Gender Pay Gap, Once
Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place
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A J Mast for The New York Times
Dr. Melanie Kingsley, a dermatology resident in
Indianapolis, said money was not behind her career choice. |
By DAVID LEONHARDT,
NYTimes on the Web, December 24, 2006
Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s,
women of all economic levels — poor, middle class and rich — were steadily
gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the
mid-’90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that
men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier.
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
Northern California who will make $63,000 this year, including overtime.
Still, Ms. Kwapnoski said she was paid significantly less than men in similar
jobs, and she has joined a class-action lawsuit against Wal-Mart Stores, which
owns Sam’s Club.
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 School of
Medicine, said she had wanted to be a doctor for as long as she could recall.
For a party celebrating her graduation from medical school, her mother printed
up invitations with a photo of Dr. Kingsley wearing a stethoscope — when she was
a toddler.
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 Chicago. There, she saw that dermatologists worked
with everyone from newborns to the elderly and worked on nearly every part of
the body, and she was hooked.
“You get paid enough to support your family and enjoy life,” said Dr. Kingsley,
a lifelong Indiana resident. “Yeah, maybe I won’t make a lot of money.
But I’ll be happy with my day-to-day job, and that’s the reason I went into
medicine — to help other people.” She added: “I have seen people do
it for the money, and they’re not very happy.”
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.
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