Today is Equal Pay Day according to an AFL-CIO email I just received. What they mean is that, on average, a woman needs to work a year and four months to earn what a man earns in one year. That means that it isn’t until sometime near the end of April that women catch up to what men earned the previous year.
While we all know households where a woman is the primary wage-earner, there is a persistent gap in the average earnings for men and women working full time, year-round. Forty-four years after the Equal Pay Act of 1963 mandated that men and women with equal experience and qualifications who do the same work be paid equally, women working full time, year-round make about 73 cents for every dollar men make. Or, put the other way around, men working full time, year-round, make 1.37 for every dollar women make.
To get a more specific sense of the inequality in different occupations, click here for the Bureau of Labor Statistics “Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by detailed occupation and sex” Some interesting examples:
At the upper end of the economic spectrum:
- The median CEO weekly salary is $1,907 for men and $1,422 for women, with men making $1.34 for every dollar women make (or, the other way around, women CEOs make about 75% of what men make)
- Among lawyers, the median weekly salary for men is $1,891 and for women it is $1,333, so men make $1.42 for every dollar women make (or women make about 70% of what men make).
At the lower end:
- Among cashiers, the median weekly income for men is $387 and for women it’s $327, so men make $1.20 for every dollar women make (or women make about 83% of what men make).
- Among waitstaff the median weekly income for men is $401 and for women it’s $348, so men make $1.16 for every dollar women make (or women make about 86% of what men make).
- Among housekeeping and janitorial staff the difference is about the same as for cashiers with income being only slightly higher.
The wage gap holds at the lower end of the economic spectrum as well as at the upper end but it’s worse at the upper end. And aside from the persistence of gender inequality in wages, it’s also important to be reminded of the startling income inequality between classes in the United States.
- The Paycheck Fairness Act (S. 766 and H.R. 1338), which would provide more effective remedies for victims of wage discrimination on the basis of sex.
- The Fair Pay Act (S. 1087), which would prohibit sex-based wage discrimination and would address the issue of comparable worth by calling for equal pay for equivalent work.
Please click through to support these bills. They are important bills. As the notice points out, given that the majority of households made up of a mother, a father and their children are households where both parents work, men and kids are hurt by the pay gap just as women are hurt by it. Pay inequality hurts men in opposite-sex partnerships because if their partners’ incomes are unfairly low, then the men themselves have to work more to make up the difference. This not only means more work, but also less time with family, and ultimately less time together.
Still, these bills alone won’t solve the problem. That’s because overt wage discrimination is not the only cause of the wage gap. The Fair Pay Act recognizes this by picking up on the issue of “equivalent work,” but even that fails to acknowledge some of the more persistent structural problems that underpin the wage gap.
Gender role socialization and the gender-typing of jobs probably have more to do with these structures than anything else.
For example, one important reason that men and women tend to have different salaries even when they are working full time doing the same jobs (take the waitstaff or the lawyers mentioned above) is that the men in those jobs may devote even more hours (in terms of overtime) than the women who work alongside them. Why? Often because it is women who take time away from the job to take care of children or aging parents. This gives men an edge in terms of earning seniority and promotions. This will not change based on the kinds of legislation being proposed. In fact, seniority is one of the reasons pay equity bills give for justifying differences in pay. So as long as women are more likely to take time off from work to take care of people, women as a group will tend to make less than men do.
There is another piece to that equation, too: Let’s say you are a woman, and you and your male partner both work full time. Let’s say you want to make decisions purely rationally, that is, without reference to gender roles, and you need to decide whose wages can be sacrificed for a while in order to tend to a child. Wouldn’t you choose the person with the lower wages? And that person would more likely to be you, the woman. The cycle is a hard one to break.
In addition, because of gender role socialization, men and women still don’t all do the same kinds of jobs. And within broad job categories they don’t choose the same specializations. Take teaching. High school teachers make more than kindergarten teachers. Kindergarten teachers (who make an average of $555 a week) are much more likely to be women than to be men. High school teachers are slightly more likely to be men than to be women and make an average of $950 if they’re men and $890 if they’re not. Among doctors, cardiologists are much more likely to be men than to be women. In the medical field in general, women are much more likely than men to be registered nurses. Cardiologists make a lot more than registered nurses, just like high school teachers make a lot more than kindergarten teachers.
Some part of that division, too, comes down to expectations about family roles. To be a cardiologist requires putting several years-worth of incredibly long hours of highly specialized training. This is a difficult thing to do if you want to have a family. But it is much more difficult if you are a woman and you want to have a family than it is if you are a man and you want to have a family. Why? Because generally, if you are a man and you want to have a family, you imagine that you will have a woman who will do much of the home/family support work. Men less often perform the kind of work/family calculus that women expect to have to perform.
What would it take for women not to be handicapped at work by the expectation (and their own desires) to be primary care givers? It would certainly take better organized and subsidized child care. It would take radical changes in the way that health care and care for the aging are managed.
What would it take for women to be better represented in jobs that are traditionally male jobs? Not much more, actually, than we’re already doing. Women are going into previously male-dominated professions at increasing rates.
The bigger question is this one: What will it take to get men into jobs that are predominantly “women’s” jobs — jobs like child care, nursing, home health care, and so on. Because if some women move out of these jobs and move up the ladder, so to speak, people will have to take their places. If those people are also women, we haven’t changed the balance at all.
And men, as human beings, are harmed by the social pressures that cause them to exclude themselves from jobs that would emphasize their capacities for love, compassion, and nurturing. Children are harmed, too, as they get less nurturing contact with the adult men in their lives.
What keeps men from these jobs? One thing is wages. They don’t generate enough income. Another is socialization. We imagine that taking care of children or cleaning up after people is “women’s work.”
And then, unfortunately, we devalue it.
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Other resources for pay equity action:
Coalition of Labor Union Women
National Committee on Pay Equity
