FAQ: What is the "Gender Gap"?
Updated 10 November 2007
The term “gender gap” generally refers to the observed inequity in earnings, whereby men earn significantly more than women both on average and when performing the same job, although there are also discussions of gender gaps in representation in certain areas of society such as education and politics. This gap varies between countries, so obviously social factors are crucial.
There are a ton of sexist rationalisations for why it is right and proper that the gender earnings gap should continue to exist. The most common one is that men are more willing to work in risky professions which pay their workers a risk premium. A problem is, that argument assumes a perfect market in which a risk premium actually is paid to workers in more danger of bodily harm, but there is absolutely no evidence that there generally exists a large enough risk premium paid to certain workers to account for any significant fraction of the gender earnings gap. The empirical evidence simply doesn’t support it.
Image Source: US Dept of Labor,
Knowledge gets the biggest pay premium
The Dept of Labor’s article from which the above image is sourced states:
In sum, the duties most highly valued by the marketplace are generally cognitive or supervisory in nature. Job attributes relating to interpersonal relationships do not seem to affect wages, nor do the attributes of physically demanding or dangerous jobs.
Second problem is, most examples of high risk professions are those “glamour” risk professions which pay well over a living wage. The arguments brought up usually fail to include the workers on low wages who are truly most at risk of fatal injury, as seen below:
Image Source: US Department of Labor, Fatal occupational injuries by industry, 2003
I doubt that anyone believes that agricultural labourers are paid a risk premium despite experiencing more than twice the risk of fatality of construction workers, do they? So, there’s obviously more going on in how well remunerated some professions are than just the perception of bodily risk and hard, dirty work.
So, if men choosing jobs which compensate them with a risk premium is not the explanation, what is it? Cue the gender essentialist arguments about how women just naturally choose less financially rewarding jobs for various reasons that are allegedly innate and immutable (despite the fact that the gender gap in earnings is much less in other countries and even virtually non-existent in a few). However, the empirical evidence again does not support the argument that work patterns alone are sufficient to explain the gender earnings gap [link].
Let a minor Greek Goddess explain further why those rationalisations are made and why they are wrong: Echidne of the Snakes did an excellent 3-part series on the Gender Gap last year (1. Theory, 2. Empirical Evidence and 3. Addressing the Wingnuts).
Addendum: Further Reading
(actual books)
Joyce P. Jacobsen, The Economics of Gender
ISBN10: 0631207279
Jane Humphries, Gender and Economics
ISBN10: 1852788437
Francine Blau, Marianne Ferber and Ann Winkler: The Economics of Women, Men and Work.
ISBN13: 9780131851542, ISBN10: 0131851543
Many more books on economics and gender listed here.
Filed under: 101, FAQ, gender gap | Tagged: FAQ, feminism, gender, gender gap, sexism
Independent Woman’s Forum gives a more credible account of the gender gap than this “Greek Goddess”
http://www.iwf.org/campus/show/18948.html
You haven’t actually read Echidne’s posts, have you? She addresses all those claims.
It’s easy to say that women “just don’t go in for” the dirty and dangerous well-paid jobs when you don’t take into account how strong the opposition to women entering the trades and the mining/emergency worker jobs is in the first place.
thats not my point.
my point was about source credibility: I believe that Warren Farrell a three-time board of directors member of the National Organization for Women New York City is a more credible person than a self proclaimed Goddess.
Dearie me, have you never heard of this esoteric concept called “humour”? The goddess thing is a joke, Jesse.
Echidne cites primary sources in her articles, she is not just presenting her opinion. These are rigorous articles even if the writer is guilty of having a sense of humour.
Warren Farrell’s history with NOW is not nearly as illustrious as he makes it out to be, y’know. The NYC chapter was quite small when Farrell belonged to it, and was not particularly influential (the national office of NOW has always been in Washington DC). If he was that important and all, how come he never made it onto the board of the DC chapter when he moved from NYC to Washington DC in 1973 (years before he openly broke with NOW)? Perhaps NYC was just a chapter that really needed officeholders, and Farrell just happened to volunteer.
BTW, have you read statements he made in this article in the November 1977 issue of Penthouse: Incest: The Last Taboo - Previously Suppressed Material From The Original Kinsey Interviews Tells Us That Incest Is Prevalent And Often Positive, promoting his book on “positive incest” which never ended up being published?
Farrell has apparently hurled charges of libel around at people on the Internet since the days of newsgroups for quoting his own words from this article, claiming that he said “gently caressing” rather than “genitally caressing”, but he has also never sued either Playboy or the journalist for printing it. Why not? No judge is ever going to rule against somebody else quoting the Playboy article if Farrell can’t show that he sued them way back when it was first published.
Echidne is a self-proclaimed expert, essentially she is proclaiming that she is Omnipotent or at least superior to regular human thought by saying she is a Goddess and referring to her self int the third person she comes off as thinking she is superior than every one elce. that aside
my argument is about credibility as a statistician. I believe that a well funded moderate organization like IWF that has received wide acclaim is more likely to have the correct view than some arm chair statistician. idol speculation on complicated matters like statistics by amateurs like you and I is not a good idea. Instead we should deffer to people who have credentials. so the question i ask is: is there anybody you could site who is in the public spotlight with credentials as a statistician on this subject? A proper recommendation with proper credentials is need for a proper consideration of truth.
Tosh, Jesse. You really are obtuse.
She is not claiming any sort of omnipotence, not even as a joke, and only someone woefully ignorant of Greek mythology and the likely attributes of “a minor Greek Goddess” with the name “Echidne of the Snakes” could claim such a thing. Also, in the Greek myths the gods and goddesses are distinctly NOT superior in thought to humanity in any way - they are often presented as monumentally flawed, just with power that mortals do not possess, and which they often misuse.
I assure you that Echidne not only knows all this but expects her readership to take that on board as part of their interaction with her generally - she has a sense of humour about inflated claims, including those surrounding deity. The third person stuff is a stylistic choice, again to maximise a humorous effect.
As to statistical credibility, Echidne links to peer-reviewed studies, particularly in Part II re the empirical evidence. It is not just her word. Follow the links.
(P.S. Nothing to say about Farrell, this time?)
For the record, on this thread, I will do some homework for you, Jesse. Echidne links to this study done by the General Accounting Office in 2003 for a Congressional Committee.
So, yes indeed, work patterns are key and were extensively studied by the GAO, and even when that was taken into account there was still a gender pay gap where women earned only 80% of men’s earnings in 2000.
There are some women who do make a good living in the dirty/dangerous professions, and there are many more women who would be happy to earn the money, but they find it difficult to gain employment in those industries. Would it ever be a 50M/50F workforce in those industries? Quite possibly not, as brute strength plays a part. But it would quite likely be a 70M/30F workforce, or maybe even 60M/40F as more and more work is done by machines. And the current ratio is generally more like 90M/10F or 95M/5F in those industries. Ludicrously inequitable. The men in these industries may be very good at subtly discriminating in ways that cannot be legally addressed, but it’s a prima facie case that they are indeed discriminating against women who would be happy to work in these well-paying jobs.
This FAQ has now been updated with extra sources and further reading recommendations.
[...] in our so-called “equal” societies where sex discrimination, sexual harassment and the glass ceiling are alive and [...]
“So, yes indeed, work patterns are key and were extensively studied by the GAO, and even when that was taken into account there was still a gender pay gap where women earned only 80% of men’s earnings in 2000.”
Yes, but my understanding is that Farrell controlled for more variables. In particular, I don’t see anything in the GAO study about occupational hazard or physically demanding jobs, and there doesn’t appear to be a very precise breakdown by occupation. The study is careful to conclude that the gap is unexplained. In other words, this study emphatically does not show that women are paid less for the same work.
By the way, no one is arguing that physically demanding jobs pay the most, but that, all other things being equal, a physically demanding job will pay more than one that is not physically demanding.
It doesn’t surprise me that unions would discriminate against women. And that needs to change. But the claim that women earn 20% less for the same work is a very profound one; it means that a rational, non-discriminatory employer could easily destroy competitors just by paying women what they’re worth and hiring up all the best women. Claiming that employers would pass up such an opportunity demands evidence, and you haven’t provided any.
And, finally, asking whether women earn less than men because of their choices is not a “sexist rationalisation.” It’s a legitimate question. And it doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that things “should” be that way.
Bari
‘…asking whether women earn less than men because of their choices is not a “sexist rationalisation.” It’s a legitimate question. And it doesn’t necessarily lead to the conclusion that things “should” be that way.’
More a case of both/and. Sexist generalisations often lurk within legitimate questions.
Perhaps it might be a more legitimate question to ask ‘why’ women earn less than men because of their choices.
Seeing as today was Equal Pay Day in the USA (the day in 2008 where earnings for women finally catch up with average earnings for men during 2007) there are a slew of posts around about the Gender Gap in earnings. Do a google blog-search on “Equal Pay Day” or “Fair Pay For Women”.
As to occupational hazard and physically demanding jobs, the most dangerous workplace with respect to injury in the USA is agricultural work, for both men and women. A particularly highly paid line of work, is it, agricultural work? The most dangerous workplaces for homicide are street prostitution (way ahead), liquor store workers, and taxi drivers: again, not particularly well-paid work.
Here’s a good post on Equal Pay from Teh Portly Dyke.
I also question your folk wisdom here:
That would depend on consumers/clients being rational consumers i.e. having the same confidence in a business run by women as they have in a business run by men. The way in which earnings in vetinary science have plummeted since women came to be the majority of practitioners, and similar patterns in other professions, shows that as soon as a profession/business is dominated by women it loses social status, and thus is less well remunerated. Your thought experiment fails in the real world, unless gendered attitudes change.
I’m also pretty sure that this is flat out untrue. Nurses require extensive educational qualifications, for a physically demanding job, and earn not much more than office clerks who only need a high-school education and perhaps a night-school diploma. All through our society, jobs (for men) which are “indoors with no heavy lifting” have higher status than jobs which require the worker to sweat, and are remunerated accordingly. How can you explain a sudden switch in status from “indoor/no lifting jobs are superior” to “outdoor/physically demanding jobs are superior”, simply by changing genders of the compared employees, other than by sexism?
It would seem also that many definition are rigged as well. For example, regarding the term physically demanding, most of us have been trained to think in terms of jobs requiring sheer muscle mass, such as operating heavy machinery or being a firefighter.
A job can be physically demanding in other ways though. For example, caring for young children and some areas of home care nursing are physically demanding as well. Sure theses jobs don’t require a person to be hercules, but there is stamina and physical endurance involved.
It’s no mistake that the jobs that were once exclusively the domain of the wife and mother are indeed some of the lowest paying. People would rather spend more money on a fancy house than pay someone a living wage look after their own child or aged parent. These are supposed to be “labor of love” jobs, get it?
Contrast this with the amount of money some women in the sex industry. Looks like not much has really changed.
Marian:
The author of the post seems to be implying that any explanation for the pay gap is a sexist rationalization, not a generalization. First of all, labeling a statement as “sexist” implies that it is biased and therefore untrue. (Or is the truth sometimes sexist?) Secondly, labeling a statement as a “rationalization” implies that it is justifying something. In fact, some people may even want to eliminate the pay gap despite thinking that women are just as well-paid as men for the work that they do.
I don’t see why it’s more legitimate. They both seem like legitimate questions to me.
On June 10th, women will also catch up in the number of non-fatal injuries and illness. They’ll catch up with men in terms of workplace fatalities on August 10, 2015.
tigtog:
Again, the claim is that all things being equal, physically demanding job pays more. It’s tough to measure, but that’s the claim. Feminists have legitimately pointed out that coal miners may make more partly because of the industry they work in. The same standard must be applied to agriculture workers.
Do you have a cite? I’d be interested to see if the military was included as a workplace. Also, if we’re including criminal occupations, it might be interesting to take a look at drug dealers.
That’s true. That’s what I think the discussion is really about. Are people behaving mostly rationally, or are they discriminating based on gender? If they are discriminating, on the balance, are women more affected than men?
The most convincing way to demonstrate discrimination is with positive evidence. For example, here is a site claiming that, while most men don’t have a preference either way about whether to deal with a man or with a woman at a car dealership, most women prefer to deal with another woman.
Another way to demonstrate discrimination is to consider one or two variables and say, “These variables don’t completely explain the pay gap. Therefore, the pay gap is based mostly on discrimination.” But it would be very surprising if the pay gap were due only to a few well-understood variables. So just considering one or two and saying they don’t explain the whole thing does not justify a claim of discrimination.
No, it doesn’t show that. It’s an interesting observation, and I’ve heard the same explanation for the decline in bank tellers’ salaries. I’m not tossing your argument out, I’m just saying it’s overly simple. There are lots of other possibilities. Did the demand for veterinarians go down, for example? Did the competition for these positions increase, flooding the market with labor? I’ve been told that becoming a veterinarian is actually harder than becoming a doctor simply because of the competition. And then you have liability for doctors, which could have increased over that time, etc.
maybe. I don’t know. If it is untrue, it doesn’t mean the pay gap is due to discrimination. It just means that men aren’t being compensated for risky work. In fact, maybe the pay gap should be bigger!
At any rate, there are two propositions that this post is attempting to prove:
1. Women earn less for the same work and
2. All things being equal, jobs that are physically demanding pay the same or less.
But there is no evidence provided for either claim.