries to the department rather than his manager (the joys of email aliases and typing those in the CC line rather than the Subject line). He walked around trying to get everyone to delete that mail message without opening it, to no avail. There were a lot of out-of-cycle “merit” raises given that year.
Yeah, I fixed the degree.
(Sheesh).
The Right says wages are set by marketplace factors that make economic sense for all parties in a free market. The Left says wage “disparities” are due to “structural sexism” that they can fix. The poor single mom hears the Left tell her that they will see to it that she will be paid as much for doing clerical work in an office as a man makes for being an oil field roughneck. Who do you think she is going to vote for?
Nerdbert wrote: “So what’s the point?”
Law school. The reason there are so many stupid lawyers is because they take a BA in some easy subject at a party college (like Occidental), then use that credential to enroll in law school. LSAT will weed out the idiots during the application process for a top law school, like Harvard, unless you happen to be a minority.
Regarding Nerdbert’s comment, my wife was told that if she’d gotten a technical degree, GM would have put her on the fast track up the corporate ladder. Yeah, I’ve got to wonder if that helped the current CEO, too. I wish Mrs. Barra the best, but you’ve got to wonder when you’ve got government and UAW operatives on the board of directors.
It’s a double edged sword, BB. The problem with affirmative action programs is that you can never be certain if the person got there by merit or by genetics — just ask Clarence Thomas how he feels about that. I’ve met some tolerable AA engineers who’ve burned out their careers by being promoted too far too fast for their own good who would have been better served by some seasoning at the lower levels. But companies who do a lot of work with the Feds tend to be under pressure to fill quotas, especially in their middle to upper ranks. Officially there are no quotas in government work, but theory isn’t practice.
Two lawyers went to the same night school. One wanted to help people so she works for legal aid, taking advantage of a flexible family policy so she could have kids. The other was the family breadwinner so he worked 60 hours a week. Both are happy with their career choices and realize the difference in pay is the consequence of those choices. But their pay is reflected in the overall gap between men and women so it looks as if she is being discriminated against when actually she’s happy as I .
I spent 30+ full-time years in field where everyone in a certain position was paid the standard wage for that position. Increases were across the board, dictated by personnel policy or union contract. However, annually, women earned much less than men in the same positions. Much of the disparity was due to child-raising obligations, sick leave taken, and an overall disinclination to work extra for overtime (OT). So yes, there was a wage/gender gap. However, it was voluntary. It has also been my experience that this was an industry-wide phenomenon, not just an aberration.
In any event, at least one person’s experience has been that the female workforce was a very reluctant worker of OT or extra duties. Longevity in that career was much shorter than a comparable male’s, and many who did stay on frequently sought inside, more female-oriented positions (plain clothes, DARE, school resource officer, etc.) rather than uniformed patrol duties.
I also believe that this is true throughout most equal opportunity employment fields. Additionally, I do not see this as a flaw or defect in females. It’s just that men and women are different, and labor outside the home is a more male-oriented task, while homemaking and child care, which is just as important, is a more female inclination.