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Why working families could be better off in Sweden

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Why working families could be better off in Sweden

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The US is the only industrialized nation that does not provide it's workers with paid parental leave day. The only thing that allows parents to still have their jobs when they take time off from work because of their newborn child is the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993 which states that a parent is only allowed 12 weeks of leave after their child is born, at times this time can be split between the two parents is they work in the same company and their are some exceptions especially among small businesses. Such exceptions include Google, which provides its female employees with five months of fully paid maternity leave.
In my opinion it is an atrocity to see how little importance our politics seems to put on family and time to be spent with the family especially at such critical moments in people's lives such as the birth of their child. I believe that devoting a good amount of time to the family creates a nurturing environment for the child which will one day be the future for their parents and it will decrease the amount of stress many parents feel about having to go back to work, especially for the mother who just gave birth to a child.

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When Australia passed a parental leave law in 2010, it left the U.S. as the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns. Most of the rest of the world has paid maternity leave policies, too; Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea are the only other countries that do not. Many countries give new fathers paid time off as well or allow parents to share paid leave.

New parents in the U.S. are guaranteed their jobs for 12 weeks after the arrival of a new baby, thanks to the Family Medical Leave Act of 1993, but they do not have to be paid during that time and exemptions apply for small companies. Only about 16 percent of employers offer fully paid maternity leave and many families take on significant debt or turn to public assistance around the birth of a child. As America's falling fertility rate raises economic concerns, working families may long to procreate in Sweden, where parents are given 480 paid days per child, to be shared between them and used anytime before the kid turns eight.

Will the U.S. catch up with the rest of the world during President Obama's second term? Advocates are working to get a national law passed while some states are expanding family leave policies, the Atlantic reports. See a new White House petition here. In the meantime, certain companies understand that keeping new parents happy makes more sense than replacing them, which generally costs somewhere between 50 and 200 percent of a worker's salary. When Google lengthened its maternity leave from three months to five and made it fully paid, new-mom attrition fell by half.

This story appears in Issue 38 of our weekly iPad magazine, Huffington, in the iTunes App store, available Friday, March 1.

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Why Working Families Could Be Better Off In Sweden

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When Australia passed a parental leave law in 2010, it left the U.S. as the only industrialized nation not to mandate paid leave for mothers of newborns. Most of the rest of the world has paid maternity leave policies, too; Lesotho, Swaziland and Papua New Guinea are the only other countries that do not.

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Although the wage gap is at its historical low in the US (from 60 cents a dollar in1980s to 80 cents per dollar in 2015) it is still 2.5 times higher than in other industrialized countries. Some proposed solutions to improving the wage gap in the US include encouraging woman to obtain higher paying jobs which still does not work because even then women are paid less and the work environment in such high paying level jobs is usually very sexist against women causing several women to either work less or not work in such high level jobs. This leads to the second potential solution; make women work more or as much as men, because it is calculated that only 10% of the women in the professional work force work as much as men (that is 41 hours a week). The lower amount of hours for several women is usually due to their family chores, while men get paid more once they have a family women's paychecks decrease a long with the hours of work they have because maternity leave here in the US and childcare policies are not beneficial to women. Lastly, it is suggested that women stop negotiating for equal pay and just have transparency in all companies, this way companies feel forced to pay the women equal pay an example of how this could work out is in the Reddit company.
Personally, I think that it is great that there are several plausible ways to get rid of the wage gap her in the US but I find it so unfortunate that for each solution there seems to be several more problems. Some which seem to be rooted plainly on discrimination, something that can not easily be illuminated because unfortunately it is deeply rooted in our society for decades (that is when specifically speaking about women's salaries).

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The gender pay gap is now the narrowest it's ever been, and yet it's still 2.5 times the size of those of other industrialized countries. So what's to be done?

Björn Kietzmann / Corbis / Zak Bickel / Kara Gordon / The Atlantic

Since 1963, the Equal Pay Act has stated that men and women doing the same work have to be paid equally. More recently, the Obama administration has announced an executive action that will require companies with 100 employees or more to report pay data broken down by gender. The problem with legislating equal pay is that it puts the onus on female employees to bring lawsuits showing that they have been discriminated against. (The California Fair Pay Act has now added additional protection, saying that women need not have the same title in order to have a claim of doing equal work and protecting them from retribution if they ask about the fairness of their pay.)

Of course, this helps if men and women are doing the same work. But a big part of the gender wage gap is due to the fact that they aren't. So what's to be done about that?

ANSWER
We should encourage women to take jobs that pay more, and in fields that pay more.
QUESTION

That would definitely help women get paid more. But will they get paid as much as the men in those roles?

Questioning popular answers to pressing conundrums
Read more

Nope. As the Harvard economist Claudia Goldin writes: "Surprisingly, the differing occupations of men and women explain only 10 to 33 percent of the difference in male and female earnings. The rest is due to differences within occupations, and part of that is due to the observable factors."

While encouraging women into higher paying fields is a good thing, it's hard to ignore that even when they make it there, they are paid less. Women now make up a third of lawyers and doctors, but they're still paid less than their male counterparts in those professions. Having more women in higher-paying fields won't solve the problem if they aren't compensated at the same rates as their male peers in those fields.

National surveys from the Bureau of Labor Statistics overwhelmingly support the notion that women spend a lot more time on chores than men do, which is why many proponents who want to close the gender gap argue that one way men can contribute to closing the gender wage gap is ensuring equality on the home front.

Perhaps there can be policies that would support that too, which brings us to ...

ANSWER
Give women flexible work, better maternity-leave policies, and free childcare.
QUESTION

Will that get us to equality?

Related Stories

Data shows that the wage gap is the smallest for young women. According to an estimate by Pew, women ages 25 to 34 have closed the gap to 93 cents to the dollar. This is consistent with research that while young women are catching up to their male peers in early career, it's mid-to-late-career women for whom the pay gap is much larger. Here's another statistic: Women who never married earn 94 percent of their male counterparts, while married women earn only 78 percent.

This is what's often referred to as the motherhood penalty, which happens later in a woman's career. Women who have children often report that they take time off, reduce hours, and sometimes quit work in order to take care of their children. One study found that while men's earnings increase by 6 percent when they have children, women with children saw their earnings decrease by 4 percent for each child.

There are two ways to go about fixing this huge part of the gender wage gap. The first is for companies or the government to implement policies that enable women to be both moms and workers, such as paid family leave and supported childcare. But there's also a cultural shift that needs to happen: The assumption that mothers are not as good at their jobs, not deserving of promotions, or won't work as hard is discrimination. Employers need to do their part in seeing women who are mothers as valued as employees.

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How Do We Close the Wage Gap in the U.S.?

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The gender pay gap is now the narrowest it's ever been, and yet it's still 2.5 times the size of those of other industrialized countries. So what's to be done? Since 1963, the Equal Pay Act has stated that men and women doing the same work have to be paid equally.

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What gender pay-gap statistics aren't capturing

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What gender pay-gap statistics aren't capturing

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The argument here is that the gender gap actually does not exist. That in reality women chose jobs that are low paying there for they earn less.   This tendency is called gender occupational segregation, when in reality women are paid less even in the jobs that are considered to be primarily feminine.

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Women are in fact more likely to choose lower-paying jobs, but numbers do a poor job of highlighting the cultural biases that can shape their decisions.

In discussions of the gender-pay gap, there's one counter-argument that comes up a lot: The gap isn't real, because after adjusting for the different types of jobs men and women tend to have, the gap shrinks to single digits. And so, the argument goes, men and women aren't paid the same amount of money because they are choosing to go into different professions, and the labor market rewards their choices differently. In other words: unequal work, hence unequal pay.

There's a lot of truth to this: Men and women do tend to choose different careers, so much so that researchers have a term for it: "gender occupational segregation." And because of this occupational sorting, the most commonly mentioned figure of the gender-gap debate-that an American woman only earns 79 cents for every dollar a typical American man makes-is indeed too simple.

But the occupational differences explanation, when presented without caveats, is also problematic. "The story is a lot more complicated than that," says Elise Gould, an economist and the co-author of a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute about gender and compensation. "We wanted to disentangle the question of 'choice' and what's happening between two workers that are sitting right next to each other in a cubicle ... What's going on behind that in terms of cultural norms, expectations, work-family balance-all the different components that might lead women to be in certain kinds of jobs differently than men."

Researchers often control for certain variables if they suspect that those variables might be exaggerating the size of an effect. In the case of the pay gap, economists often adjust their data to compensate for the fact that, for example, men are overrepresented in high-paying computer programming jobs, and women are overrepresented in low-paying service jobs. These adjustments lead to numbers that stand as good estimates of how big a pay gap would be if men and women were represented in equal numbers in each profession. There are usually other variables that researchers control for, too; geography, experience, and job titles are other variables with known effects, so filtering them out from the numbers is a step toward isolating the effects of gender on pay.

But the striking thing is that even after adjusting for so many factors, there's still a statistically significant pay gap. (Pay-gap skeptics often note that the gap shrinks after taking these factors into account, but it's supposed to-those statistical adjustments were intended to create a more definitive, standardized measurement.) The fact that a gap remains at all after such adjustments shows that the problem defies any simple explanation. As Robert Hohman, the CEO of Glassdoor, wrote a few months ago in Fortune:

Factoring differences in education, experience, age, location, job title, industry and even company, our latest research reveals that the "adjusted" gender pay gap in the U.S. amounts to women earning about 94.6 cents per dollar compared to men. It is remarkable that a significant gap persists even after comparing male-female worker pay at the job title and company level.

That 5-cent difference is evidence that something isn't getting accounted for in all those variables that economists are adjusting.

The premise of the occupational-differences argument is that if women are choosing jobs that are easier to do, they shouldn't be paid the same wages as men. But what that argument-that women are to blame for keeping their wages down because they're choosing bad jobs-doesn't take into account are the many things that contribute to the way men and women choose their careers.

Gould, along with her co-author, Jessica Schieder, argue that the decisions women make regarding their careers do not happen in a vacuum: These are decisions shaped by cultural norms and expectations, societal forces that aren't cleanly captured by pay data. Gould and Schieder point to a multitude of messages that women get from society about what sorts of jobs they should pick: The expectations of American mothers could lead women to take lower-paying jobs because they're more likely to offer flexible (or shorter hours), while fears of discrimination might steer them away from higher-paying professions. In other words, adjusted statistics could be missing the role of discrimination in the processes that lead women to choose the careers they do.

"Too often it is assumed that this gap is not evidence of discrimination, but is instead a statistical artifact of failing to adjust for factors that could drive earnings differences between men and women. However, these factors-particularly occupational differences between women and men-are themselves affected by gender bias," Gould and Schieder write.

And while there are many efforts to push women towards studying subjects that would funnel them into higher-paying fields, such as science or tech, it's worth remembering that the adjusted gap still exists. Closing it would mean paying attention to all the ways that women make choices about their careers-and the inequities they can experience after they make them.

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What Gender Pay-Gap Statistics Aren't Capturing

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Women are in fact more likely to choose lower-paying jobs, but numbers do a poor job of highlighting the cultural biases that can shape their decisions. In discussions of the gender-pay gap, there's one counter-argument that comes up a lot: The gap isn't real, because after adjusting for the different types of jobs men and women tend to have, the gap shrinks to single digits.

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Women make up 50% of the work force in the US, yet they are are paid 77 cents for every dollar a Caucasian white man. Argues if the wage gap is due to equal work or equal individuals, yet women are still paid less when they are evaluated in the same sense. Evidence of discrimination in the US are such that essential blatantly say they don't hire "negros nor women". Women even those without kids usually have more responsibilities among their family, therefor this is a side of the coin that argues that maybe women are paid less because they work less. A year or two after a child is born that is when the wage gap between women and men begins to show. Slaughter says that when women have children or they are caring for a family member they have to work in a flexible schedule and they are part time which means that the boss won't trust them called temporal flexibility.

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The gist: discrimination can't explain why women earn so much less than men. If only it were that easy. Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post. And you'll find credits for the music in the episode noted within the transcript.
Our latest Freakonomics Radio episode is called "The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap." (You can subscribe to the podcast at iTunes or elsewhere, get the RSS feed, or listen via the media player above.)

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MEDIA CLIP: Oh, hi. I'm Sarah Silverman, writer, comedian, and vagina owner. Women make up almost half the working population, yet we typically earn just 78 cents for every dollar a man makes in almost every profession.

I'm pretty sure you've heard this kind of statistic before - maybe in a political ad.

POLITICAL AD: The gender pay gap is real and women still earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man earns for working the same job.

Maybe even in a State of the Union address.

BARACK OBAMA: Today, women make up about half our workforce. But they still make 77 cents for every dollar a man earns. That is wrong. And in 2014, it's an embarrassment. Women deserve equal pay for equal work.

The implication is that women are being discriminated against. True, they earn less. But does that mean ...

CLAUDIA GOLDIN: Does that mean that women are receiving lower pay for equal work? That is possibly the case in certain places, but by and large it's not that, it's something else.

"Something else" - like what? That's our question of the day on Freakonomics Radio, as we try to figure out the true story of the gender pay gap. If you're looking for someone to explain the gender pay gap, you couldn't do much better than today's guest.

GOLDIN: Claudia Goldin, I'm a professor of economics at Harvard University.

Goldin has been working on gender economics for years, and has personally done some of the most influential research.

GOLDIN: So, I define my role by thinking about the issues of today and putting them in historical perspective and understanding what the roots are. Because until you see the more distant past you really don't know whether you're looking at something that's a little ephemeral transitory blip or something that's important. DUBNER: And how important is it for you to get hold of good data in order to reach those conclusions? GOLDIN: It's sort of essential. I always say that I do not live in a data vacuum. I find it very hard to breathe in a data vacuum.

In 1990, Claudia Goldin became the first woman to get tenure in the Harvard economics department. In 2014, she served as president of the American Economic Association, the AEA. Her lecture at the annual AEA meeting was called " A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter."

DUBNER: You have argued - and I'll quote you to yourself - "The converging roles of men and women are among the grandest advances in the last century." What do you mean by that, and why is it so grand? GOLDIN: I'm very much interested in converging roles having to do with the productive capacities of men and women. So that would be their education, their professional degrees, their life-cycle labor-force participation - meaning how many years have they been productive members of the workforce. And so, there are converging roles in these arenas and they have meant that men and women are significantly more alike in terms of how firms and employers would look at them and how they look at themselves. DUBNER: Now, we hear about the gender pay gap a lot. We're told repeatedly - including by the President of the United States in the State of the Union - that "women earn much less than men for doing the same work," is one of the phrases that we hear - seventy-some cents on the dollar. So, first off, can you clarify what that really means? How true is that, when we hear a statement like that, especially in a political arena? GOLDIN: Well, it is true that if you took individuals in the labor force and took those who were working full-time, full-year, and took all women, took the median annual earnings of those women and took the same thing for men, and divided the two, it would be .77 or around that, OK? And that's a number that has increased. In early 1970's it was .59 and there was a mantra, "59 cents on a dollar, that's not enough, OK? We are equal to men, we deserve more." So, is this for equal work? Is it equal individuals? What economists do is they use data to figure out whether the individuals are the same; they try to make them comparable as possible; they squeeze out these differences and productive attributes; they look for individuals who have the same education, the same labor-force participation rates over their life cycle, etc. And they squeeze those out and we still get a number that's less than one. So, does that mean that women are receiving lower pay for equal work? That is possibly the case in certain places, but by and large, it's not that. It's something else. DUBNER: If we are talking about a gender pay gap, of whatever size - somewhere between 23 cents and zero cents less per dollar than a man - let's look at what factors might contribute to that. So, number one, what about discrimination? What is the evidence that women earn less because they're discriminated against on some dimension or another? GOLDIN: It's hard to find the smoking guns, OK? The smoking guns existed in the past. I have found many a smoking gun where you find actual evidence of firms saying, for example, "I do not hire Negroes." Or, "I do not hire women." I mean, you actually find these in 1939. We don't find those smoking guns now, but what we do try to do is hold everything constant that we can hold, get the best data that we can get. And what remains we don't call discrimination, we call wage discrimination. Discrimination is such a loaded word that we don't want to use that, so we use quotes around "wage discrimination." And so the first thing is, what type of data do you need to do that? It would be incredibly rich data. And a couple of people have put together data using administrative records that are phenomenally good data that can hold lots of things constant, that can track individuals over their lifetimes and get to the answer. And the answer is that it's a pretty small number, this number for wage discrimination once you hold lots of things constant. It's probably there, but we're not quite certain whether these differences are due to the fact that women, even those without kids, have more responsibilities or take more responsibilities in their own families - taking care of their parents, for example. So the answer is that we don't have tons of evidence that it's true discrimination. DUBNER: Talk for a moment about potential categorical differences between men and women that have shown up in some research. The different appetite for competition, as some have labeled it. Or, in another instance, the willingness to bargain on salary or flexibility. How much might those contribute to the pay gap? GOLDIN: I think there's no doubt that they contribute to some degree. But let me tell you why I don't think that they go the real distance. Some of the best studies that we have of the gender pay gap, following individuals longitudinally, show that when they show up right out of college, or out of law school, or after they get their M.B.A. - all the studies that we have indicate that wages are pretty similar then. So if men were better bargainers, they would have been better right then. And it doesn't look as if they're better bargainers to a degree that shows up as a very large number. But further down the pike in their lives, by 10-15 years out, we see very large differences in their pay. But we also see large differences in where they are, in their job titles, and a lot of that occurs a year or two after a kid is born, and it occurs for women and not for men. If anything, men tend to work somewhat harder. And I know that there are many who have done many experiments on the fact that women don't necessarily like competition as much as men do - they value temporal flexibility, men value income growth - that there are various differences. But in terms of bargaining and competition it doesn't look like it's showing up that much at the very beginning. DUBNER: Let me ask you about one more contributory factor. The parent penalty, what's often called the mommy tax. How significant is that as a contributory factor? GOLDIN: Well, it seems as if it's a very large factor. That anything that leads you to want to have more time is going to be a large factor.

The noted public-policy scholar Anne-Marie Slaughter, in a book called Unfinished Business , singled out what she calls the "care penalty" as a main driver of gender inequity. Here's how Slaughter sees it:

ANNE-MARIE SLAUGHTER: If you take women who don't have caregiving obligations, they're almost equal with men. It's somewhere in the 95 percent range. But when women then have children, or again are caring for their own parents or other sick family members who need care, then they need to work differently. They need to work flexibly, and often go part-time. They often get less-good assignments because their bosses think that they're not going to want work that allows them to travel, or they're not going to be able to stay up all night, or whatever it is. And so then you start - if you're working part-time, you don't get the same raises. And if you're working flexibly your boss very typically thinks that you're not that committed to your career, so you don't get promoted.

It is this pursuit, of what Claudia Goldin calls "temporal flexibility," that Goldin sees as perhaps the most powerful explanation for the gender pay gap. As she told us, it doesn't seem as though outright discrimination or differences in competitive drive or bargaining ability can account for much of the difference. But that need, or desire, for flexibility in the workplace leads to a split that's very clear in the data - a split that has to do with job selection.

GOLDIN: Women often take jobs that have different characteristics, different amenities.
[MUSIC: Orbit Monkey, "Uh Oh" (from Easy to Love)]
When Goldin refers to "amenities," she isn't just talking about free lunch at the office or free massages. She's talking about the ability to work flexible hours, or maybe work at home some days, maybe complete a project outside the typical corporate schedule - all of which can be extremely valuable if you are helping care for your family members in addition to working.

GOLDIN: I like to think about an individual who gets a degree - let's say a law degree - and it's a woman, and now I have an individual a man who gets a law degree. And they graduate from law school and they're both equally brilliant, and they both get jobs in approximately the same type of firm. By and large they're going to earn approximately the same amount when they start. Things will continue in their lives - they'll both perhaps find partners, get married, have kids. It's often the case that women will leave the very large law firms that put a lot of time demands on them and go to smaller firms or become corporate counsel, become part-time corporate counsel, perhaps, for a while. They will go to small firms where the workload is somewhat different. They may work in fact the same number of hours, but they may work hours that are their hours rather than the hours imposed on them by the firm. The woman will then begin to make - if she's the one who did this - she will make considerably less than the man. And a lot of what we see - not all of it - but a lot of what we see is this choice to go into occupations that have less expensive temporal flexibility, that allow individuals to do their work on their own time.

DUBNER: So do you find that there are bigger differences between men and women between different occupations? In other words, what would be a more typical story? A man and a woman, let's say, who are observationally equivalent in terms of aptitude and education, and so on. What would be more typical, that the female would go into a profession where the average salary is lower than the man? Or that the female would go into the same profession as the man, but choose a particular type of occupation within that profession that might provide more latitude and therefore come with less salary? GOLDIN: Right, so we have both things going on. So, we know that there is what many people call "occupational segregation." Nurses are female. Doctors are - they were disproportionately male; in some specialties they still are. We know that nurses earn less than doctors, in general. So one might think that all of the difference in average earnings is going to be the difference because women select more into occupations that look like they're paying less - big occupational groups that are paying less - and men select into occupations in which they pay more. But, really the lion's share of the difference is due to the fact that in every occupation, just about, women receive less than men. And they're receiving less than men for a host of reasons, one of which is that they're not working the same amount of time. And in many occupations, working more hours or being there when the firm wants you to be there earns you a lot more. So, in fact, something like three-quarters of the difference, if you look at the 469 occupations in the Census, and you look at how much is due to the fact that women are disproportionately in certain occupations, and how much is due to the fact that within each occupation there are differences - 75% is due to the within each occupation. Thus, another way of putting it is, you could hypothetically give women the male distribution of occupations and you would wipe out only about a quarter of the difference in earnings between men and women.

DUBNER: Can you talk for a moment about where you see the largest in-sector differences in gender pay? GOLDIN: So, what I did was I took all of the occupations in the Census and then I looked at the top paying 105 occupations. So, the point that I'm drawing is about $60,000 a year. So, the occupations then divide into those in the corporate and finance sector, those in health, those in science and technology, which I can group together. And then there is this other group that's just very hard to put in one or the other - lawyers, for example, would be in that one. And what I find - it's very clear - is that the gender wage gaps, when you correct for the stuff you can correct for in the Census, you find that the biggest wage gaps are in the corporate, the financial sectors, also law, and the health occupations in which there is a high fraction of ownership, of self-employment - so the podiatrists, for example, the chiropractors. So, the ones that have the smallest difference between male and female earnings with these corrections are the technology occupations and the science occupations and the health occupations where there is a small degree of self-employment - as is true today for, for example, pharmacists. DUBNER: OK, so as best as you can figure the why out, where the gap within the profession is so large, why is it so large? GOLDIN: By and large, it appears that there's just a very high cost of temporal flexibility in certain occupations. And part of this is that people don't have good substitutes for themselves in certain cases. So, you are doing a merger in an acquisition, you're a lawyer, you are a consultant - whatever it is - the client might say, "I want you there. I want you there all the time. I want to call you at 2 in the morning. I want you to be there on Sunday, on holidays. I want you to go to Japan whenever I say that you should." Well, that's a tremendous demand. So an individual who values their family time would say, "I'm not doing that." So therefore if a woman wants to - law, for example, is a good example - if a woman wants to practice law, she has a law degree, she enjoys practicing law, being a corporate counsel would give her more flexibility. That doesn't mean that she's working fewer hours than she would've worked otherwise, but she can work her hours, and she gets paid somewhat less.

* * *

The big question of the gender pay gap has to be broken down into a set of smaller questions. And then you have to find the data to answer them. When someone like Claudia Goldin does that, it's pretty obvious that the statistic cited by everyone from Sarah Silverman to President Obama isn't quite right. Because women aren't getting paid twenty-some percent less than men for doing the same work. They are, however, often doing different work, or work that affords more flexibility - which tends to pay less.

Now, it may be that if you put a dollar value on the flexibility, it could offset a lot of the actual, salary dollars. In any case, there would seem to be kinda-sorta good news here, which is that discrimination doesn't seem to be the main culprit in the gender pay gap. Or at least it's hard to find a smoking gun, as Claudia Goldin says. But not impossible.

A hack of Sony Pictures e-mails showed that the actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams got fewer back-end points than their male counterparts in the film American Hustle. Interestingly, when Lawrence later wrote about this revelation, she largely blamed herself. "I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early," she wrote. "I didn't want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don't need... But if I'm honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn't say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn't want to seem 'difficult' or 'spoiled.'"

So, that's another component to consider when you're talking about the gender pay gap - that even in the absence of outright discrimination, the playing fields are not necessarily equal. Some of the most compelling evidence for this fact comes from the late 1990s, a study that Claudia Goldin did with . The paper was called " Orchestrating Impartiality."

GOLDIN: We found out that the best orchestras in the United States, most of them use a blind when they do auditions. They didn't in the past, and each one of them adopted this technique for having auditions. And the blind means that the individuals who are making the decision on the sound of the individual's performance do not get to see the individual; that there is a screen in front of the individual. And so we decided that since the various orchestras adopted this screen, we could figure out whether the huge increase in women in the great orchestras in the United States was in, perhaps, due to the use of this screen. DUBNER: So I guess one theory might be if orchestras got a lot more female over time, it may have just been that the pool of female applicants had grown a lot or the pool of male applicants had shrunk a lot, right? But you wanted to isolate the effect of the blind auditions, correct? And what did you find? GOLDIN: We found that blind auditions mattered a tremendous amount. Our best estimate was that it was about 25% of an increase, which is pretty large. And one of the ways that we did it - and this I will say was Ceci's brilliance - was that because we had the names of individuals, we actually could track individuals who auditioned not blind and then blind for different orchestras. DUBNER: I'm trying to tell - I may be interpreting this wrong - but are you saying that the use of more blind auditions also had an effect of simply encouraging more females to audition for those top tier orchestras? GOLDIN: That's right. It appears to have led to an explosion of auditions. DUBNER: So that suggests that - gender gap aside, which we're talking about - that what you might more broadly and much more importantly call an opportunity gap in the gender sphere is something that's not only omnipresent in certain industries but also really hard to get at, right? GOLDIN: That's right. I think that this is a very good example of where individuals might not come out to interview - it's expensive to do that in some sense, you have to travel to do it, you have to put your pride on the line. And so now there was just a much larger group of individuals doing these interviews.

* * *

DUBNER: So you're a Harvard economist. Your partner in life, Larry Katz, is also a Harvard economist. How fair would you consider your pay in relation to his? GOLDIN: They're exactly the same, practically. I think I always make slightly more because I'm more senior than he in terms of years, and I think that the administration always thinks that if I get $5 more that that makes it better. And it sort of sure does. DUBNER: It gives you bragging rights, at least, right? GOLDIN: Absolutely.

Goldin and Katz would both show up in the Census data as post-secondary teachers. And in this case, the female teacher earns a few dollars more than her male counterpart. But what if Goldin had decided some years back to find somewhere less-demanding to work than at Harvard? Maybe she needed to care for some family members; maybe she wanted to study opera singing on the side. Whatever. So perhaps she opted out of the Ivy League tenure track for a different teaching job that didn't pay as much.

Well, if that were the case, she and Larry Katz would still both show up in the Census data as post-secondary teachers - but now the female worker is earning a lot less than the male counterpart. You multiply that story by a few million and you have a huge pay gap between men and women.

In some ways it's a self-inflicted wound - women make choices that lead to smaller monetary returns. On the other hand, society is set up in such a way that those choices are often not really very optional. So, what's to be done about it?

Some people have taken matters into their own hands. A record label from Portland, Oregon, called M'lady's Records, decided to give female customers a 23 percent discount on mail orders to account for the pay gap. They weren't the only ones to think of this strategy.

MEDIA CLIP: A bar in Brooklyn is charging women just 77% of their bar bills all night to highlight the wage gap between working men and women.

But getting a discount on drinks, or records, isn't going to accomplish much. What would Claudia Goldin do?

DUBNER: So, let me ask you this. Can you point to examples of countries or cultures or maybe firms that in your view have successfully addressed the real root causes of the gender pay gap? GOLDIN: In some ways, certain occupations that seem to have successfully addressed them may not have given it any thought. My favorite example is pharmacy, in which there's virtually no part-time penalty, in which there is very little ownership now in terms of independent pharmacies. We may lament that - I would certainly lament if I lost the wonderful independent pharmacy in Cambridge - but in fact, women tend to shy away from ownership in part because it involves a fair amount of responsibility that is unpredictable. So, there have been changes in pharmacy that have led pharmacists to be better substitutes for each other - the use of highly standardized drugs, for example, less compounding, less individual, less need for a particular pharmacist to deal with you. Information technologies have been absolutely essential. When you go to the pharmacist, it could be any of the pharmacists working there who are intelligent and professional and can read the information about you. So some of what has happened that has been good for women comes from changes that I call organic, and they simply happen because of various technological advances that make each pharmacist a perfect puzzle piece for another pharmacist. And also, I mean, go to Silicon Valley and they don't talk about family time, they talk about play time, and it's work-life balance rather than just work-family balance. So the more and more people in our society who value that, the more firms are going to be searching for methods to reduce the cost of this amenity. If the cost is expensive, then it's going to be the case that individuals who shy away from those jobs are going to be paid disproportionately less and the more people who want those jobs, the more firms are going to find it costly to provide them, and they're going to come up with ways using information technology to create these puzzle pieces.

* * *

It may be a natural impulse, when you hear that women earn less than men, to find someone to blame. One obvious villain is: men, presumably for being discriminatory. But as Claudia Goldin told us, there isn't much evidence to support the discrimination argument.

Another obvious villain is: our institutional setup. If we could change - maybe modernize - a lot of our institutions, and the incentives they offer, wouldn't that lead to more equality? Let's assume that's true. The question would then become: which institutions should be changed, and how?

And should we assume that governments should take the lead? In 2009, President Obama signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which expands the right to sue in cases of unequal pay. But that's a pretty narrow advance. President Obama and others want more legislation to try to close the gender pay gap. I asked Claudia Goldin if she thinks this is a good idea, and if so, what kind of legislation makes sense?
* * *
GOLDIN: The best legislation that we can have is to change certain aspects of our school system. If family matters are important here - and I believe they are - it's not just baby care. Simply doing something for infants isn't the big deal. Most people I know who have kids will say that life was relatively easy until their kids went to the local public school, which sends them out at two o'clock, which sends them home in June, and the problems that they have are trying then to fill in the time to six o'clock, which used to be filled in in daycare, and fill in the summer, which used to be filled in in daycare. So for the children, alone, it would be worth extending the day and extending the year. This is not cheap, but it's simply an extension of a public good that we are already producing and it will do a world of good for working families. DUBNER: Interesting, but you're not calling for, or advocating at least, as your first choice, legislation that would change the way firms work to create more equal opportunities or more temporal flexibility, let's say, for women? GOLDIN: If I could figure out a way of doing that, I would have told you. But I don't think it's easy to mandate. How can you mandate that firms all figure out ways of reducing the cost of temporal flexibility and reducing the costs of having people be puzzle pieces? We're simply not going to do that. It's going to happen organically. DUBNER: There are some places where men are required, increasingly, to take family leave when they have a child. So does that kind of legislation - that happens governmentally, but then at the firm level - does that suitably level the playing field by lowering the cost of temporal flexibility? GOLDIN: Well that doesn't lower the cost of temporal flexibility. That could change the amount of time that each parent spends with kids. So there are, sort of, two separate ways of dealing with this. One is changing the cost of the amenity, and the other one is changing the supply of the individuals who demand the amenity. And that might change the latter; it's not necessarily going to change the former at all.

DUBNER: Anne-Marie Slaughter, whom we've also spoken with about this topic, argues that a lot of the solution for gender equality in the workplace lies with men - that men need essentially to be sort of re-socialized, to better understand their role and women's role in family care and so on. I'm curious what your thoughts are on that. That's a strong social norm in our culture, that women are the, "primary caregiver" and so on. I'm curious whether you think that's a necessary and/or likely change, and that might produce some benefit to everybody? GOLDIN: Well, that is certainly related to the previous point that you made about paternity leave. That if we mandate that men take paternity leave or give them paternity leave - parental leave that only they could take, that you can't mandate they take it, you can simply say that if you don't take it, it evaporates. One of the reasons for doing that in the various countries that have done it is to, sort of, change the social norm and have fathers bond more with their kids, and take more responsibility when their kids are young and then they're going to do more later. And there are some studies - one in Quebec, for example - that indicates that it does have somewhat of an impact. So, that's going along the lines of what Anne-Marie Slaughter says, and I couldn't agree with her more that if in fact men leaned out more the world would be a better place for women. How you accomplish that is more difficult. I think that it would be easier to accomplish getting the price of the amenity down, than as you just said, reprogramming all the men in the United States. So, I think of these issues as these solutions in buckets as: fix the women -that is, make them more competitive, better bargaining skills, better at math. Fix the infants - take care of the infants, that will do it, OK? Fix the men - which is the point that we were just talking about. Or, fix the organizations and the jobs and I'm thinking more about the latter. DUBNER: What costs come with that convergence of the roles of men and women? Especially hidden costs that we haven't considered. In other words, we've set this up as a goal of equity, especially in the workplace. Can you point to any examples where there are costs, however, to the pursuit of that equity? GOLDIN: Well, there are always going to be differences. There's no question. No one's saying that we want a world in which men and women are identical, in which you look out and you just see androgynous individuals walking around in Mao suits. So, I'm not certain what actual costs there are. Making men kinder and gentler and more interested in their kids - how can there be any cost to that? Making women more respected in their jobs, how can there be any cost to that? Making women fiercer and better bargainers and more competitive? Meh. I can see a cost to that. DUBNER: I'm just curious, what's it like for you to hear the kind of stock political assertion about the size of the gender gap knowing that it misses all the nuances that you've just described? GOLDIN: It makes me feel that I have to get back in my office and do better work, and write it up better, and state it with more force. But, I recognize that there are facts, there are truths, and there's political action. So one simply has to recognize that there are good people out there who want to make the world a better place and they will push what they want even in the absence of hard evidence.

Claudia Goldin admits that her career has turned out pretty well. If you want to be an academic, landing in the economics department at Harvard isn't bad. Goldin is considered a true expert in her field; she's won awards, been celebrated. But she's also been reminded, now and then, that simply being female can carry costs of its own.

GOLDIN: My own story is interesting because I was asked - and I do not do consulting - I was asked to evaluate a project that was done by a leading international agency that will remain unnamed. And the project was that in the organization, it was deemed that women were being treated less well than men. And they did an internal study, and the internal study concluded that women were doing just as well as men and that there were no problems at all - that whatever problems were in the organization were some other things. Maybe there was groping, maybe there was harassment, but that didn't look like it showed up in terms of their job position and their pay. OK, so this person calls me up and says, we need external people to review it. And he asked me and two other people, who were men, who worked a lot as consultants. And the person said to me, "how about $2,000 for this job?" And I thought, "that's interesting," because I thought I was doing it as a favor. "That's fine, $2,000." So the three of us evaluated the internal review, found that it looked pretty good, and I received my payment. A couple months go by and I receive a call that said, "By the way" - and remember that the project we were working on was wage- and promotion-discrimination against women - and I receive a call and was told that the other two men had a rate that they asked for and so their pay was about one and a half times or two times mine. So, someone at that organization actually approved three consultants, the woman receiving about half of what the men received. So, there is evidence that the individual who didn't ask for anything - because I didn't have a rate - got less than the guys who did ask for it. DUBNER: Alright, so my one piece of advice for you, Claudia, would be that you need to find out the previously agreed-upon male rate and quote that instead of letting them tell you what you're going to get, alright? GOLDIN: Thank you very much. Well, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to call you up and ask you to bargain for me. DUBNER: It's a deal. I'll do it.

* * *

And next time on Freakonomics Radio, how to become a political superforecaster. It is not as straightforward as you think.

* * *
PEOPLE
Freakonomics Radio is produced by WNYC Studios and Dubner Productions. This episode was produced by Greg Rosalsky. Our staff also includes , , Merritt Jacob, Christopher Werth, Kasia Mychajlowycz, Alison Hockenberry and Caroline English. If you want more Freakonomics Radio, you can also find us on Twitter and Facebook and don't forget to subscribe to this podcast on iTunes or wherever else you get your free, weekly podcasts.

Here's where you can learn more about the people and ideas behind this episode:

Claudia Goldin, professor of economics at Harvard
RESEARCH
Cecilia Rouse, professor of economics at Princeton, Dean of Woodrow Wilson School

Anne-Marie Slaughter, president and CEO of New America

" A Grand Gender Convergence: Its Last Chapter," by Claudia Goldin, American Economic Review (2014)

" How To Achieve Gender Equality," by Claudia Goldin, Milkin Institute (2015)

ETC.
" Orchestrating Impartiality: The Impact of 'Blind' Auditions on Female Musicians," by Claudia Goldin and Cecila Rouse, American Economic Review (2000)

"Unfinished Business ," by Anne-Marie Slaughter (Random House, 2015)

" Meet the Woman Who Said Women Can't Have It All," Freakonomics Radio (2015)

" Women Are Not Men," Freakonomics Radio (2015)

" Sarah Silverman Closes The Gap," YouTube (2014)

" Why Do I Make Less Than My Male Co-Stars?" by Jennifer Lawrence, Lenny (2015)

" Portland," by Coasting, M'Lady's Records (2011)

" From the Archives: President Obama Signs the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act," The White House (2012)

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The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap - Freakonomics

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The gist: discrimination can't explain why women earn so much less than men. If only it were that easy. Below is a transcript of the episode, modified for your reading pleasure. For more information on the people and ideas in the episode, see the links at the bottom of this post.

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Latina women are paid less than african american women and white women who all get paid less than white men. Even in female dominated jobs women earn ten percent on average less than men, an example of such a thing is found in the nursing field. It is estimated that women in the United States earn less then men in 99.6% of all job industries. There have been attempts to repeal or even get rid of such discrimination through legislation as is seen in the 2007 Equal Pay Enforcement Act which was shortly repealed. I believe that it was repealed because there are several rich men that can control the politics in regards to pay who would rather stay rich and become richer than allow everyone to be paid justly and equally.

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Women make up nearly half of the U.S. workforce. Full participants, they've reached equal and some cases higher, levels than their male counterparts, and yet,

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Women in Wyoming are the ones that are being paid the least in the US.

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Bad news, Wyoming women: Your state has the worst gender pay gap out of all 50 - and it's impacting your retirement savings.

On Wednesday, NerdWallet released a study that found women in Wyoming make a mere 64 cents for every $1 a local man earns. That's about 16 cents below the national average of 80 cents for every man's $1, according to 2015 U.S. Census Bureau data. But according to the study, this wage gap in Wyoming and elsewhere is also creating a bigger divide when it comes to a 401(k) and traditional individual retirement accounts, or Roth IRA.

Women in Wyoming must tuck away $1.55 for every $1 a man invests in retirement savings in order to build an equivalent nest egg, researchers found-about 30 cents more than the $1.25 average American woman need to save for every $1 a man invests.

To conclude those numbers, NerdWallet examined U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007 and 2015 to determine how annual income and wages changed over that time frame. The study's authors also charted the states that have seen the pay gap shrink during that period, and also calculated where it has worsened.

New York, Rhode Island, Delaware, New Hampshire, and Connecticut all saw the pay gap shrink, with New York (on average) boasting the smallest difference in wages. As of 2015, women in New York made about 89 cents for every $1 a man earned-meaning they have to invest $1.13 for every $1 a man saves to reach the same size retirement as their male counterparts, the study found.

Though Oklahoma was better than Wyoming when it came to the wage gap, it was the worst state for wage gap improvement during the same time period (2007-2015), according to NerdWallet. Women in that state would need to save $1.37 for every $1 men save there.
(Click here for more articles from Time Inc.'s "Looking Forward" series.)
So, what's causing the wage gap? Instead of "equal pay for equal work," the issue may be described as "equal pay for equal value." In other words, the gap in wages is most likely a result of "the clustering of men in higher-paying positions and professions," the researchers wrote in the study-a problem that is perpetuated by the fact women are far more likely to take career breaks for child and elder care, thus limiting the number of women working in time-consuming jobs with little flexibility for family needs, according to the 2014 Harvard study NerdWallet references.

When it comes to saving for retirement, there's no question that both men and women have a hard time saving: About half of U.S. families aren't saving enough to maintain their standard of living once they've retired, notes the study. But the issue becomes a bigger challenge for women, as they, on average, live five years longer than men.

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This State Has the Largest Gender Wage Gap in the U.S.

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Bad news, Wyoming women: Your state has the worst gender pay gap out of all 50 - and it's impacting your retirement savings. On Wednesday, NerdWallet released a study that found women in Wyoming make a mere 64 cents for every $1 a local man earns.

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The narrowing, but persistent gender gap in pay

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The narrowing, but persistent gender gap in pay

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The gender gap in pay has narrowed since 1980, but it has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so. In 2017, women earned 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers in the United States. Based on this estimate, it would take an extra 47 days of work for women to earn what men did in 2017.

By comparison, the Census Bureau found that full-time, year-round working women earned 80% of what their male counterparts earned in 2016.

Our analysis finds that the 2017 wage gap was smaller for adults ages 25 to 34 than for all workers ages 16 and older. Women in this age group earned 89 cents for every dollar a man in the same age group earned.
(For more on the gender pay gap, see our 2014 explainer, "There's more to the story of the shrinking pay gap." To understand how we calculate the gender pay gap, see our 2013 post, "How Pew Research Center measured the gender pay gap.")
The estimated 18-cent gender pay gap among all workers in 2017 has narrowed from 36 cents in 1980. For young women, the gap has narrowed even more over time. In 1980, women ages 25 to 34 earned 33 cents less than their male counterparts, compared with 11 cents in 2017.

Why does a gender pay gap still persist?

Much of the gap has been explained by measurable factors such as educational attainment, occupational segregation and work experience. The narrowing of the gap is attributable in large part to gains women have made in each of these dimensions.

But other factors that are difficult to measure, including gender discrimination, may contribute to the ongoing wage discrepancy. In a 2017 Pew Research Center survey, about four-in-ten working women (42%) said they have experienced gender discrimination at work, compared with about two-in-ten men (22%) who said the same. One of the most commonly reported forms of discrimination focused on earnings inequality. One-in-four employed women said they have earned less than a man who was doing the same job; just 5% of men said they have earned less than a woman doing the same job.

Both men and women see inequalities in the workplace: In a 2014 Pew Research Center survey, 77% of women and 63% of men said this country needs to continue making changes to give men and women equality in the workplace.

Family caregiving responsibilities, particularly motherhood, can lead to interruptions in career paths for women and can have an impact on long-term earnings. In a 2013 survey, women were more likely than men to say they had taken breaks from their careers to care for their family. Roughly four-in-ten mothers said that at some point in their work life they had taken a significant amount of time off (39%) or reduced their work hours (42%) to care for a child or other family member. Roughly a quarter (27%) said they had quit work altogether to take care of these familial responsibilities. Fewer men said the same. For example, just 24% of fathers said they had taken a significant amount of time off to care for a child or other family member.

Our 2016 survey of workers who have taken parental, family or medical leave in the past two years found that mothers typically take more time off than fathers after birth or adoption. The median length of leave among mothers after the birth or adoption of their child was 11 weeks, compared with one week for fathers. About half (47%) of mothers who took time off from work in the past two years after birth or adoption took off 12 weeks or more.

Mothers were also nearly twice as likely as fathers to say taking time off had a negative impact on their job or career. Among those who took leave from work in the past two years following the birth or adoption of their child, 25% of women said this had a negative impact at work, compared with 13% of men.

Even though women have increased their presence in higher-paying jobs traditionally dominated by men, such as professional and managerial positions, women as a whole continue to be overrepresented in lower-paying occupations. This may also contribute to gender differences in pay.

Note: This is an update of a post originally published April 8, 2014.

Topics: Gender, Income Inequality, Work and Employment, Income

1. Nikki Graf is a research associate focusing on social and demographic trends at Pew Research Center.

2. Anna Brown is a research analyst focusing on social and demographic trends at Pew Research Center.

3. Eileen Patten is a former research analyst focusing on Hispanic, social and demographic trends at Pew Research Center.

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The narrowing, but persistent, gender gap in pay

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The gender gap in pay has narrowed since 1980, but it has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so. In 2017, women earned 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of both full- and part-time workers in the United States.

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The gender pay gap varies substantially from state to state, due to factors such as:

The primary industries in the state and the opportunities they create

Demographics such as race/ethnicity, age, and education level

Regional differences in attitudes and beliefs about work and gender

Differences in the scope and strength of state pay discrimination laws and policies

Explore Your State STATE WAGE GAP DATA
The gender pay gap occurs across almost all occupations and industries:

Male-dominated industries tend to have higher wages than industries and occupations made up mostly of female workers;

In a comparison of occupations with at least 50,000 men and 50,000 women in 2017, 107 out of 114 had statistically significant gaps in pay that favored men; six occupations had no significant gap; and just one had a gap favoring women.

In some occupations, women collectively are receiving billions less than they would with equal pay; for instance, women working as physicians and surgeons are paid $19 billion less annually than if they were paid the same as men in that occupation.

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The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap: AAUW Report

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The gender pay gap varies substantially from state to state, due to factors such as: The primary industries in the state and the opportunities they create Demographics such as race/ethnicity, age, and education level Regional differences in attitudes and beliefs about work and gender Differences in the scope and strength

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Project MUSE - Ideological Wage Inequalities?: The Technical/Social Dualism and the Gender Wage Gap in Engineering

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Use the simple Search box at the top of the page or the Advanced Search linked from the top of the page to find book and journal content. Refine results with the filtering options on the left side of the Advanced Search page or on your search results page.

# data[].attributes.headline
The Gender Wage Gap in the US and Cross Nationally

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The Gender Wage Gap in the US and Cross Nationally

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Authors

Joya Misra,

Corresponding author

Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology

Correspondence address: Joya Misra, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall Amherst, MA 01003, USA. E-mail: misra@soc.umass.edu

Search for more papers by this author

Marta Murray-Close

Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology
Search for more papers by this author

Abstract

Scholarship in sociology and economics has long explored the gender wage gap. Recent research suggests that these inequalities are indicative of important differences not only between men and women, but among women and men, reflecting rising levels of income inequality among workers in the post-industrial era. We argue that the most interesting debates in the gender wage gap - those exploring differences among subgroups by class, race, and/or parenthood status (such as the motherhood wage penalty), as well as those considering differences across countries - can bring new insights to the study of wage inequality, as well as to understandings of what drives gendered wage inequality.

Authors

Joya Misra,

Corresponding author

Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology

Correspondence address: Joya Misra, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall Amherst, MA 01003, USA. E-mail: misra@soc.umass.edu

Search for more papers by this author

Marta Murray-Close

Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology
Search for more papers by this author

Abstract

Scholarship in sociology and economics has long explored the gender wage gap. Recent research suggests that these inequalities are indicative of important differences not only between men and women, but among women and men, reflecting rising levels of income inequality among workers in the post-industrial era. We argue that the most interesting debates in the gender wage gap - those exploring differences among subgroups by class, race, and/or parenthood status (such as the motherhood wage penalty), as well as those considering differences across countries - can bring new insights to the study of wage inequality, as well as to understandings of what drives gendered wage inequality.

Authors

Joya Misra,

Corresponding author

Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology

Correspondence address: Joya Misra, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall Amherst, MA 01003, USA. E-mail: misra@soc.umass.edu

Search for more papers by this author

Marta Murray-Close

Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology
Search for more papers by this author

Abstract

Scholarship in sociology and economics has long explored the gender wage gap. Recent research suggests that these inequalities are indicative of important differences not only between men and women, but among women and men, reflecting rising levels of income inequality among workers in the post-industrial era. We argue that the most interesting debates in the gender wage gap - those exploring differences among subgroups by class, race, and/or parenthood status (such as the motherhood wage penalty), as well as those considering differences across countries - can bring new insights to the study of wage inequality, as well as to understandings of what drives gendered wage inequality.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.title
The Gender Wage Gap in the United States and Cross Nationally

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Corresponding author Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology Correspondence address: Joya Misra, Department of Sociology, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology, 200 Hicks Way, Thompson Hall Amherst, MA 01003, USA. E-mail: misra@soc.umass.edu Search for more papers by this author Department of Economics, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Sociology Search for more papers by this author Scholarship in sociology and economics has long explored the gender wage gap.

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Five Facts About the Gender Pay Gap: | whitehouse.gov

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All of Our Problems Stem from the Same Sex Based Myths

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All of Our Problems Stem from the Same Sex Based Myths

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"All Our Problems Stem from the Same Sex Based Myths": Gloria Steinem Delineates American Gender Myths during ERA Hearings

In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923. Many female reformers opposed the amendment in fear that it would end protective labor and health legislation designed to aid female workers and poverty-stricken mothers. A major divide, often class-based, emerged among women's groups. While the National Woman's Party and groups representing business and professional women continued to push for an ERA, passage was unlikely until the 1960s, when the revived women's movement, especially the National Organization for Women (NOW), made the ERA priority. The 1960s and 1970s saw important legislation enacted to address sex discrimination in employment and education-most prominently, the Equal Pay Act of 1963, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and Title IX of the 1972 Higher Education Act-and on March 22, 1972, Congress passed the ERA. The proposed amendment expired in 1982, however, with support from only 35 states—three short of the required 38 necessary for ratification. Strong grassroots opposition emerged in the southern and western sections of the country, led by anti-feminist activist Phyllis Schafly. Schlafly charged that the amendment would create a "unisex society" while weakening the family, maligning the homemaker, legitimizing homosexuality, and exposing girls to the military draft. In the following 1970 Senate hearing, author and editor Gloria Steinem argued that opposition to the ERA was supported by deep-seated societal myths about gender that exaggerated difference, ignored factual evidence of inequitable treatment, denied the importance of the women's movement, and promoted male domination.

STATEMENT OF GLORIA STEINEM, WRITER AND CRITIC

My name is Gloria Steinem. I am a writer and editor, and I am currently a member of the policy council of the Democratic committee. And I work regularly with the lowest-paid workers in the country, the migrant workers, men, women, and children both in California and in my own State of New York. . . .

During 12 years of working for a living, I have experienced much of the legal and social discrimination reserved for women in this country. I have been refused service in public restaurants, ordered out of public gathering places, and turned away from apartment rentals; all for the clearly-stated, sole reason that I am a woman. And all without the legal remedies available to blacks and other minorities. I have been excluded from professional groups, writing assignments on so-called "unfeminine" subjects such as politics, full participation in the Democratic Party, jury duty, and even from such small male privileges as discounts on airline fares. Most important to me, I have been denied a society in which women are encouraged, or even allowed to think of themselves as first-class citizens and responsible human beings.

However, after 2 years of researching the status of American women, I have discovered that in reality, I am very, very lucky. Most women, both wage-earners and housewives, routinely suffer more humiliation and injustice than I do.

As a freelance writer, I don't work in the male-dominated hierarchy of an office. (Women, like blacks and other visibly different minorities, do better in individual professions such as the arts, sports, or domestic work; anything in which they don't have authority over white males.) I am not one of the millions of women who must support a family. Therefore, I haven't had to go on welfare because there are no day-care centers for my children while I work, and I haven't had to submit to the humiliating welfare inquiries about my private and sexual life, inquiries from which men are exempt. I haven't had to brave the sex bias of labor unions and employers, only to see my family subsist on a median salary 40 percent less than the male median salary.

I hope this committee will hear the personal, daily injustices suffered by many women-professionals and day laborers, women housebound by welfare as well as by suburbia. We have all been silent for too long. But we won't be silent anymore.

The truth is that all our problems stem from the same sex based myths. We may appear before you as white radicals or the middle-aged middle class or black soul sisters, but we are all sisters in fighting against these outdated myths. Like racial myths, they have been reflected in our laws. Let me list a few.

That woman are biologically inferior to men. In fact, an equally good case can be made for the reverse. Women live longer than men, even when the men are not subject to business pressures. Women survived Nazi concentration camps better, keep cooler heads in emergencies currently studied by disaster-researchers, are protected against heart attacks by their female sex hormones, and are so much more durable at every stage of life that nature must conceive 20 to 50 percent more males in order to keep the balance going.

Man's hunting activities are forever being pointed to as tribal proof of superiority. But while he was hunting, women built houses, tilled the fields, developed animal husbandry, and perfected language. Men, being all alone in the bush, often developed into a creature as strong as women, fleeter of foot, but not very bright.

However, I don't want to prove the superiority of one sex to another. That would only be repeating a male mistake. English scientists once definitively proved, after all, that the English were descended from the angels, while the Irish were descended from the apes; it was the rationale for England's domination of Ireland for more than a century. The point is that science is used to support current myth and economics almost as much as the church was.

What we do know is that the difference between two races or two sexes is much smaller than the differences to be found within each group. Therefore, in spite of the slide show on female inferiorities that I understand was shown to you yesterday, the law makes much more sense when it treats individuals, not groups bundled together by some condition of birth. . . .

Another myth, that women are already treated equally in this society. I am sure there has been ample testimony to prove that equal pay for equal work, equal chance for advancement, and equal training or encouragement is obscenely scarce in every field, even those-like food and fashion industries-that are supposedly "feminine."

A deeper result of social and legal injustice, however, is what sociologists refer to as "Internalized Aggression." Victims of aggression absorb the myth of their own inferiority, and come to believe that their group is in fact second class. Even when they themselves realize they are not second class, they may still think their group is, thus the tendency to be the only Jew in the club, the only black woman on the block, the only woman in the office.

Women suffer this second class treatment from the moment they are born. They are expected to be, rather than achieve, to function biologically rather than learn. A brother, whatever his intellect, is more likely to get the family's encouragement and education money, while girls are often pressured to conceal ambition and intelligence, to "Uncle Tom."

I interviewed a New York public school teacher who told me about a black teenager's desire to be a doctor. With all the barriers in mind, she suggested kindly that he be a veterinarian instead.

The same day, a high school teacher mentioned a girl who wanted to be a doctor. The teacher said, "How about a nurse?"

Teachers, parents, and the Supreme Court may exude a protective, well-meaning rationale, but limiting the individual's ambition is doing no one a favor. Certainly not this country; it needs all the talent it can get.

Another myth, that American women hold great economic power. Fifty-one percent of all shareholders in this country are women. That is a favorite male-chauvinist statistic. However, the number of shares they hold is so small that the total is only 18 percent of all the shares. Even those holdings are often controlled by men.

Similarly, only 5 percent of all the people in the country who receive $10,000 a year or more, earned or otherwise, are women. And that includes the famous rich widows.

The constantly repeated myth of our economic power seems less testimony to our real power than to the resentment of what little power we do have.

Another myth, that children must have full-time mothers. American mothers spend more time with their homes and children than those of any other society we know about. In the past, joint families, servants, a prevalent system in which grandparents raised the children, or family field work in the agrarian systems-all these factors contributed more to child care than the labor-saving devices of which we are so proud.

The truth is that most American children seem to be suffering from too much mother, and too little father. Part of the program of Women's Liberation is a return of fathers to their children. If laws permit women equal work and pay opportunities, men will then be relieved of their role as sole breadwinner. Fewer ulcers, fewer hours of meaningless work, equal responsibility for his own children: these are a few of the reasons that Women's Liberation is Men's Liberation too.

As for psychic health of the children, studies show that the quality of time spent by parents is more important than the quantity. The most damaged children were not those whose mothers worked, but those whose mothers preferred to work but stayed home out of the role-playing desire to be a "good mother."

Another myth, that the women's movement is not political, won't last, or is somehow not "serious."

When black people leave their 19th century roles, they are feared. When women dare to leave theirs, they are ridiculed. We understand this; we accept the burden of ridicule. It won't keep us quiet anymore.

Similarly, it shouldn't deceive male observers into thinking that this is somehow a joke. We are 51 percent of the population; we are essentially united on these issues across boundaries of class or race or age; and we may well end by changing this society more than the civil rights movement. That is an apt parallel. We, too, have our right wing and left wing, our separatists, gradualists, and Uncle Toms. But we are changing our own consciousness, and that of the country. Engels noted the relationship of the authoritarian, nuclear family to capitalism: the father as capitalist, the mother as means of production, and the children as labor. He said the family would change as the economic system did, and that seems to have happened, whether we want to admit it or not. Women's bodies will no longer be owned by the state for the production of workers and soldiers; birth control and abortion are facts of everyday life. The new family is an egalitarian family.

Gunnar Myrdal noted 30 years ago the parallel between women and Negroes in this country. Both suffered from such restricting social myths as: smaller brains, passive natures, inability to govern themselves (and certainly not white men), sex objects only, childlike natures, special skills, and the like. When evaluating a general statement about women, it might be valuable to substitute "black people" for "women"-just to test the prejudice at work.

And it might be valuable to do this constitutionally as well. Neither group is going to be content as a cheap labor pool anymore. And neither is going to be content without full constitutional rights.

Finally, I would like to say one thing about this time in which I am testifying.

I had deep misgivings about discussing this topic when National Guardsmen are occupying our campuses, the country is being turned against itself in a terrible polarization, and America is enlarging an already inhuman and unjustifiable war. But it seems to me that much of the trouble in this country has to do with the "masculine mystique"; with the myth that masculinity somehow depends on the subjugation of other people. It is a bipartisan problem; both our past and current Presidents seem to be victims of this myth, and to behave accordingly.

Women are not more moral than men. We are only uncorrupted by power. But we do not want to imitate men, to join this country as it is, and I think our very participation will change it. Perhaps women elected leaders-and there will be many of them-will not be so likely to dominate black people or yellow people or men; anybody who looks different from us.

After all, we won't have our masculinity to prove.

Source: Congress, Senate, Committee on the Judiciary, The "Equal Rights" Amendment: Hearings before the Subcommittee on Constitutional Amendments of the Committee on the Judiciary, 91st Cong., 2d sess., May 5, 6, and 7, 1970.

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"All Our Problems Stem from the Same Sex Based Myths": Gloria Steinem Delineates American Gender Myths during ERA Hearings

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In the years following the 1920 ratification of the 19th Amendment extending voting rights to women, the National Woman's Party, the radical wing of the suffrage movement, advocated passage of a constitutional amendment to make discrimination based on gender illegal. The first Congressional hearing on the equal rights amendment (ERA) was held in 1923.

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Pay Secrecy and the Gender Wage Gap in the United States

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Pay Secrecy and the Gender Wage Gap in the United States

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Pay Secrecy and the Gender Wage Gap in the United States

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Legislators and advocates claim that pay secrecy perpetuates the gender wage gap and that the Fair Labor Standards Act (FLSA) should be amended to outlaw these practices. Using a difference‐in‐differences...