how's this? someone finally applied common sense??
The Truth About the Pay Gap
Feminist politics and bad economics
Steve Chapman | April 30, 2007
New Year's Day is called that because it begins a new year, and
Thanksgiving has that name because it's an occasion for expressing
gratitude. But Equal Pay Day, observed this year on April 24, is
named for something that, we are told, doesn't exist -- equal pay
for men and women.
The National Committee on Pay Equity used the occasion to announce
that among full-time workers, women make only 77 cents for every
dollar paid to men. The three leading Democratic presidential
candidates have all endorsed legislation to fix the problem.
And the effort got new fuel from a report by the American
Association of University Women (AAUW) Educational Foundation,
which says women are paid less starting with their first jobs out
of college, and that the deficit only grows with time. Pay
discrimination, says AAUW, is still "a serious problem for women in
the work force."
In reality, that's not clear at all. What we know from an array of
evidence, including this report, is that most if not all of the
discrepancy can be traced to factors other than sexism. When it
comes to pay equity, we really have come a long way.
On its face, the evidence in the AAUW study looks damning. "One
year out of college," it says, "women working full-time earn only
80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn. Ten years after
graduation, women fall farther behind, earning only 69 percent as
much as men earn."
But read more, and you learn things that don't get much notice on
Equal Pay Day. As the report
acknowledges, women with college degrees tend to go into fields
like education, psychology and the humanities, which typically pay
less than the sectors preferred by men, such as engineering, math
and business. They are also more likely than men to work for
nonprofit groups and local governments, which do not offer salaries
that Alex Rodriguez would envy.
As they get older, many women elect to work less so they can spend
time with their children. A decade after graduation, 39 percent of
women are out of the work force or working part time -- compared
with only 3 percent of men. When these mothers return to full-time
jobs, they naturally earn less than they would have if they had
never left.
Even before they have kids, men and women often do different things
that may affect earnings. A year out of college, notes AAUW, women
in full-time jobs work an average of 42 hours a week, compared to
45 for men. Men are also far more likely to work more than 50 hours
a week.
Buried in the report is a startling
admission: "After accounting for all factors known to affect wages,
about one-quarter of the gap remains unexplained and may be attributed to discrimination "
(my emphasis). Another way to put it is that three-quarters of the
gap clearly has innocent causes -- and that we actually don't know
whether discrimination accounts for the rest.
I asked Harvard economist Claudia Goldin if there is sufficient
evidence to conclude that women experience systematic pay
discrimination. "No," she replied. There are certainly instances of
discrimination, she says, but most of the gap is the result of
different choices. Other hard-to-measure factors, Goldin thinks,
largely account for the remaining gap -- "probably not all, but
most of it."
The divergent career paths of men and women may reflect a basic
unfairness in what's expected of them. It could be that a lot of
mothers, if they had their way, would rather pursue careers but
have to stay home with the kids because their husbands insist. Or
it may be that for one reason or another, many mothers prefer to
take on the lion's share of child-rearing. In any case, the pay
disparity caused by these choices can't be blamed on piggish
employers.
June O'Neill, an economist at Baruch College and former director of
the Congressional Budget Office, has uncovered something that
debunks the discrimination thesis. Take
out the effects of marriage and child-rearing, and the difference
between the genders suddenly vanishes. "For men and women who never
marry and never have children, there is no earnings gap,"
she said in an interview.
That's a fact you won't hear from AAUW or the Democratic
presidential candidates. The prevailing impulse on Equal Pay Day
was to lament how far we are from the goal. The true revelation,
though, is how close.
(source: Reason
Online)
