We've come a long way, baby.

Uh ... or not ...
Laurie | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 2:46 pm | #

The "snark" is sadly true. And the IWF (Independent Women's Forum) says women don't EVER have to worry about the wage gap because of good ole neocon Republican white men are in charge of the country. Idiots.

It just overjoys me to no end that I could possibly earn less than my male counterpart simply because I'm half-Black/half-White and unfortunately have XX chromosomes.

I'm sooo sorry for the way I was born. Yes please! Punish me by paying me less than the white guy sitting next to me because I'm not exactly him--biologically and racially. Even though I went to law school too, worked my ass off for seven years in school and internships, and earn the same grades and LSAT score as the white guy sitting next to me. And, though I decided to never have children, still, please, punish me anyway (but women who have children shouldn't be punished either).

The joys of not possessing a penis and not being fully white.
Pseudo-Adrienne | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 4:48 pm | #

Not to rain on your snark, but part of this might be the surprise factor. White men, who are smarter and better at everything in the world, of course earn more than everyone else: they deserve to, by the power of their (white) penises. But this fact is not surprising in any way (it's so boring we can ignore it and pretend there's no wage gap! Whee!), while the fact that black women earn more than white women is (to me, anyhow) surprising, especially the quite large disparity. (The ginormous disparity between white men and everyone else is not, however, surprising.)
wolfangel | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 5:02 pm | #

Have y'all read 'Women Don't Ask' by Linda Babcock & Sara Laschever? I highly recommend. It deals primarily with the business world, but is very relevant to academia as well.

The thesis: Women in the workplace suffer huge inequities from the word go because they are uncomfortable negotiating (for benefits, for salary-- hell, they're honored to get the damn job!), don't negotiate aggressively and when they do, are penalized for asking for too much.

It also discusses the Mommy Tax: When women reenter the work force after time off for child rearing, they do not advance as fast as their male comrades. We all know the story, but it was a shock to find out that over the course of a career, the discrepancy between women in the same job class who do, vs. who don't take time off to raise children can be a million space bux or more for college educated women.

I'm planning on sending my annotated copy to Larry.
Kumachka | 03.28.05 - 6:13 pm | #

Yes, pay no attention to those white men behind the curtain.
Sarah | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 6:15 pm | #

Oh, and I heard from my Harvard spies that Herr Summers got a standing ovation when he addressed the Business School faculty and students just after the vote of no-confidence.
Kumachka | 03.28.05 - 6:16 pm | #

You've got it all wrong. Black women are worth more than white women because they are precious and rare and unique and valuable as examples of a company's dedication to equal opportunity.

Now, why do men get paid more? Think it through.

Because we're unusual and scarce, and are valuable tokens.

The ineluctable logic of the article allows no other conclusion. It makes sense. That's also why women have to work harder for the same amount of money -- because part of our pay as males is awarded for the virtue of our mere existence. I get 20% more for standing around looking beautiful and masculine.
PZ Myers | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 6:25 pm | #

But it's so much more fun to examine the fight over the crumbs.
Shakespeare's Sister | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 6:46 pm | #

Sure, PZ can stand around and look beautiful, but what about us average-or-less-than guys? Where's our extra 20%? Wait, oh here it is right here.

Oops. Forget the first rule of the boys club - don't draw attention to your 'inadequacies.'
mikez | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 6:59 pm | #

Should anyone dare to suggest that it really isn't biology that is at the root of the divide, she or 'brown he' is quickly labeled unreasonable and anti-scientific, nevermind her or his professional affiliation. I've got a word to describe the sort of people who--like Larry Summers--enjoy toying with the biologically essentialist ideas: simpletons.
pietro | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 7:17 pm | #

You know, I was reading this article earlier today and after I got done frothing at the mouth I said, "I hope Bitch Ph.D. sees this too because I'm sure she'll have something much more cogent to say about this spin on the ongoing story of these inequities than 'Gah, grr, gah!'"

And -- see? -- you did! My thanks.

Now I need to go link this article to a message board I frequent where most of the women self-identify as non-feminists because "those issues don't matter these days."
Ancarett | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 7:26 pm | #

I think it is strange, maybe because I grew up in a mother dominated household, but i can't figure out what reason a company would have a reason to pay a woman less than a man. I am a middle class, white democrat, male and think that the "wage gap" is the a shame. no man or woman should be paid less simply becauseof the way they look. I was watching "inherit the wind" the other day and astonished and how far we havent come.
neal | 03.28.05 - 7:26 pm | #

Heh.

Check out this article in today's Globe, wherein Steven Pinker calls Bob Trivers, a best-buddy of Huey P. Newton, ''one of the great thinkers in the history of Western thought.'

http://www.boston.com/news/globe..._revolutionary/

...that'll make a few heads explode.
CD318 | 03.28.05 - 9:53 pm | #

This is what makes me fear entering the real world. I wish I could stay in academia forever. (Though, thanks to people like Summers, that's no batch of roses, either.)

Bitch, you are my hero.
periangel | Homepage | 03.28.05 - 10:47 pm | #

Now I need to go link this article to a message board I frequent where most of the women self-identify as non-feminists because "those issues don't matter these days."

What the fuck ?
Since when did the position of equal rights for everyone regardless of the gender become something which does not matter ?
Even if equality would have been reached that position would not be understandable to me.
That's like saying that someone is not a democrat because someone lives in democracy.
Sünert | 03.29.05 - 1:33 am | #

That lede was disgraceful. I raved about it to two other Americans in my office to the point that now they probably think I am a nut. It really bothers me when newspapers report on a study and focus on side issues. It is not fair to those of us who depend on the secondhand coverage because we don't have the time or the training to read the damned Census survey itself.
Anna in Cairo | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 3:22 am | #

Last year in the course of working over the election results, I looked at the census data for my state, which the local govt has broken down by town.

Generally speaking, the wage difference for men and women matches up to the national US/UK split - seventy-smething cents to the XY dollar.

But I noticed something very odd, in the course of noticing a lot of things that debunked the myths of the Left. One of them of course was that higher average income, in a township, meant that that town was a great deal more likely to go R than D. This wasn't universal, but the reverse was the exception, and usually indicated one of the handful of university towns in the state.

Another one was that the closer to the MA and VT borders, the more likely to go R. This again was counter-intuitive, at least to people who didn't live here, and were naively dclaring that NH went blue because of expats. Being intimately familiar wtih the Masshole phenom, I was not surprised to see the radius from Boston going progressively red, any more than the connection between money and R. Money and commuters go together, and a lot of the Massholes are white flight/tax flight types who want their Boston/Killington paycheck cake and their taxfree eating it too.

Which brings me to the final two "surprises." One is that higher education went with Republican voting. Well, rich doctors and lawyers and engineers have advanced degrees, right? and money to protect? Here, the farming and factory towns, the rural depressed areas, went blue.

And the final one - this is the only one that surprised me - is that in those rich Republican towns, women make *significantly* less than .75 on the dollar.

Yup, the higher the average household income, the less money women in that town made on average.

Why? I've visited many of those towns, know people from them, worked in them and gone to school with their kids. (Small state.) The answer is - stay at home moms. There are *lots* of them there. Those doctor/lawyer/CEO husbands can afford to have wives who don't work, which brings down the average woman's pay in that district.

(Race isn't much of a factor, we're 94% white and at the moment the majority of our minorities are moving very literally into the spaces formerly occupied by Polish and Irish and French-Canadian millhands, and voting so far in accord with labor interests.)

So my instant assumption was that this reflects, depending on how the study was done - and I'm terrible at maths so I'm not the one to verify - if it's averaged out womens' salaries by demographic, the fact that plenty of white-collar women who were stock brokers and lawyers and such, having married in their class (I know some of these IRL and have encountered more in interviews about the "mommy track") can afford to drop out either part time or completely.

To put it in another way, white women are more likely to be subsidized by the Old Boy system than are black women, and to take advantage of that opportunity, without even realizing that this is what's going on.
bellatrys | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 3:47 am | #

neal, as an ex-conservative, I know exactly what the argument is, because my father made it when I was working for him. (There are two arguments, in fact, the "fiscally conservative" one and then the less-heard theocon one.)

To wit, it's actually *justice* that women get paid less, because it's like insurance risks. An employer invests money and company resources into training an employee. A woman is more likely to get married and leave, thereby cheating her employer out of full returns on that training over the long haul. Whereas a male employee is more likely to stay for the long haul, making that employer investment pay off. Thus, by paying women less, the employer is just factoring in that likely risk of lost investment in the future. Therefore it is completely fair.

Now - what are the actual statistics and numbers on this? Dunno. They were never given. This doesn't reflect anything I have seen in my own twenty years of workplace experience, but rather the opposite - men leaving with no employee loyalty, when they get married and want/need a bigger paycheck.

It also doesn't take into account in the "slacker factor" which is that everywhere I've worked, the privileged males in the office (not all, but enough for it to be noticeable) have treated work there the way they treated housework at home: ignore it long enough, and some woman will have to take care of it. So how is this being factored into paychecks?

Then there is the Theological Argument, which you won't likely hear outside a Christian company, but which was a little surprising to me: the application of the parable in Matthew 20:1-16, which is I always understood meant to indicate that people who have been believers longer (compare with "blue diaper babies") don't get any privileged status over people who come to the movement late. (e.g. me becoming a liberal)

But it was also invoked as an excuse for paying different people different amounts for the same work. (less with the slacker/incompetence factor.) And the Boss, like the owner of the vineyard, has the right to pay everyone whatever he wants, regardless of seniority - this was invoked to justify some putz who'd just walked in, who was (imo, and others') a screw up and a con artist, and who, because he was unctuous and "keen," got given a promotion really fast. And got raises - because he was married and his wife had a baby on the way and they "needed" to buy a house.

Justice in this case, was trumped by Scripture.

(This isn't the only reason I'm not a theocon any more, btw. But it was a factor, or an element in the sexism factor, which colonized mind programming I was finally able to overcome.)
bellatrys | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 4:00 am | #

Sunert - since the Plutocracy successfully carried off their campaign of demonization of feminism these past forty-odd years, culminating in the caricature of The Platonic Ideal of The Feminist in Dr. Mike Adams' description here, something mo "nice" woman wants to be, unwashed, unshaven, vicious and unloved, the combination of all the worst extremes of fringe movement types from thirty years ago.

Since the Hegemony has been blatting away on its calliope nonstop the refrain that, like Civil Rights, all those injustices are in the past and any examples are just exceptions, and if women (and blacks) aren't now as successful as white males, well, then, this shows that they never were actually equal in potential, were they...

All the money for Town Hall etc btw comes from the fortunes amassed oil barons (Buckley, Koch), steel and banking barons (Scaife), defense contrators (Bradley and Olin) and other manufacturers (Coors) who were opposed to labour rights in the 1800s and have never stopped pitting the little streets against the less. They just got a lot slicker with their anti-worker propaganda outfits, is all.
bellatrys | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 4:07 am | #

i saw this on my local news last night and my head popped off. a thought on brown women edging out their fairer sisters in the pay scale: brown women don't tend to leave the work force (we either can't afford to or we've worked so hard to get where we are, we're like 'fuck it, you will pry this job from my cold dead fingers.') in the corporate world, our retention rates are almost on par with white men (our numbers are few but we're right behind them, step for step.) (there was a nytimes magazine article about this a year ago - the opt out women - and the writer failed to explore this and make connections between wages.)

another factor, and someone may have already touched on this - mentoring. you're promoted and your pay goes up when you have someone with signing authority in your corner. in the firm i just left (woman owned and mostly female consultants) pay raises were fair and substantial - because female project leads advocated hard for their team members.
ding | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 7:48 am | #

another factor in the version of the article I read yesterday was that nonwhite women were working more hours (often more than one job) and the comparison was not 40 hours to 40 hours, but "weekly wages".
timna | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 8:53 am | #

Timna, but that was speculation--it could also be true that white women were working less than 40 hours. Or, it could just be the way the ball bounces, and not mean anything all that significant: the gap between different groups of women isn't that big. It's the men, man.
bitchphd | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 9:40 am | #

I disagree: (nearly) 20% is a fairly big gap. (It pales next to the bigger gap, but it's not insignificant; the one between whites and Hispanics probably is.) I would like to see the actual statistics behind this, though; difference in hours worked, difference in standard deviations, is there a skew, etc. Of course, lacking any actual citations in the articles, I'm stuck.
wolfangel | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 9:53 am | #

Possible reasons why college educated black women make more than college educated white women:
1. Only the smartest black people make it to college. Not so much for white people.

2. Black - and Asian - women are more likely to live in urban areas. The salaries are a little higher, the rents are a LOT higher.

3. As bellatrys suggests, college educated white women are probably better subsidized by white men to work less than black women are by black men. (To see why THAT is, look again at the compassison of white men's pay to black men's pay.)

A couple of questions re: Men v. Women:
1. Are the salaries shown here means or medians? If means, the descrepencies between white men and everyone else could be exagerated by white men's dominance of CEO positions, which have grown in the past quater century out of all proportion to other wages. If so, the problem could be more narrow than it seems (although still very important).
2. How important is it that men are socialized to make decisions that they rationally should not make? Fortune 500 CEOs are tireless workaholics who either do not have kids or do not think that getting to know their kids is important. And men tend to view carreer success entierly in terms of salary rather than job satisfaction: I am in legal aid, which is quickly becoming a female dominated field, because men lawyers would usually rather make more money, even if they have to sell their life nad soul.

Note that I do not think that second question is in opposition to women being discriminated against. A society that trains men - and only or primarily men - to be tireless and heartless money-grubbing bastards will make being a tireless and heartless money grubbing bastard look like a good thing, and will (wrongly) streotype women as being less capable to being a heartless and tireless money grubbing bastard.
Decnavda | 03.29.05 - 10:53 am | #

wolfangel, you're right, it's not completely insignificant; my bad. It's a lot, lot less important than the gap between white men and everyone else, though. As Decnavda points out, if you look at the gap between white and brown men, that right there goes some way to explaining why the gap between white and brown women might be happening.
bitchphd | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 11:22 am | #

I absolutely agree that it's a lot less significant than the gap between white men and anyone else (clearly so: 50% is much bigger than 20%). But the number is enough that I think it needs some explanation (which need the stats: there have been some compelling possible explanations given, but they're only possible explanations with no stats. Sigh. Who wrote these articles, and can they be fired?)

I admit: this is the number that intrigues me because it's so surprising. I am not at all surprised at the gap between white men and everyone else. I see why focussing on it could be problematic; I see it as interesting, but not some proof of discrimination against white women, but focussing on it is likely to make it come across that way. On the other hand, the gap between white men and everyone else is less interesting (new), but more likely to be due to discrimination (in favour of white men) than just a byproduct of other things.
wolfangel | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 11:53 am | #

i personally this all comes back to the greed of corporate america. the wage wap is accepted and has not been fought by main stream america( meaning the white men that make more) thus the corporations have nothing about it. why would they, if women and minorities keep getting paid less, than they can save money. I believe that people need to stand up and fight for what they believe in even if it hurts them. I am a union employee and as such all the workers at my job are paid on seniority and not on gender. but i would gladly strike and risk my job to help the women i work with to fight for equality. But i am idealist that alos refuses to shop at walmart because the are anti union. I just feel that workers need to unite and fight the greedy corporations. this may cause harm to some (white men that make more)in the short run, but in the long run everyone wins, and is equal.

sorry for the marxist rhetoric, I get passionate about workers rights, white collar or blue collar
neal | 03.29.05 - 1:09 pm | #

So it hasn't changed, huh?

I remember when my single-parent mother (thanks to divorce), finally finished anesthesia school, taking on huge debts to do it, and went to work. A few years after she got her job, the hospital where she worked decided to hire another anesthetist. A man. Fresh out of anesthesia school. Unmarried. They paid him more. She protested it. Their excuse: Well, he'll be supporting a family. Mom hit the frickin' roof: " I have THREE KIDS, NO HUSBAND, A DYING FATHER, AND AN INVALID MOTHER! Do you call that no family to support?" The response: "Well, you could always get married someday, and you'll probably quit working." Yes, they said it to her.

That was in the 70s. The attitude hasn't changed. We now have "options," which is nothing more than "You could get married someday" in disguise.

Yes, even when you're working, you will hear crap like that. Like some knight in shining armor on a white horse is just waiting to charge up and save the motherfucking day.

Sorry, it ain't happening, and I'm not waiting for it. I'm the primary breadwinner at Castle LJ. I don't like work more than anybody else (I probably hate it more), but I do it. At least I work someplace where I don't face this bullshit. Unions are the great equalizer. I make exactly what someone else with my level and seniority makes. No exceptions. Unionize, unionize, unionize.
LJ | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 1:12 pm | #

someone said it further upthread but i'll repeat it because it bears repeating:

this situation won't change unless the culture of the workplace changes. i agree that unions are an equalizer but corporate america would rather defenstrate itself than allow their workers to organize. in nearly all fortune 500 companies human resource and human capital departments give lip service to work/life balance, but that's about the extent to which companies think about ways to make life for their workers better.

the interesting thing is that things are going really well for corporate america - profits and earnings are generally up and holding steady (some industries are stronger than others, of course). so this shifting of an enormous burden onto their workers (male and female) is simply a result of greed. and organizations that work differently (who regularly promote women and minorities, and reward them financially) are considered 'outliers' and not best practice, despite their profitable bottom line.

it's wholly a dysfunctional fishbowl, corporate america is.
ding | Homepage | 03.29.05 - 3:16 pm | #

There's a huge confounding variables problem here--that's the average ages. Since the college-eductated population gets whiter as it gets older (due to greater discrimination in the pre-civil rights era), a much greater proportion of white college-educated men would be in their peak earning years than any non-white group.

In other words--a college-educated worker aged 55-65 (peak earnings years) is disproportionately likely to be white, relative to the population of college educated workers.
SamChevre | 03.30.05 - 6:24 am | #

Sam, do you have statistics showing that college educated workers are (1) in their peak earning years from 55-65 (which I doubt); and (2) disproportionately *men* to that degree (which I also doubt)? Or is that just a guess (like the explanations the article itself offers)? Moreover, have you taken notice that the gap between white men and women has actually *grown*? My sense is that your comment is dismissing the wage gap as having nothing to do with discrimination.
bitchphd | Homepage | 03.30.05 - 6:41 am | #

i didn't have time to read through more than 2/3 of this thread, so it might have been said already, but what the hell, if it has it bears repeating.

the stat that says that black women earn more than white women is misleading. that figure encompasses all working women. there is another stat from the same report that only takes into account women who work full time and year round. in that case, white women beat out black women. this suggests that white women work less than black women, which alot of us already know.
mean regression | Homepage | 03.30.05 - 11:54 pm | #