How to Respond When Someone Says, “There’s No Pay Gap”
Being skeptical is really an excellent idea. You’re allowed to ask a scientist before you decide if global warming is a hoax. Go ahead and research whether or not Snapple enemas are an effective way to reduce your waistline. It’s okay to demand proof when someone tells you that Hillary Clinton is a shape-shifting lizard.
But here’s something I’m fucking tired of people being skeptical about — the pay gap.
Maybe you’ve heard the arguments: The pay gap is based on bunk statistics and misleading calculations. Women and men simply “choose” different educational and career paths. Once you account for those choices, the pay gap disappears.
Here’s what one pay gap denier has to say on the subject:
“Using the statistic that women make 78 cents on the dollar as evidence of rampant discrimination has been debunked over and over again. That statistic doesn’t take into account a lot of choices that women and men make — education, years of experience and hours worked — that influence earnings. If we want to have a fruitful discussion about a gender wage gap, we should have it after the comparison is adjusted for those factors.”
Okay. Let’s go ahead and adjust for those factors. Luckily, Glassdoor Economic Research has already done the calculations. In 2016, Glassdoor added statistical controls to its pay gap data, accounting for job title, age, education, industry, location and loads of other factors. The result? Women make 94.6 cents per dollar compared to men.
Fantastic! That means the wage gap isn’t due to overt sexism! Well, it is, but only 5.4% of the time!
Unfortunately, that 5.4% really adds up. A woman earning US$39,621 per year (the median full-time wage for women in the US) will lose out on more than US$64,100 over a 30-year career.
But it’s also important to remember that they pay gap is actually not 5.4%. The pay gap in the US is 22%, with women making 78 cents for every dollar earned by a man. So even though the adjusted pay gap is “only” 5.4%, the 22% statistic is the one we need to talk about.
Despite what pay gap agnostics would have you believe, the 22% pay gap is real and important precisely because it captures the effect that men’s and women’s career choices have on how much money they earn. To put it another way — why are women choosing careers that pay them 22% less than men?
One answer is that, actually, women don’t choose to work in low-paid professions. Rather, when women join a profession in large numbers and “feminize” it, the prestige and the pay drop. Just look at teaching. Once the sphere of highly-educated and respected men, schools decreased their wages drastically in the 1800s when the profession came to be dominated by women — who were, obviously, only paid half as much as men. Today, women who teach continue to earn less than men, and teaching as a whole is significantly underpaid compared to similar graduate professions.
The opposite can also occur — when men take over a field, the salaries and status rise. Computer programming used to be a menial career populated by women, and the job of writing code was seen as little more than clerical work. However, once men entered the field in the 1950s and 60s, software development became understood as a job that could only be performed by the best mathematical minds. Male programmers, doing the same jobs as their female counterparts a few years before, attained prominence, power and much better pay.
We’re seeing a similar effect today as more men enter the secretarial field as personal assistants. As explained in an exceedingly tone-deaf Guardian article on the rise of male PAs:
“In the past, men felt the salaries weren’t high enough and there was a stigma attached to administrative, typing-based roles…[but] the secretarial role has changed massively. Gone are the days of the traditional typist, and there is more of a career path. Guys are seeing that they can get to a stage where they are providing a lot of business support to their boss, and that is reflected in their salary.”
When women did the job, they were typists. When men do the job, they are:
“…organising and managing commitments, project-managing schedules and communicating with a vast network of contacts. It’s an obvious career choice for ambitious individuals keen to operate at the centre of the business sphere.”
Barf.
This and other such bullshit is why we need to take seriously the 22% pay gap. We need to keep fighting against the implicit biases that drive women into less profitable careers; the biases that made those careers less profitable in the first place because they were staffed by women. It’s a nasty cycle that won’t stop until we end the myth that the work done by women is less valuable than the work done by men.
So, yes. The pay gap does exist. It exists because women are paid 5.4% less than men for doing the exact same job, and it exists because women are paid 22% less than men when you account for the careers we choose, the full-time hours we work and the education we receive. Those factors are not something to “adjust” for when we’re talking wage gap statistics. Those factors are something we need to examine, and something we need to fix.
P.S. — you can start by checking out What Gap?, a campaign that’s encouraging women around the globe to Be Undeniable and ask for a pay raise on December 6th.
