Yey!
You know, cuz I thought the Brits were way ahead of us.
Actually, where are we US women in terms of wage equity? Am in grad school, and feeling a lil detached --
But Bitch, of course we're paid less! We could run off at any moment and have lots of babies, and then where would they be?
I must add, my (UK) employer is actually brilliant and pays me an honest salary, but as a young woman i'm already seeing the strains that having a family is going to cause on my career. Aren't we technically less valuable to a company when our flight risk is much higher, as a result of our reproductive abilities?
You might also appreciate that in the academy - that hotbed of liberalism - pay for full-time women is around 15% less than for men. At my University, less than 6% of the professors are female; I believe the national average, across disciplines, is around 9%. We also have less equal political representation than those leading feminist states, Rwanda, Mozambique, and Iraq (seriously - http://www.guardian.co.uk/guardi...643339,00.html)
. Inspiring or *what*?! But yet all my first-year students assure me, they aren't feminists because we're all equal now!
Sorry that link totally isn't going to work. Didn't mean to stuff up your nice comments page 
Ah! My favorite subject. I can discuss the state of gender relations in the work place for hours. I can write pages and pages (don’t worry though I will try to restrain myself!). Equality within the workplace is extremely complex and I cannot hope to discuss all the issues that I think are relevant. However I would love to raise a few key issues:
The variations within different countries (particularly western Europe and the USA) are fascinating. I agree with Ghani that the crux of the matter tends to be that women are assumed to choose at some point to reproduce. The irrational fear within the business world seems almost neurotic. The argument seems to run that at some point all talented women will disappear to have babies. Leaving the company in dire straits. The assumption seems to be that the world will then proceed to come crashing down around their ears, resulting in lost profits, unsatisfied customers and general unrest. For my Master thesis I had the fascinating task of analyzing why a leading company with numerous talented women within its ranks did not have a single women in top management.
What does it boil down to? I would argue that some essential points to consider are:
1. Society’s perception and definition of commitment and loyalty.
2. Underlying assumptions regarding the nature of work, childcare and the family unit.
Both points are intricately intertwined with society’s definition of what it means to be a man and what it means to be a woman. All employee’s that I interviewed, both male and female, senior and junior, saw no reason as to why women could not be just as successful and well paid as their male counterparts. This was however, contingent upon women being able to conform to assumptions defining the successful professional. Of vital importance were levels of commitment and loyalty. The important question is how does society define these concepts? My research showed, as have similar studies that, commitment and loyalty often means long hours at the office and generally placing the needs of the company above your own. Here comes catch 22, women are assumed to be the primary care takers, women are assumed at some point to choose to start a family and at that moment the family becomes first priority not the firm. The result is that many company’s view women as a wasted investment since at some point their levels of commitment and loyalty will drop drastically. These underlying assumptions were however held simultaneously with the view that there was no reason for women not to achieve top management positions if they really wanted them.
Because of the way society is structured the man’s role as caretaker within the family remains unproblematic Men are expected and assumed to be able to maintain the correct levels of commitment and loyalty throughout their career. The implication of my research highlighted the belief that women could succeed if they were willing to sacrifice a family life. However, women still had to contend with the assumption that this was not a choice they would actually make. Men are exempt from this paradox.
I believe it is not until assumptions about the nature of loyalty, commitment and family dynamics begin to change in mainstream society that women will be able to compete on a more equal footing with men. Furthermore, changes in assumptions must also take place simultaneously with a more equitable division of labour within the home.
As a women living in Norway who wants a career and family, I am in one sense extremely lucky. I am entitled by law to two years leave. The first year of this leave is paid and I am guaranteed to return to my position when I return. In addition, four weeks of this parental leave is reserved for the father. 90% of fathers in Norway choose to use this paternity leave. Furthermore the year’s leave can be divided between both parents. So you could for example share the leave 50/50. However, this is an option, which is not as common, but neither is it extremely rare. Such legislation goes a long way in enabling women to better balance family career. However, I would agrue that until businesses seriously readdress their attitudes towards investing in women and until society recognizes that it is not necessarily the women’s role to be the primary caretaker, we are just treating the symptoms and not the causes.
So . . . what is boils down to (per Funky Chicken's information--thanks by the way!) is that "professional" is defined in ways that don't account for people with families--including women. One cannot be professional and have long-term family responsibilities (like a child)--unless, of course, one has a "wife," who can free one from many of those responsibilities to be professional.
I imagine that men who do or must prioritize their children over their job face similar problems, although men have the advantage of not being the object of suspicion at the get go (b/c they're obviously not women and will likely follow the "rules" of "profesional").
And, obviously, women have the added pressure of social expectations: "what?! you're not going quit your job and stay home with the baby? You suck as a mom."
In any case, for things to change for women, the needs of the family need to be accounted for. "Professional" needs to be redefined. And, the ideas of family and children need to be re-conceptualized as valuable (I hate to sound like a right-y "family values" freak, but our moment really does DESPISE children. Last Fall the NYT even did an article on this, showing how our govt keeps taking more and more monet from "kids" and giving to other sorts of programs. Henry Giroux talks about how our children are trated as nothing more than mini-consumers and, again, our government refuses to do anything about it.)
wish I'd edited that last paragraph more carefully. Sorry about that.
After the breathtaking headline and lead, the article goes on to say: The survey also revealed that women were routinely missing out on senior jobs, starting on lower salaries and taking longer to get promoted, largely because they were more likely to take career breaks to have children.
In addition:
A review of Lloyds TSB's wage bill revealed deep divisions in pay, with high-flying men reaping rewards in bonuses because the bank feared it might lose them. Men were also more likely to negotiate higher starting salaries when they joined the bank. Lloyds TSB has since overhauled its pay structures.
Finally, the article winds up with
Much of this is explained by women choosing to take career breaks to have families or opting for lower paid jobs - so-called occupational segregation. But a proportion of the gap is still attributed to employers discriminating against women.
Soooo... how much can be attributed to employer discrimination? I don't know. It's a poorly written article, and obviously authored by someone with a loose grasp of mathematics and statistics. This is the wrong blog to make sexist jokes, so I won't make one.
But anyway, perhaps my verbal skills are simply a little underdeveloped.
Dear Equal Justice for Men Society (and any others who are interested), the economist blogger,Echidne of the Snakes, (you can find her in Dr. B's blogroll) has done a wonderful three-part series on things like occupational segregation and wage discrimination. Go look at this week's and last week's entries.
I really like the analysis by funky chx. Thanks for sharing!! I have been thinking about this issue quite a lot since that dumb NYT article about female students at Yale saying they plan to sacrifice their careers to be full-time moms. I'm sorry I don't know how to create this link here, but you can find the article by going to: pathbox.wustl.edu/~awn/awntop/news/motherhood.pdf
The thing I want to add to this discussion is regarding the solutions proposed by FC: "I would argue that until businesses seriously readdress their attitudes towards investing in women and until society recognizes that it is not necessarily the women’s role to be the primary caretaker, we are just treating the symptoms and not the causes."
Yes, both of those things must happen.
However, I also think we need to change our society's definition of commitment and loyalty to one's work. Just because some people are willing to work 80 hr weeks and put the company's needs above their own doesn't mean that it should be the status-quo--or even thought of as exemplary behavior. People have lives; and the US, in particular (well, that's been my primary experience), doesn't want its workers to have lives.
To me it's like the idea of a minimum wage (or living wage, if we had one). Just because there are people desperate enough to work for peanuts doesn't mean that it should be allowed.
While we continue to expect this ridiculous sacrifice to the company/university/organization, there will always have to be someone else at home taking care of things. I hate to be pessimistic, but I think that, because of women's childbearing biology, she will always be the one most often thought of as the primary caretaker. Even if it were possible to change that--so men and women are thought equally likely to be the caretaker--I don't think it would be right. I think people's lives outside of work should be respected and that BOTH parents should be able to put their family first.
Just me 2 cents.
FC, that was a very good brief statement of issues. At first I was stunned by the time on your post, until I remembered it wasn't 5:00 am in Norway.
During the Hirshman dustup in December, I remember that Hirshman herself, I think in comments at Echidne, referred to what Richard Posner had said recently, about the now-proven (because it had always been an anti-feminist talking point) irrationality of preparing women for top jobs when the odds were they weren't going to step up. (That puts it very inexactly, but the jist is there and the point is that both are talking about top graduates).
This is logical only so long as the terms of the debate are set by what can be expected of the most ambitious.
That would be fully supported or completely self-sufficient young men, and a very few similar young women. For example, the portrait of Patrick Fitzgerald that has emerged in recent months, which gives us some idea of his relentless concentration and focus, may inspire awe and respect, but it is not a portrait of a balanced life.
Now, I'm a man, and a lawyer, and I look at these demands and I say "I couldn't live like that" and I thought that before I had kids. If I'd been drawn into that kind of practice at the start I might have gotten used to it, but I doubt it. Hirshman seemed to be saying that women will, at the outset, need to succeed under these conditions, and in significant numbers, to be able to effect change.
Perhaps this is only realistic, and I was impressed by Hirshman's tough line, and the support it got by Echidne and Bitchphd against legions who found its vision unacceptably bleak and cruel, and tried to attack it on irrelevent grounds. Hirshmania brought me to this site. Still, I can't help but feel this game is rigged. The temptation, for man and woman alike, to step down, to drop out, to choose domesticity, is overwhelming. Yes the long-term risks are enormous, particularly when one partner does it and the other doesn't; that's where the gross disparities in power come from. But without careful preparation to work well in a rewarding field, a very important and too-often overlooked part of Hirshman's prescription, the choice looks like: "I know I can't keep this up; if I try I will fail, or at least fall short. On the other hand, I can succeed in my family life, and be there for my children."
To me the most devastating part of Hirshman's piece was the sketch portraits of the unseriousness of the women she studied. The one where the husband and wife were lawyers at the same firm, and he prepared himself to go into a niche business and she didn't even seem to understand how it happened. Or the woman who realized that success depended on being excited about deals she couldn't bring herself to care about.
I say devastating, because while Hirshman's point is that this is why women don't succeed, it is also why I wouldn't have succeeded, in one of those jobs. Her implication is that men expect to need to succeed and prepare themselves realistically to do so. This works rhetorically because of the slice of the elite she describes: who isn't a bit indignant at such unseriousness among people with such advantages, with such promising starts? Maybe, in that strata, the men do all know that, although why such understanding should be vouchsafed to them and not their sisters puzzles me. I can see it being part of a family upbringing in some families but not in others. Not, alas,in my gentle, Weasley-like family. But if the family ethos got the girl through college and the top schools, how come the rest of it didn't take? If she needs Hirshman's tough love in college, why doesn't her brother?
I don't know, because it's not my strata. I have been as unprepared for professional work as any debutante.
So everything you say about structural inequalities is true, and very well put. And gendere roles, and expectations are deeply-rooted in every situation. Yes. But.
I love this site. I love this topic. But I feel that however closely inequality and gender track each other, and however effective as a proxy for weakness in this society gender may be, somehow this workplace-fitness issue is both broader and narrower than feminism
By all means, find those men being paid the 25% premium simply for being male and fire them. It will be a valuable service to shareholders.
the crux of the matter tends to be that women are assumed to choose at some point to reproduce.
Absolutely. And the unspoken corrolary--that men are assumed NOT to reproduce. Or at least, if they do, not to have any consequences for their career.
In fact, I think *that's* the major problem.
As for men, I'm sure the latter (Or at least, if they do, not to have any consequences for their career.) is the real assumption, not the the former (men are assumed NOT to reproduce.).
BPhD, it's exactly that. My industry (book publishing, in the UK) is predominately female at the bottom, and largely male at the top. The higher you go, the fewer women you find. This year alone several colleagues have taken maternity leave and not returned to work after the baby was born. One wanted to come back 3 days a week but was told 4 days or nothing. So she's now looking for a new (part time) job. The reason many women I know give for staying home is that their partner earns more/has better prospects. Almost like it's easier (and I'd say this is encouraged by employers) for one person (in most cases the mother) to stay home than to share the task and both lose out on promotions/raises. So essentially at that stage both partners are making a choice between childcare or work.
Most if not all male board members in my company (9 men, 2 women, btw) have families. Neither of the women have kids. I guess somewhere along the line they had to make their 'choice'.
You know... I've discovered that while data gathered by government agencies is sometimes valuable, the politicised conclusions they come to, are often not.
I suspect, in general, there's a co-relation between unemployment, pay equity, prison, and homelessness whose complexity is outside the focus of most efforts to promote equality.
It appears that most western nations suffer a gender reality where prisons and homeless shelters are dominated by men, while poverty (low income) and pay inequity are dominated by women. It seems apparent too, that these statistical inequalities have ALOT to do with our notions of role in gender.
Meanwhile, the majority suffer from an inequitable distribution of wealth that dwarfs any of the above inequalities.
BPD: "Absolutely. And the unspoken corrolary--that men are assumed NOT to reproduce. Or at least, if they do, not to have any consequences for their career."
Oddly, taking paternity leave can affect our subsequent careers far more than if we were female, as it's less socially acceptable for men to do so and we're REALLY seen as "dissing" the company if we don't just let our wives do it. Being a good parent really gets expensive fast. It is one of the many reasons it is difficult to be a stay at home father.
It is not sexist per se to imagine that you would be less inclined to hire someone with a decent chance of leaving soon (permanently or for two years) than you would to hire someone who you believed, based on averages, would stay and pay for the cost of their training. Economically speaking, this is not driven by an anti woman intent.
Admittedly it has that effect: women are seen (correctly, it turns out) as being more likely to leave the workplace, and less likely to value work over family. So, unsurprisingly, women are paid less.
That is because from an emplyer's profit perspective women are often WORTH less. This is purely statistics, not sexism. Women are as competent as men, of course, or more so. But if you factor in the continued possibility (more likely than men to leave work or demand reduced hours, for purely social reasons, both of which can be hideously expensive for the company) it's no surprise they're paid less as well.
An interesting question is how to solve the problem. Would you want laws which force employers to pay women more than the employer thinks they're "worth"?
This takes a societal problem (women are stuck) and puts it on the shoulders of the compnies who would be subject to the equality laws (probably those with 25+ employees). Certainly many similar laws already exist--ADA laws are an excellent example--which force people to do things which do not benefit them.
An interesting result of such laws might be a social trend. One of the reasons that many educated liberal men (e.g. yours truly) don't do as much childcare is that it's too damn expensive: my wife doesn't make as much as me, so trading 3 days of her work for 3 days of mine is a serious net loss of income. We make a lot more with me at work than with her at work. But if there were laws which upped her income, I'd LOVE to split childcare. And once enough men start staying home and taking advantage of the new financial possibilities, that will prbably change social stigmas as well.
Almost like it's easier (and I'd say this is encouraged by employers) for one person (in most cases the mother) to stay home than to share the task and both lose out on promotions/raises. So essentially at that stage both partners are making a choice between childcare or work.
This is why healthcare being tied to employment irks me so much. Once you go from being full-time to something less, benefits very frequently go out the window. To some extent, children's healthcare is *relatively* easy to get someone to pay for, but just because people had a baby doesn't mean you can stop caring about the parents' health.
The Equal Pay Act (1963) was the first civil rights law passed in the US; the first of what we call "EEO laws". When it was passed, the average female earned about 59 cents for every dollar earned by the average male.
Nowadays, that ratio is in the high 70-some percent range.
That's pitiful. Over 40 years since the law's passage, and we can manage only 3/4 of what men get paid?
It's not a simplistic thing, though. A fair amount of recent research points to it having a lot to do with the way women interact; it's not just a simple attempt to pay women less. First and foremost, women don't like to negotiate and don't initiate the conversation about wanting (or deserving) a raise.
Women are *much* more likely to accept the initial salary offer when they are hired than men. Maybe they feel it's too risky to be pushy--that they're lucky to have the offer.
Ya gotta negotiate. It's the way the game is played.
(said as a person teaching a Negotiation class in the college of business)
Oddly, taking paternity leave can affect our subsequent careers far more than if we were female, as it's less socially acceptable for men to do so and we're REALLY seen as "dissing" the company if we don't just let our wives do it. Being a good parent really gets expensive fast. It is one of the many reasons it is difficult to be a stay at home father
Indeed. And one of the reasons women have made the gains we've made is that individual women took the risks, bucked what was socially acceptable, and in a lot of cases paid the consequences. If guys WANT pay to equal out, so that they can do more parenting, then they're gonna have to do the same: stick their necks out and let their bosses know that women don't have kids all on their own.
'Occupational segregation' doesn't necessarily contribute to a gender wage gap. Sweden, for example, has a high degree of occupational segregation (women work primarily in education, child care, etc), but women earn over 80% of what men do (http://www.eiro.eurofound.eu.int/2002/01/study/
tn0201101s.html, in other studies with more recent data, this figure is as high as 90%, but I can't find them right now)
because that society values the work that is done by women. Occupational segregation becomes a concern when a group is being relegated to low-wage occupations and is prevented from pursuing high-wage careers. It's one thing for women to be concentrated in 'caring' jobs because they like them, and quite another for them to be concentrated in low-paying jobs because they face barriers to pursuing the job they actually want.
The justification that it's ok to not pay nurses and teachers very much because they got 'non-pecuniary' benefits from working in caring jobs is a cop out. I'm sure there are non-wage perks associated with being a lawyer or a doctor (prestige, respect...) but I never hear anyone arguing that we should pay them less if they actually like the job they are doing. This is where sexism creeps in - this idea that women are inherently more caring and 'giving' than men, and they would do it anyway even if we don't pay them anything, so they should be happy with what they get. Bullshit
Women are not socialized to negotiate or be ambitious - we are socialized to be modest. I remember my mother telling not to tell people about my high marks if they asked because it might make them feel bad about their marks. I remember being in gym class in elementary school and being *so careful* not to 'show off' during the two weeks we spent on gymnastics (despite my efforts, I would get bored of doing the basic things that I had learned at 3 and the teacher would accuse me of showing off and making the boys feel bad) - but this never happened the other 9 and 1/2 months of the year that we spent on football, basketball etc - the only restriction put on the boys who played these sports was that they couldn't tackle or hit anyone, but they were still encouraged to play.
Sorry for the long rant.
I'm an ABD grad student, and going on the job market in the next 2 years. This is something i have spent a great deal of time thinking about, and it is going to get real very soon.
When I am interviewed, and eventually someone offers me a job (knock on wood), there'll be a salary with it. I know that even within academia, there are gender gaps in pay, including starting pay. Some of this has been attributed to women not negotiating their starting salaries to higher levels, while more men do so.
Getting a job offer, especially at a decent university, would be so nice, that I don't feel in a great position to just start asking for more money. How do I figure out what the average starting salaries are for particular universities? Is this information publicly available?
And how do I go about saying, well your starting offer is too low, how about this, without either 1) screwing my chances of getting the job, and 2) offending people by saying things like, I know the starting wage for male professors is higher than what you just offered me (essentially accusing my interviewers of sexism which, true or not, seems like a bad starting move). Any suggestions?
Sylvie, read "Lifting a Ton of Feathers." Keep in mind that if you get an offer, they want you; a failed search sucks. Your bargaining power will be greater if you have another offer in hand, obviously. Starting salaries are available via the Chronicle of Higher Ed Careers page (online). Talk to new hires at your own program about how they negotiated their offers (you can't ask their salaries, I s'pose, but you can ask in general terms). Ask a mentor, a dissertation chair, a department chair about negotiating--and once the offer's on the table, take it to that person and ask them for help in figuring out what more to ask for. Be clear on what you want, and take into account both things like pay (the higher it is, the more you'll accumulate in pension over time), benefits, and perks--pre-tenure sabbatical, computer, laptop, startup fund, research assistant, not just teaching load but class size, and so on.
Great book which y'all might have come across:
"Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide" which discusses the financial, and societal ramifications of women's reluctance to negotiate in the workplace. Great bits on how this manifests itself in academia as well.
Well, I just got myself a job back in my field (I was laid off while pregnant Dec 2004)... at a college, which is (up here, anyway) a union shop.
It will be interesting to watch this come about over the coming years. I know I'm going to have to keep my mouth firmly clamped or risk not even surviving my probation, much less raises over the years. I don't know if I'll be able to risk my normal guest speaking times at "Disabilities in the Workplace" and "Women in IT" anymore, which is sad on many levels.
I know for a fact I will be the ONLY woman in my department at my payband. I know already that people are already talking about how I got the job or why, and why they don't think I deserve it. I interviewed for a job at the same place, 4 paybands lower earlier in the year... but it wouldn't have paid my childcare, let alone anything after that. Oddly enough, that is going to earn a lot of enemity amoungst a certain group of staff.
Whatever you may think of Tony Blair's Iraq policy, he did take a very publicized paternity leave when his youngest son was born about 5 years ago, with the stated intent of making it more acceptable for dads to take time off.
I e-know a successful lawyer who has just made junior partner in a large US firm. Her husband has stepped up to the childcare/homecare plate. In order to spend some time with her kids in the evenings, she comes into the office at 6:30am, then goes home at 4:00pm. What she chooses with gritted teeth to find "amusing" is that most people in the office assume that this means she's only working "part-time", even when it's a matter of record that she's logging more billable hours than all but two of the other lawyers in the firm.
The senior partners who review what all the juniors and associates are doing are well aware that she's putting in the time and billing the hours, so they're fine with her arrangements. It's the men at or just below her own level who condescend to her while billing fewer hours that annoy.
You can't compare salaries without correcting for:
1) Years of work experience
2) Hours worked per year
Women are often younger in the workforce. Less experience, on the average, means lower income. Lesser experienced employees are less valuable to employers.
Women with children often work less hours than men so that they can spend more time with their children.
Women also sometimes drop out of the workforce for a while to tend to children.
None of the above is due to discrimation by employers.
It would be interesting to see the UK salary comparisons after correcting for all of the above. If women still come out lower, that would perhaps show the real extent of discrimination - assuming that it really exists on the average.
Most good companies, at least in the U.S., are eager to hire and promote women to show their diversity credentials as well as attract talented women. So any discimination would just be bad business.
Dan, you're oversimplifying. The pressures on women to put kids first aren't entirely (or even mostly) the fault of individual employers, no. Nonetheless, employers who don't take into account that their employees have families, and therefore put those employees in the position of chooosing between family and work, are discriminating in practice, if not in intent.
Moreover, if you read the link, you'd have seen that the study DID correct for things like that. And it still found that women were paid less than men in the same jobs.
Barry at amptoons.com did a series on this as well, that was quite well put together.
None of the above is due to discrimation by employers
If an employer treats a man who spends time with his family as "not a team player" (so that Husband is less likely than Wife to be able to take a career hit), or treats all women as potential drop-outs (so that you might as well take that maternity leave--they'll never promote you anyway), then employer actions most certainly DO contribute to family choices. It's nonsense to pretend that women make decisions in a vacuum.
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