Gender Pay Gap, Once
Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place
Dr.
Melanie Kingsley, a dermatology resident in
Published: December 24, 2006 – New York Times
The New
Gender Divide
One Stubborn Gap
Articles
in this series are examining what has happened to men and women several decades
after the women’s movement began.
Previous
Articles in the Series:
Women in Science:
The Battle Moves to the Trenches (Dec. 19, 2006)
Facing Middle Age With No Degree, and No Wife (Aug. 6, 2006)
Men Not Working,
and Not Wanting Just Any Job (July 31, 2006)
Small
Colleges, Short of Men, Embrace Football (July 10, 2006)
At Colleges,
Women Are Leaving Men in the Dust (July 9, 2006)
Related
Bureau of Labor Statistics Data on Labor Force Status of Women
(Microsoft Excel file)
End of the Gender Revolution? (Data From
Researchers David A. Cotter, Joan M. Hermsen and
Reeve Vanneman)
Multimedia
Few Cracks in the Glass Ceiling
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.
A
decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar
qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today,
that is far harder to envision.
“Nothing
happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late ’70s,” said Francine
D. Blau, an economist at Cornell and a
leading researcher of gender and pay. “Then the ’80s stood out as a period of
sharp increases in women’s pay. And it’s much less impressive after that.”
Last
year, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned
74.7 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group did,
according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. A
decade earlier, the women earned 75.7 cents.
The
reasons for the stagnation are complicated and appear to include both
discrimination and women’s own choices. The number of women staying home with
young children has risen
recently, according to the Labor Department; the increase has been
sharpest among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high
salaries. The pace at which women are flowing into highly paid fields also
appears to have slowed.
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.”
Whatever
role their own preferences may play in the pay gap, many women say they
continue to battle subtle forms of lingering prejudice. Indeed, the pay gap
between men and women who have similar qualifications and work in the same
occupation — which economists say is one of the purest measures of gender
equality — has barely budged since 1990.
Today,
the discrimination often comes from bosses who believe they treat everyone
equally, women say, but it can still create a glass ceiling that keeps them
from reaching the best jobs at a company.
“I
don’t think anyone would ever say I couldn’t do the job as well as a man,” said
Christine Kwapnoski, a 42-year-old bakery manager at
a Sam’s Club in
The
lawsuit is part of a spurt of cases in recent years contending gender discrimination
at large companies, including Boeing, Costco, Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley. Last month, the Supreme Court
heard arguments in a case against Goodyear Tire and Rubber.
At
Sam’s Club, Ms. Kwapnoski said that when she was a
dock supervisor, she discovered that a man she supervised was making as much as
she was. She was later promoted with no raise, even though men who received
such a promotion did get more money, she said.
“Basically,
I was told it was none of my business, that there was nothing I could do about
it,” she said.
Ms.
Kwapnoski does not have a bachelor’s degree, but her
allegations are typical of the recent trends in another way: the pay gap is now
largest among workers earning relatively good salaries.
At
Wal-Mart, the percentage of women dwindles at each successive management level.
They hold almost 75 percent of department-head positions, according to the
company. But only about 20 percent of store managers, who can make
significantly more than $100,000, are women.
This
is true even though women receive better evaluations than men on average and
have longer job tenure, said Brad Seligman, the lead plaintiffs’ lawyer in the
lawsuit.
Theodore
J. Boutrous Jr., a lawyer for Wal-Mart, said the
company did not discriminate. “It’s really a leap of logic to assume that the
data is a product of discrimination,” Mr. Boutrous
said. “People have different interests, different priorities, different career
paths” — and different levels of desire to go into management, he added.
The
other companies that have been sued also say they do not discriminate.
Economists
say that the recent pay trends have been overlooked because the overall pay
gap, as measured by the government, continues to narrow. The average hourly pay
of all female workers rose to 80.1 percent of men’s pay last year, from 77.3
percent in 2000.
But
that is largely because women continue to close the qualifications gap. More
women than men now graduate from college, and the number of women with decades
of work experience is still growing rapidly. Within many demographic groups,
though, women are no longer gaining ground.
Ms.
Blau and her husband, Lawrence
M. Kahn, another Cornell economist, have done some of the most detailed
studies of gender and pay, comparing men and women who have the same
occupation, education, experience, race and
labor-union status. At the end of the late 1970s, women earned about 82 percent
as much each hour as men with a similar profile. A decade later, the number had
shot up to 91 percent, offering reason to wonder if women would reach parity.
But
by the late ’90s, the number remained at 91 percent. Ms. Blau
and Mr. Kahn have not yet examined the current decade in detail, but she said
other data suggested that there had been little movement.
During
the 1990s boom, college-educated men received larger raises than women on
average. Women have done slightly better than the men in the last few years,
but not enough to make up for the late ’90s, the Economic Policy Institute
analysis found.
There
is no proof that discrimination is the cause of the remaining pay gap, Ms. Blau said. It is possible that the average man, brought up
to view himself the main breadwinner, is more committed to his job than the
average woman.
But
researchers note that government efforts to reduce sex discrimination have
ebbed over the period that the pay gap has stagnated. In the 1960s and ’70s,
laws like Title VII and Title IX prohibited discrimination at work and in
school and may have helped close the pay gap in subsequent years. There have
been no similar pushes in the last couple of decades.
Women
have continued to pour into high-paid professions like law,
medicine and corporate management where they were once rare, but the increases
seem to have slowed, noted Reeve
Vanneman, a sociologist at the University of Maryland.
Medicine
offers a particularly good window on these changes. Roughly 40 percent of
medical school graduates are women today. Yet many of the highest paid
specialties, the ones in which salaries often exceed $400,000, remain dominated
by men and will be for decades to come, based on the pipeline of residents.
Only
28 percent of radiology residents in 2004-5 were women, the Association of
American Medical Colleges has reported. Only 10 percent of orthopedic surgery
residents were female. The specialties in which more than half of new doctors
are women, like dermatology, family medicine and pediatrics, tend to pay less.
Melanie
Kingsley, a 28-year-old resident at the Indiana University
As
the first doctor in her family, though, she did not have a clear idea of which
specialty she would choose until she spent a summer working alongside a female
dermatologist in
“You
get paid enough to support your family and enjoy life,” said Dr. Kingsley, a
lifelong
The
gender differences among medical specialties point to another aspect of the
current pay gap. In earlier decades, the size of the gap was similar among
middle-class and affluent workers. At times, it was actually smaller at the
top.
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.