Gender Inequities Worsen

It's been quite a while now since girls were expected to grow up and become a happy housewife, and maybe get a part-time job on the side to supplement hubby's income. Decades after the sexual revolution it doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch for modern women to expect to be able to enter into a career and make as much money as a man working the same job. And for a while it looked like things were improving. But apparently progress in that direction has slowed to a halt.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House — do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.
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But the gap is now widest among highly paid workers. A woman making more than 95 percent of all other women earned the equivalent of $36 an hour last year, or about $90,000 a year for working 50 hours a week. A man making more than 95 percent of all other men, putting in the same hours, would have earned $115,000 — a difference of 28 percent.

At the very top of the income ladder, the gap is probably even larger. The official statistics do not capture the nation’s highest earners, and in many fields where pay has soared — Wall Street, hedge funds, technology — the top jobs are overwhelmingly held by men.
Of course, some might say that fewer women have committed themselves to the hollow pursuit of trying to make as much money as possible at the expense of all other aspects of their lives. Or that providing cheap or free day care for mothers, who are still the primary caregivers in most American families.

Like so much about gender and the workplace, there are at least two ways to view these trends. One is that women, faced with most of the burden for taking care of families, are forced to choose jobs that pay less — or, in the case of stay-at-home mothers, nothing at all.

If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view.

The other view is that women consider money a top priority less often than men do. Many may relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that offer more opportunity to influence other people’s lives.

Both views, economists note, could have some truth to them.

“Is equality of income what we really want?” asked Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who has written about the revolution in women’s work over the last generation. “Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don’t expect them to take that chance equally often.”
Measuring the number of women who are presented with the opportunity to make more money and turn it down is probably a practical impossibility, but does seem like a somewhat flimsy excuse for the continuing inquity in salaries for men and women.

Lower income employees have the advantage of numerical superiority on their side, and since there are more low income employees, patterns of discrimination are easier to spot, making lawsuits easier to file against problem employers. While the suits are not always successful they at least keep the issue in the minds of large employers. But at the upper income bracket there are fewer employees, so while similar lawsuits are possible historically there hasnt' been much luck with them, at least so far.

All of which raises the question of how to fix the problem? Attitudes have been shifting for a while, but until that change begins to be reflected in an end of the difference between salaries across genders it won't mean much.

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