What??? The *AAUW* has a study saying there is gender pay inequality??? Shocking, I tell you...

Someone needs to investigate the cause of this, not just complain about the symptoms. I'm sure not 100% of the difference is sexism, though much of it may be. The usual explanations by economists for the non-sexism part are these:
a) Woman prefer different jobs to men (that's why most software engineers are men, and most nurses are women). whether this is caused by society or genetics is still an open debate, though studies have shown that infant boys prefer to look at machines compared to human interaction, while the reverse is true for infant girls. For the same reason, most managers in America are women, who usually get paid better than the people working for them.
b) Women take less risks than men. this one seems like bull to me, but that's the consensus explanation for the "glass cieling" at the moment.
c) women make different career/life balance choices than men, again whether this is genetic or acculturated is open to debate. Basically the idea here is that women are less willing (on average) to go to work and put in 80 hours compared to men, and ceteris paribus the guy putting in 80 hours a week is destined to make more and get promoted faster than the guy putting in 70 who in turn makes more than the guy putting in 60, etc.

Women and men are different and just like women are on average happier than men, men on average make more money. It definitely sucks.

Hey, I know it's not much of a silver lining, but let's see positives where there are positives: KISS MY MORE EQUITABLE ASS, ALABAMA!

Here's an idea: when interviewing for jobs, ask for more than what you're worth. Like men do. It's not like 95% of businesses out there are consciously holding down women's salaries. It's just that many women are too gutless to ask for what they really deserve.

If the study is looking at median pay (such as the oft-quoted 77 cents on the dollar stat derived from U.S. Census figures), there are some other possibilities as well. We all know about the weird phenomenon with median pay figures that shows that when Bill Gates walks into a men's room, the median pay in the room shoots up astronomically -- just don't try to spend that money if you happen to be in that room, because the second he washes his hands and walks outside, the median pay goes right back down to where it was. When he steps out of the men's room into the lobby of the building, the gender gap in median income tilts precariously.

This fact gets brought up every time the "tax cuts for the rich" argument comes up, because those who favor such tax breaks like to point to increases in median income as proof that their policies are working. But again, that way of measuring salaries conveniently folds the rich (who, as we all know, are getting richer) in with everybody else while ignoring things like growing income disparity.

So for instance, one of the reasons that the gender gap in wages has narrowed in the last thirty years is because median wages (measured in real dollars) for most men have fallen. Simply looking at the gap, one might conclude that women are making slight progress, but in reality they are just not losing ground as quickly.

However, things like CEO pay in major corporations have risen in the same period astronomically. And at the very highest end of the wage scale there is a rather pronounced gender gap. If those wages were folded into the whole formula for calculating the median, it could tilt the balance significantly.

My point is not that there is not gender inequality in wages; There plainly is. But some of the statistics that are frequently quoted to make this point are not very precise measures. I'm sure some Slog readers with better mathematics skills could shed further light on this (even as others blast me for being a sexist apologist.)

For once in my life, I agree with Gomez.(#4)

According to a recent copy of Ms. Magazine, a large reason women earn less than men is because they fail to negotiate the salary of their first real job. 7% of women negotiate their first salary and 57% of men negotiate. After a few years, this inbalance grows. As a result, women lose an average of $560,000 in loss wages compared to men over their lifetimes.

This is how companies get around discrimination laws. Wages/salaries are expensive and if they can get away with paying less for the same work, they will.

Women: Negotiate that first salary! If you get a "no" to your request, ask for a re-evaluation in six months for a raise. Organize your compensation package BEFORE you accept the offer! After your first day of work, negotiating becomes very difficult.

also of note is that younger women show less pay difference between younger men. it may not be that the gap widens as people age... it maybe that older people are more likely to discriminate or were more likely to have been discriminated against. check the same recent graduates in ten years...

flamingbanjo: Go look up "median"... in the kitchen at McDonald's, the median wage is $7.93. If Bill Gates walks in, the median wage is still $7.93.

flamingbanjo @5: "when Bill Gates walks into a men's room, the median pay in the room shoots up astronomically"

Incorrect. You are confusing the median with the mean (aka average). You report the median in a study like this in order to avoid the Bill Gates effect.

i don't think most people my age discriminate as much as people from previous generations... that's what i was getting at. so it might look like the gap widens, but we aren't following a particular person's journey. i think it's getting better with time.

Well, what do you expect since women can't even get the Equal Rights amendment (redone as something else) through here in the US, while in Canada they forced it into the Constitution by playing hardball with politicians.

Talking about it does nothing.

And WalMart loves underpaying women.

When is equal work day? (Or is the year not long enough?)

I stand corrected. How embarassing. So what I wanna know is, is the CEO of a small business considered the same profession as the CEO of Wal-Mart? Somebody help me out here.

Andrew: "Someone" has "investigated the cause" of this. The data DO account for "work/life choices"-- although, as the post on my blog that I linked to points out, working from home isn't much of a "choice" when you'll lose your job or face unaffordable day care costs if you keep working. (Other countries don't have this problem because they offer paid maternity leave and subsidized day care.) As for "women's work" paying less, did it ever occur to you that perhaps it pays less BECAUSE it's "women's work"? And finally, as for the "dirty, risky, unappealing" argument--I think plenty of fields dominated by women (day care, health care, education) are dirty, risky and unappealing enough that, according to your argument, they should pay extremely well.

I have a lot of sympathy for someone who is paid less for the same work. I have no sympathy for people like ECB who are either too numerically incompetent or too disingenuous to get their statistics straight.

The comparison that results in a mid-april date for "equal pay day" is a straight-up comparison of full-time male and female wage earners ($40,798 vs. $31,223 in 2004), not corrected for any other factors.

In any case, ECB's litany of what factors her un-cited statistic supposedly corrects for doesn't include the biggest correction of all: profession. Academic researches with less of an axe to grind who really do try to correct for all factors typically find a gap of 0%-5%. (See, for example this study of physicians' earnings.)

We can certainly argue about whether it's fair that typically female jobs pay less than typically male jobs, and, if it is, whether "comparable worth" laws designed to ensure that pay reflects cosmic significance, rather than supply and demand, are the right solution. But we should be open and honest and clear that is what we are arguing about, not try to pull one over on our readers by implying that a full 25% wage gap is attributable purely to sex.

"Un-cited"? Umm... It is cited. And it explores lots of reasons for the wage gap beyond "purely... sex." In fact, it attributes just 25 percent of the wage gap to bias. Go read the (very comprehensive) study before you go off, dude.

If a job pays less, its not because it's "woman's work", it's because of supply and demand, just like anything else.

My job pays better than a cook at mcdonald's because there are fewer people who can do my job, and the value-add of my job is more than that of the mcdonald's job. Same is true of housekeepers and the same is true of day care.

Now teachers get paid worse because our government sucks and would rather spend close to a trillion dollars fucking up the middle east than fund an education system that works, but shit, in a democracy you get the government you deserve.

When I say risky I mean Martha stewart putting it all on the line to launch a magazine, or Oprah quitting a successful TV news career to start a (new concept at the time) day time tv show. Not the same thing as the risks of being in a day care.

The finally thing I thought about and hadn't considered before, what if women just don't care as much about money as men and would rather be happy with their lives? I have a friend stopped being a doctor and makes t-shirts because it makes him happy and who needs money anyway?

ECB: 25% due to bias of a 25% total gap is a 5% gap due to bias, so we are actually close on these numbers. Interesting that you didn't choose to call that out in your post, but instead tried to make it sound like the full 25% gap remained after all non-sex factors were corrected for.

@17 - yeah, right. Just ask the CEO of Seattle Ports.

... ROFLMAO ...

by the way, you spelled counterparts wrong, ECB.

@15 and 17,

I guess you both conveniently overlooked this part of ECB's post:

the pay gap between the genders already exists one year after college and only widens over time. One year out of college, women working full-time make 80 percent of what men make, accounting for hours, occupation, and whether a worker is a parent.

Straight out of college

Accounting for hours

Factoring for occupation

Factoring for parenthood

Get it?

I thought Oprah would have balanced this scale out on her own by now.

The AAUW is an advocacy group. Taking their research at face value is foolish. Would you turn to Big Oil for studies on climate change?

Reading this thread is like a time warp. The "blame discrimination" argument has been debunked so many times in so many ways. Do you even bother to familiarize yourselves with the arguments of your opponents?

Will in Seattle, what does a government agency with virtually no oversight have to do with a market? Absolutely nothing, they are complete opposites (see communism). In fact, the teacher/war in iraq idea could be replaced by a teacher/port ceo comparison.

You don't need to be blind to economics to be a liberal. Read Brad Delong's blog, or talk to clinton's treasury secretary Robert Rubin about that. It just makes liberals seem ignorant that the vast majority of us are so blind to that science.

keshmeshi- nice try, but still not factoring for personal tastes!

Huh. I have to try to negotiate a salary today. I am fucking terrified even though I am very qualified, had great grades in college, was Phi Betta Kappa (except I can't spell it). I'm about 2 years out of college at this point and the thought of asking for what I'm worth-- or, heaven forbid, MORE than I'm worth-- is really scary.

ECB is wrong.
In her Slog post, she first claims that pay gap statistics are controlled for "age, hours worked, education, work experience, union status, and region of the country." And it makes sense that they would be, right? Otherwise the 71-cent number is meaningless.
But they aren't. From the AAUW press release: "Even after controlling for hours, occupation, parenthood, and other factors known to affect earnings, the research indicates that one-quarter of the pay gap remains unexplained." "Even after" means that before, they weren't controlled for these factors.
You can't use statistics so sloppily and/or deceptively and expect people to take your arguments seriously.

In answer to my own question (still smarting from making the "mean/median" mistake, which I made in spite of supposedly knowing better, just like I regularly confuse "further/farther"): According to this article, the disparity of pay for jobs at the "executive" level is much, much greater. The ten highest-paid executives in the country are all men.

No. 18: "The finally thing I thought about and hadn't considered before, what if women just don't care as much about money as men and would rather be happy with their lives?"

You know what would make me happier with my life? More money. That would be even more true if I was struggling the way working-class women struggle. "Happiness" is pretty hard to come by when you're struggling to make ends meet.

Hey #24, how did the negotiation go?

And to everyone else, why don't they teach this vital skill in school?

Same reason they don't teach you how to balance a checkbook or budget your finances... because people in constant financial peril are easier to control in the working world.

Oh, you thought schools were run with integrity. That's cute.

Here's a suggestion, ECB: fewer expensive shopping trips. Some of us don't blow $80 a pop on multiple pairs of shoes.

Everyone thinks their lives would be better with more money... until they ARE making more money, then increase their spending in equal proportion, then end up thinking they need more money all over again.

I always have a hard time not just telling women who complain about this to eat shit and die: I spent most of my adult life working in restaurants, where about half my bosses were men. After I finally finished college and started working in offices eight years ago, I haven't had a single male boss. Not only that, but in all by one case my boss's boss was a woman. On two separate occasions I was hired on for a job with the same qualifications as my female predecessor and paid less for the same work.

And here's the capper-- a few weeks ago I went out for lunch with one of my former bosses. I'd been unemployed for a while and I was feeling pretty despondent so I asked her why she hired me. And my 5'3" 53 year old former boss said, hand to god,

"I don't know. I guess I just liked the idea of having a male assistant your size."

And the thing is, I knew that. I'm over 6 feet tall, I bench about 350, and I had a pretty good idea when she hired me that it was mostly because she thought it would be funny to boss a guy like me around. And she's not the first woman boss I've gotten that feeling from.

Now, when I tell women this they usually tell me I'm some kind of statistical anomaly; whatever. That's been my life experience up to now. And in most of those offices I was one of a very few guys, and all of us were in lower-end jobs, so I can't be that unusual. And I'll lump it for now. Whatever. But it's pretty fucking galling to have to listen to this shit every fucking year from women who are supposedly so discriminated against when all I've ever seen in the workplace is women getting better jobs that pay more and me, on such rare occasion as I can get my foot in the door, getting a couple thousand dollars less per year for the same work.

Judah @ 31: ah yes, the life experiences of a lone individual (sample size 1), completely negate the findings of large population surveys. Great reasoning there.

And Tom @ 25: "Even after" means that before, they weren't controlled for these factors."

Umm..."even after" is a stock phrase in these kinds of studies. What you're telling the reader is that at first pass the raw data tells you something is up, then you move on to more detailed analyses in an attempt to control for confounding variables. If a pattern still holds you introduce it by saying even after...

Doubting sex-based pay disparity at this point is like holding out on whether human activity causes global warming.

Gnossos: I don't think a single one of the skeptical voices here claimed the true rate of bias is zero. (Certainly I did't.) What we for chide ECB for is quite purposefully misrepresenting what the data do say. She basically writes: "The wage disparity is 25%! And they controlled for other factors!" Any reasonable person reading that would take it to mean that the wage disparity is 25% after they controlled for other factors. And that's simply not true, as ECB finally got round to admitting around post 16. A more honest formulation (which would have garnered no protest from me) would have been: "After correcting for other factors, about a 5% wage disparity persists." ECB prefered the former, misleading formulation, and we all know full well that wasn't by accident.

David: The 5% unexplained disparity is for one year after graduation from college. At ten years out it is 12%.

Some folks above seem to argue that this is a generational artifact and will fade away as time goes by.

It seems to me that it could just as plausibly be argued that this is a "glass ceiling" effect and that as women move forward in their careers they are less likley to be given promotions or pay increases at the same level as men.

Whatever the reasons for this, it is still the case that if you look at the upper ranks of many (most?) fields in the US women are grossly underrepresented and are paid at substantially lower salaries.

This is true even in supposedly aware and liberal institutions. There are departments at the UW, for example, that are notorious for denials of tenure to women faculty members and for disparate rates of promotion and compensation.

I've got no problems with actually looking at the data and trying to parse it out and questioning assumptions. What does frost my gizzard, however, is that when studies like this showing the effects of sex (or race, or class) on employment (or education, or housing) come out we get this reflexive chorus from men (or whites, or richies) that this can't be true and that some other force (e.g., the incompetence or unworthiness of those affected) is at play.

Gnossos: I was with you up until the end there where you apparently deny that there are "other forces" (besides pure bias) at play. The fact that the corrected effect is only 25% of the raw effect is rather clear evidence that not only are other forces at play, but that those other forces account for the the vast majority of the effect.

To be sure, "vast majority" is not the same as "entire". But if you come out touting raw numbers (because bigger numbers make for better headlines), and then you attack anyone who points out your misrepresentation as a chauvanist denialist, then you are setting yourself up for people to call bullshit.

I think Mr. Wright gets where I'm coming from. I do believe that there is real wage discrimination, but I've been hearing that 75 cents on the dollar figure for twenty years and it seems at this point completely implausible to me that McDonalds could get away with paying burger flipper dude $10.00 and the female burger flipper standing next to him $7.71 across their whole operation and not be slapped with a class action suit. So something else must be going on.

My suspicion is that as one moves up the income ladder, the old-boys-network effect becomes more pronounced. And that those jobs are weighted more heavily than lower paying jobs in this representation. When I worked for a major corporation, we had to go to non-discrimination and anti-harassment trainings every year, and they seemed to be almost entirely motivated by fear of litigation. If it were as simple as pointing out a 25% across-the-board income disparity, every corporation would be getting sued like Wal-Mart recently was.

"There are departments at the UW, for example, that are notorious for denials of tenure to women faculty members and for disparate rates of promotion and compensation."

gnossos: which UW deparments are you referring to when you say "for example." What has their gender ratio of hiring in the last 15 years?

Your argumentum ad ignorantiam is even more pathetic than erica's argumentum ad numerum.

Gnossos, my point is that ECB wrote that there is a 20% pay gap "even after" accounting for hours worked, occupation, and other factors. In fact, 80% is the raw difference; the discrepancy remaining "even after" is 5% (that's on page 18 of the study and amply clear even from the press release). What frosts me is that the conventional wisdom keeps talking about women earning 80% or less than men for doing the same work when it is just not true. Gnossos and ECB, it would do wonders for your credibility if you'd admit you are wrong on this point (or point out to us all just where in the study they claim that women earn 80% of what men earn 1 year after college AFTER norming for occupation, hours worked, and other relevant factors).

David W @ 35: I'm not denying there are other forces/factors at work (sorry, I thought I was clearer about acknowledging them). What I do reject is the claim that other factors besides bias account for ALL disparity, and that factors such as sex, race, and class are irrelevant. I don't think you're making that argument, but I'm amazed at how often people make it.

Tom @ 38: I never claimed what you're claiming I did. All I did was cite from the report that one year after graduation there is a 5% pay disparity that was not explained by looking at a variety of other factors. And that at ten years out the disparity increases to 12%.

Are there other factors that they perhaps should have looked at as controls? Sure. Take breast/hip size. If you think I'm joking, I assure you I'm not. Studies have shown associations between measures of physical attractiveness and job success. For some reason Slog is not letting me post a link to one study, but just google attractiveness and job success and you'll get results.

Doink @ 37: okay, you're right to call me for making a statement like that without some back-up. First, when I said "notorious" I was doing exactly what I accused Judah of doing.

And at the risk of incurring further wrath I'll do a little more.

There is one department in the social sciences, which is notorious (that word again!) in the rumor mill for its practices. I know a woman who transferred to the department from another large university. When I asked her about her tenure status she laughed and said that was a condition of her accepting the job: that it came with automatic tenure. In the academic rumor mill, women are warned away from this department.

Okay, enough with anecdote. Do I have data? Not much unfortunately. There has been at least one class action suit that I know of (against the school of dentistry).

The University of Washington chapter of the American Association of University Professors has consistently issued "State of the Faculty" reports.

In their 2006 report they stated:

"Today women hold 37% of all faculty positions at UW, up from 32% in 1997, and 29% of tenured positions, up from 20% in 1997. These numbers have been rising slowly but steadily. There is one worrisome sign: a declining percentage of women among tenure-eligible assistant professors, now down to 42%. It is also important to note that most of the contingent faculty are female: 59% of all lecturers and teaching associates. These data do not allow us to explore salary inequities which have long been a problem and certainly continue today."

Overall they give the UW a grade of F for its tenure system and C+ for gender equality.