Before You Talk About Women’s Choices, Read This
It’s Equal Pay Day! The average woman has now earned as much as the average man did in 2017 if they both started working on Jan. 1, 2017.
Yes, of course there’s a lot of nuance missing in that statement. Women in tech had their Equal Pay Day sometime in January; women of color are still waiting for theirs. It varies greatly by industry, job role, education level, and a host of other factors. That’s what “average” means.
But before you even think about telling me that women’s choices explain the gender wage gap, stop. Just stop. I’ve got some facts to give you.
The Gap is Real
The AAUW released a fantastic study just updated with 2016 data that shows the pay gap exists at every age, in almost every industry, and at every education level. The gap worsens significantly when you factor in race.
The gender wage gap persists even after controlling for nearly every conceivable factor, with the “unexplained” gap remaining at 3-4%. Over a 30-year career, even that small gap makes a huge difference. But just because the other factors can be explained doesn’t mean they’re really in women’s control.
The Choices are Illusory
You can’t get three tweets into #EqualPayDay on Twitter today without reading something like this.
At some level, she’s right. If a woman behaved exactly like a man, she would be much more likely to have higher pay. But let’s examine how much choice women actually have in which career they choose and how they handle motherhood, and whether acting like a man would really help.
Bias from the Start
Sure, pay differs by industry. But can women actually choose the same careers as men? Well, starting as early as elementary school, teachers unconsciously discourage girls from STEM work. Girls are socialized into “nurturing” fields, while boys are directed toward “higher-value” fields. Girls are socialized to take care of other people, including the children they’re often expected to have.
The Real Problem: We Don’t Value Women’s Work
When women become the majority employee in a field, wages go down. When men take over a field, wages go up, but women get pushed out. Moreover, in the few industries where women out-earn men, it’s a minuscule difference, compared to the fields with the biggest gaps, in which men earn nearly twice as much as women.
One of the most jarring statistics is that we pay men more to watch cars than we pay women to watch children. There’s no social reason why we’d pay more for our cars than our children, but men are doing one job and women are doing the other.
(Kevin Miller, senior researcher with the American Association of University Women, via FiveThirtyEight)
In my field, as another example, programming was considered “secretarial” work and women dominated the field. When companies decided that programming was important, they explicitly sought out men and pushed women out. Today, programming is one of the highest-paid jobs not in the medical field, with a starting salary of at least six figures in many areas, but women (and other non-white-male groups) have been systematically kept away from it. It’s a conscious choice, but an unconscious bias.
But We Don’t Want Women to Be Like Men, Either
Even if a woman chooses the same field as a man, she’s less likely to be hired and less likely to be promoted (even in fields dominated by women), meaning she’ll earn less over her career and therefore have lower retirement income as well. (See this whole thread, from which I pulled a bunch of stats.)
And if she acts exactly like a man, she gets resented by both men and women for not living up to the stereotype that has been nurtured (haha) in us by our culture since birth. It’s called the double-bind of being a woman.
All of these are the results of unconscious bias, which cannot be overcome unless people start paying attention to it. (Hence the name.)
The “Choices” of Motherhood
The other big choice people talk about when it comes to women’s salaries is having kids. They “choose” to scale back hours, take less money to work more flexible jobs, or quit working altogether to raise kids.
To start with, let’s talk about why people choose to have kids at all. Although it depends on how you slice the data and ask the question, on average, parents seem to be better off than their childless peers. The author of the study writes, “We are not showing in this paper that having kids makes people happy, but I think this might give people hope that parents are not miserable.” So it seems like men and women both expect to benefit (perhaps intangibly) from having kids.
However, mothers and fathers have the largest pay gap, even though young, single women often out-earn their male counterparts. Married men earn more than single men, but partnered women earn less than their male counterparts even before they have kids. But, in yet another double-bind, if women choose not to have kids, that decision is stigmatized.
Why are married men so much better off, even if they have kids? Because women do more emotional labor, more housework, and more childcare — in other words, women do more of the unpaid labor that keeps households running smoothly (though it has been slowly trending toward equality).
Seriously, as someone who at one point had a cook, a nanny, and a housekeeper, I can confirm that having someone watch my kids all day, clean up the house, and prepare my meals, so that all I had to do was come home, eat, and tuck the kids into bed, was awesome. (Of course, I did the hiring, payroll, and scheduling, and they didn’t work every day, so it still wasn’t as easy as if I’d been a man with a stay-at-home wife.)
So when someone tells you that the gender wage gap is the result of choosing to have children rather than discrimination, they’re partially correct. Any individual who makes the choice to take less pay because they choose to have kids and therefore need more flexible hours or want to take more time with their families has my undying support. The question is, why should they have to take a pay cut to raise a child?
Society Needs Children but Doesn’t Want to Support Parents
Who benefits from having kids? Parents experience most of both the direct costs and the direct benefits. But society benefits greatly when the birth rate is at replacement level.
We all know that safety net programs such as Social Security are uncomfortably similar to a pyramid scheme. I can’t find the link right now, but an article in The Economist pointed out that GDP growth is strongly correlated to the workforce expanding (i.e., more people are getting jobs than retiring). Conversely, a shrinking workforce depresses GDP growth. Ironically, one proposed solution to help GDP growth in the face of a declining birth rate is to encourage more women to join the workforce.
But why would moms want to work more? The United States still doesn’t have universal health care (public or private coverage), paid maternity leave (many mothers don’t even get unpaid leave), or mandatory paid sick leave, all policies that aid all working parents — but especially mothers, because they take on the majority of the child-rearing burden. Why aren’t fathers demanding that their jobs give them the flexibility that women are expected to take a pay cut to receive? Perhaps they would if women refused to do the work for free, but here’s where you get to individual vs. societal expectations. Each individual makes a sensible decision (e.g., my husband’s making more than I am, so I’ll take care of the kid), but it adds up to an alarming statistic across the board.
The Solution: Consciousness
OK, so now that I’ve spent way more time writing this article than I meant to, what’s the solution?
It’s not just an equal pay law. As we’ve already seen, actual discrimination between men and women in the same role accounts for only 3-4% of the wage gap (although that is still significant and should be fixed!). Instead, we need to make sure we’re addressing unconscious bias and inequality.
Start with gender bias in school systems and racial inequality between school systems so that women (and men) of color get at least as much opportunity as white women. While the gap persists across education levels, more education is still generally correlated with higher pay.
We need companies to deeply examine their hiring and promotion practices to make sure that women aren’t getting overlooked because of the personality double-bind.
We need to make it possible for every worker to have paid sick leave, paid leave to take care of family (new children or otherwise), and flexibility in their work hours, so that parents can spend time with their kids before they become the next generation of workers.
All these suggestions benefit every worker, not just women. Not coincidentally, diversity in the workplace benefits both employees and their employers’ bottom lines. Equal Pay really is better for all.
