Happy Equal Pay Day! Now let’s talk about equal pay.
The gender pay gap is a real thing, and it is costing women real money.
Hundreds of thousands of dollars over a lifetime, in fact.
Here are four things you need to know about it:
The pay gap is real.
Women, on average, earn less than their male peers. How much less depends on a number of factors.
The first rebuttal one hears when trying to discuss pay discrimination is, “But are we taking about
equal work?”
And the answer is yes, women do get paid less for doing the same work
as their male peers. It’s why the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act exists.
Ledbetter worked as an overnight supervisor at the Goodyear Tire and
Rubber Co. for nearly two decades. Just as she was about to retire, she
received an anonymous note alerting her to the fact that she was making
$3,727 per month, while men doing the same job —
the same job — were being paid between $4,286 to $5,236 per month.
Ledbetter
isn’t some anomaly. She is the face of the insidious operations of pay
discrimination. It’s why there is now a law named after her. (A law that
people like Rick Perry
do not want to enforce.)
Here are some other examples of pay inequity within a single job, according to a breakdown of median weekly salaries from the
Bureau of Labor Statistics:
- A
male education administrator makes, on average, $1,566 a week. His
female colleague earns, on average, 67 percent of that salary.
- A male high school teacher makes, on average, $1,050 a week. His female colleague earns, on average, 93 percent of that.
- A male physician makes, on average, $2,099 a week. His female colleague earns, on average, 67 percent of that.
This trend continues across fields. For bus drivers, cooks, executives and baby sitters. (Yes, even
baby sitters.) In fact, among the Bureau’s
nearly 600 listed occupations, women earn less than men in all but seven of them.
And while it may surprise Rand Paul, the pay gap persists among veterinarians, too.
Someone may want to tell his niece.
The pay gap persists even when you factor in hours worked, family leave and other variables.
The
second thing a pay gap skeptic will probably tell you is, “Some women
work less hours and take time off to raise families or care for ailing
relatives.
That’s why they make less money than men.” And the
answer is yes, women do shoulder a disproportionate amount of the labor
of raising families or caring for sick relatives. But rather than
debunking the pay gap, the unequal distribution of this kind of labor
among men and women is actually driving it.
A 2003 report from the
Government Accountability Office reveals
that the pay gap persists between men and women — even after one takes
into account part-time work and women working fewer hours or taking time
off to raise children or care for family members. After doing a
quantitative analysis of a nationally representative longitudinal data set,
the GAO found that while many factors influence wage disparities, when
you remove all of these differences, women still earn around 80 percent
of men’s wages. As the authors of the report note, “Even after
accounting for key factors that affect earnings, our model could not
explain all of the difference in earnings between men and women.”
Other
studies have found a narrower gap in certain industries, but a gap
nonetheless. The American Association of University Women found that
among recent college graduates with the same credentials, a 6 percent
pay gap remained, and that gap expanded to 12 percent over time. Even in
the “best cities” for pay equity, women are still earning
90 percent of their male colleagues’ salaries.
Here’s how the
Department of Labor explains it:
Decades
of research shows a gender gap in pay even after factors like the kind
of work performed and qualifications (education and experience) are
taken into account. These studies consistently conclude that discrimination is the best explanation of the remaining difference in pay.
Economists generally attribute about 40 percent of the pay gap to
discrimination — making about 60 percent explained by differences
between workers or their jobs.
And those “explained”
differences don’t account for the fact that the “choices” girls and
women make about education, career and family are shaped by deeply
gendered cultural norms.
Rather than take for granted that women
work fewer hours because they genuinely prefer it, policymakers have
started to examine the question of
why women are
disproportionately doing the kind of labor — primary parenting, for
example — that requires time off work. On the matter of women’s
“choices,” White House economic adviser Betsey Stevenson recently told
MSNBC,
“Some of women’s choices come because they experience sexism. Some of
women’s choices come because they are disproportionately balancing the
needs of work and family. Which of these choices should we consider
legitimate choices, and which of them should we consider things that we
have a societal obligation to try to mitigate?”
The pay gap is worse for women of color and LBTQ women.
It
is, at this point, safe to say that the pay gap is in part driven by
sexism in its many manifestations, both institutional and cultural. But
pay discrimination is also a product of entrenched racism and
homophobia.
African-American women who work full-time year round
earn 64 cents on the dollar; Latina women earn 54 cents for every dollar
earned by a white, non-Hispanic colleague. As data from the National
Women’s Law Center points out, these gaps “translated into a loss of
$18,650 for African-American women and $24,111 for Hispanic women in
2012.” Asian-American women’s salaries show the smallest pay gap — but
they are still earning, on average, 87 cents on the dollar.
Trans women are
incredibly vulnerable to pay discrimination, and lack, in most places, the
basic job protections that ensure they can find and keep a job in the first place.
The concentration of women in low-wage jobs is part of the problem.
Two
out of every three minimum wage workers is a woman, and many of those
women are also mothers or the primary caregivers in their households.
This is why policymakers include raising the minimum wage in their
recommendations for closing the gender earnings gap.
As I’ve
pointed out before,
raising the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to a meager $10.10 an hour
would boost earnings for 28 million workers, and would help lift
millions of women out of poverty. More than
25 percent of
low-wage and low-income workers are single mothers, but at the current
minimum wage, a woman who works full-time can expect to make an average
of $14,500 each year. That’s $4,000 less than the poverty level for a
mother of two children.
According to a recent White House
report,
“Estimates from the President’s Council of Economic Advisers suggest
that increasing the minimum wage to $10.10 an hour and indexing it to
inflation could close about 5 percent of the gender wage gap.”
As
the report also notes, women breadwinners in low-income families
contribute a bigger share of their family’s financial resources than
women in higher-income households. A small increase to the minimum wage
could translate to a major boost for families fighting to stay afloat.
As Dave Jamieson at the
Huffington Post
notes, women “account for the majority of workers in the 10 largest
jobs that pay below $10.10 per hour, including housekeepers, cashiers
and childcare workers.” And according to the National Women’s Law
Center, the gender gap is worse in states that haven’t raised their
minimum wage above the meager federal level of $7.25 an hour.
Rand Paul, Rick Perry (Credit: AP/Alex Brandon/Tony Gutierrez)
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