I found this insightful video that further explores some of the sources of the income gap between men and women.
In particular, they touch on how the career decisions women make as a result of societal pressures may be the primary cause of pay difference between men and women.
It’s a rather interesting perspective. It’s worth a watch if you have a couple of minutes.
Welcome to the third and final of my 3 “major blogs” in this 3-part blog series.
So far, I have explored the basic details of the income gap between men and women and made the argument that “equal pay for equal work” has technically been achieved and women have lower average salaries then men due to other equally-unjust reasons.
In the last blog, I left off with the realization that the primary cause of the difference in average salary between men and women is the different societal pressures put on men and women when it comes to raising children. The fact that women are still expected to be the primary caregivers for children and men are expected to be the “breadwinners” puts extra responsibilities on women that inhibit them from working nearly as many hours as men or even working at all.
It is from this conclusion that I propose a few policy alternatives that I believe the government should institute to address the gap between the average salary of men and women. The first, and probably most important, policy that I propose is a dramatic expansion of child care tax credits to middle and low income families.
Currently, federal government provides qualifying families with $3000 per year for one child or a max of $6000 per year for 2 or more children that can be spent on childcare services with the stipulation that the childcare services be used so that both parents can work. Compare the amount of this tax break with the average cost of childcare which varies from $4863 per child per year in Mississippi to $21,984.00 in Washington D.C. and the offered subsidy seems laughable. In fact, in 42 states the average annual cost of childcare exceeds $7000. (All these statistics can be found here along with a more detailed analysis of the cost of childcare by state)
Childcare is under covered by the current tax credit and it has led to a reality in which choosing to join the workforce is too costly for a lot of woman. For some lower and middle income families, it’s cheaper for the family to have one parent stay home and baby sit the child then to spend money on childcare so both parents can work. And thanks to societal norms, the mother is usually the one that stays home.
Now, it’s not inherently wrong that some families have to have one parent stay home with their child or work fewer hours per week to accommodate childcare schedules. Budgetary constraints affect every family. All families face economic struggles and everyone must sacrifice in some way due to financial constraints. And the government can’t possibly be expected to relieve all inhibitions to every family being financial stable.
But the problem is that the way that families try to accommodate financial constraints surrounding the birth of a child is biased against women by forcing them to unequally sacrifice their professional careers and thus their own ability to earn their own resources. And having a situation where women are systematically earning less resources then men is a problem because it prevent them achieving true equality in other aspects of life. (This gets back to the issue I mentioned in my first blog)
It is for this reason that I would propose a dramatic increase in childcare tax credits offered to middle and low income families. I’m hesitant to ascribe an exact value for my proposal because I’m not properly informed with this policy area but I would propose increasing childcare tax credits to at least $7000 per child per year.
By more than doubling the amount of tax credit for childcare from $3000 to at least $7000, it would allow more stay-at-home mothers to join the work force or current full-time employees that are mothers to work those few extra hours each week that they would usually have to duck out to pick-up their child from daycare. The introduction of more stay-at-home moms to the workforce and an increase in the number of hours worked by currently-employed mothers would go a long way in bridging the 18-point gap in average pay between men and women.
On top of the childcare tax credit to families, I would also propose another set of programs intended to increase the number of women in certain male-dominated industries such computer sciences, engineering, law, and medicine. This agenda would consist of a two-sided effort to get women into higher paying industries that have remained heavily dominated by men.
The first major policy initiative is introducing extensive affirmative action and scholarship programs at major public universities across the country. These programs would apply to majors relevant to the fields of computer sciences, engineering, law, medicine, and other high-paying, male-dominated fields. These programs would collectively inspire women to pursue careers in these fields and provide them with the proper training so that they are qualified for these careers.
The second major policy proposal in this education program is a rather controversial one that is intended to provide incentives for companies in these industries to hire women. I would propose that the government offer tax breaks to companies in these industries that hire women in positions in which they currently constitute less than 25% of the workers. These tax breaks would only exist for 5-10 years with the goal of introducing women into these industries. Hopefully, after 5-10 years, enough progress will have been made that women will have developed a permanent spot in these industries and the discriminatory practices will have been overcome.
By getting women in these industries, we could accomplish two goals. First, getting women jobs in high paying industries would help raise the average salary of all women. Second, these policies would tear down some of the sexist hiring tendencies in these industries that were mentioned in the first blog.
Together, I feel that the childcare tax credit and field-specific initiatives to increase female representation would go a long way in closing the gap between the difference in average salary between men and women. For reasons laid out in my previous blogs, many of the social inequalities that women face would be resolved.
My policy proposals are not an end-all-be-all solution to the current gap in average pay between men and women. Nor has enough research been done to know the exact effect these policies would have. Thus, there is a great deal that can be said about the ambiguity and unintended consequences that are likely associated with my proposals. I’m receptive to criticism of all such flaws.
Overall, the point of my proposals is to introduce policies that could at least begin to address some of the underlying sources of unequal pay between men and women. Many of the greater inequalities that women experience in society are tied to the fact that they are in an economically inferior position to men. That it one of the reasons that I chose to analyze the pay gap for my blog series. It’s such an important issue.
I hope you have enjoyed this 3-part blog series. It was the first blog that I had ever managed and I really enjoyed it. I will continue to post “mini blogs” to relevant material for the next week or so.
I hope that I was able to make you think about this issue from a new perspective and that you disagreed with me at least a couple of times. That would mean that this blog is working and raising awareness about the issue.
I will continue to check the comments on reddit and tumblr for another week so I encourage you all to keep posting your responses there.
Thanks for reading and have a nice day. It’s been fun.
I found an interesting article by CNN that touches on a recent incident at the New York Times that has sparked debate over the pay gap between men and women in the media. It also provides some interesting statistics about greater income inequality problems for women.
Interesting read.
http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/19/living/boston-gender-pay-gap-meeting/
I found this Washington Post article that looks at the study that I cited in my previous blog and better explains some of the observations I was trying to make about the sources of income inequality.
I must point out that I don’t agree with everything that he argues though.
http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702303532704579483752909957472
Welcome to my second “major” blog post.
In this blog I will be introducing my own personal views on the reality of the income gap between men and women and what is the primary cause of our current wage disparity.
I hold a rather controversial belief that society has technically achieved “equal pay for equal work” in the sense that if a women has the exact same experience as a man and does exactly the same amount of work in the same amount of time as a man, she can expect to be paid an equal amount as her male counterpart in modern society. I recognize that women do, on average, tend to earn less than men, acknowledge that that is wrong, and will attribute the continued inequality to other unjust conditions that privilege men.
But what I’m principally asserting is that most companies don’t actively decide to pay a woman less than an equally-qualified male counterpart simply because she is women.
To start, I will be referencing the most recent non-biased study to have been done on the pay disparity between men and women: the 2012 Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) study titled “Highlights of Women’s Earning in 2012”. Now there are lot of details in this study that are worth noting and I suggest reading it as it’s very reader-friendly but I’ll only touch on a few of the more noticeable facts in this study. Ultimately, the data supports the idea that the pay disparity doesn’t exactly equal the 78% I referenced in the first blog.
Some of the more notable facts from the study are as follows:
Now, I could go into more specifics about how certain industries have greater pay disparity then others but that is irrelevant to whether women, when they do get the same job as a man, tend to earn the same amount as him for the same work. What the provided data shows us is that when you control for education, experience, time worked, and actual work done, men and women in the same industry get paid (nearly) the same amount for doing the same work. (There was a study done about a year ago by a major university that more specifically addressed this question that I wanted to include in this blog but it’s archived in a pay-to-use database online so I couldn’t access it. The conclusion of the authors essentially confirmed what I just stated above and went so far as to assert that we’ve had pay equality since the early 2000’s. I’ll try to link to the study later next week if I can get access to it.)
I find the most telling of the provided statistics is that women who have never had children earn 96% of their male counterparts. What this shows it that if you remove one of the most significant differences between men and women when it comes to making career decisions: pregnancy/child-rearing, we find that women have essentially achieved pay equality with men.
What the data shows is that the fact that women are usually the one’s to stay at home with their children is actually the greatest inhibitor to women receiving an annual salary equal to men. Women are more likely to give-up their careers then men to take care of the child. Or when mothers do remain in the workforce, they are forced to work more flexible schedules and fewer total hours to accommodate child care availability. In contrast, men aren’t expected to adjust their work schedules thus they tend to work more and make more money than their female counterparts with children. This is reflected in the stats that I provided that pointed out how women are more likely to get caught in that 35-39 hours worked per week window versus men who are more likely work over 40 hours per week.
There is a substantial difference between the average “full-time” male and female employees in the same industry because the “full time” label tends to ignore the slight weekly difference in hours worked between men and women. Women, more so then men, aren’t able to work late because they have to pick-up their children. Over the course of a year, that difference in hours adds up to eventually represent the difference in average salary between men and women. The increased expectation of women to be the primary caregivers thus plays a huge role in explaining the discrepancy in average income between men and women.
I do recognize that, aside from a lack of appropriate child care opportunities, discrimination in hiring practices against women and the discouraging of women from higher paying jobs in male-dominated industries such as law, medicine, engineering, and computer sciences are also major reasons why women tend to make less.
But I think that what the 96% figure shows us is that child-rearing and the societal expectation of women as being the primary caregivers are the greatest inhibitors to equal income between men and women. And as much as something needs to be done about broader discrimination against women in the workplace, the reason that women only earn 81% of what men earn annually is primarily due to unequal expectations of parents by society.
So what does this mean about where I stand on the pay disparity between men and women? If you will remember correctly, in my last blog I said that I believe we will have achieved income equality between men and women when women earn 95% of what men earn. I believe at this time I should clarify what I meant by that.
Does the fact that when women who are equally qualified and work equal hours with men earn 96% of what men earn mean that I think we have achieved “pay equality”? Hell no.
My second requirement for true income equality was that men and women aren’t discriminated against in working tendencies. The fact that the aforementioned statistic requires a qualifier means that systematic discrimination against women in the workplace has not been removed. Although women aren’t as widely discriminated against in terms of hiring practices anymore, women are still systematically discriminated against because they are the ones that are expected to stay home with the children.
Although we have technically achieved “equal pay for equal work”, so long as women are expected to give-up or compromise their careers at a rate any higher than men, systemic discrimination will continue to exist. My 95% threshold for equality meant that women have to have an average salary that is at least 95% that of men.
Which is why in my next blog one of the policies I propose for addressing income inequality is an unprecedented expansion of child-care tax subsidies for low-income and middle-income families. In my next blog I will introduce my policy solutions to helping reduce the pay gap between men and women.
I concede that my analysis in this blog is not perfect and that discrimination in hiring and pay practices may be a bit more prevalent then I’m aware of. I encourage others to disprove and ultimately rip-apart everything that I’ve presented here. As a man, I can’t even begin to imagine the sort of discrimination that women must put-up with in the workplace.
Also, those readers that are here from reddit: I’ve read all of your comments and have taken them all to heart. If you wish to make your arguments against this blog in the comment sections to my links, I will definitely read them all.
Thanks for reading. Hope to have you back next week.
As I mentioned in my previous blog, there have been many events that have led to women being in a lesser position economically compared to men. And one of the more significant of these events was a landmark Supreme Court decision handed down in 1908 in which the Court established the precedent that women could be treated different from men in the ways that laws are written. It was on the basis of this case that all subsequent practices of discrimination against women in the workplace were justified until 1973.
It was from this case that we got such “insightful” statements from the Supreme Court as:
“That woman’s physical structure and the performance of maternal functions place her at a disadvantage in the struggle for subsistence is obvious. This is especially true when the burdens of motherhood are upon her. Even when they are not, by abundant testimony of the medical fraternity continuance for a long time on her feet at work, repeating this from day to day, tends to injurious effects upon the body, and as healthy mothers are essential to vigorous offspring, the physical well-being of woman becomes an object of public interest and care in order to preserve the strength and vigor of the race.”
If care to read more from the Court’s laughable ruling in the case click here.
Hello and welcome to my blog.
I’m 19 year old male that is currently a junior in college at a major state university in the US. I’m also white, straight, and a Democrat.
Let me explain a little bit about what this blog is and what I hope to accomplish with it. I’m currently taking a women’s studies class at my university and one of the assignments for the class is to complete some form of activism project that focuses on feminism, equality, and women’s rights. For my project, I decided to a 3-part blog analysis that is complimented by periodical posts to links of other relevant articles and videos.
As for the subject of my blog, this 3-part blog series will focus primarily on the issue of income inequality between men and women. In particular, the fact that women on average tend to make less money than men. This post actually represents the first of the 3 major blogs. Through these blogs I hope to raise awareness about the issue, get people thinking about their own experiences with gender inequality in the workforce, and, if I do this right, you’ll disagree with some of the points I’ve made and start thinking about your own opinion on the issue.
Before getting into the analysis I have planned for this post, I feel I should take a minute and thank you for simply reading this blog. To those that have been brought here by my spamming on reddit, tumblr, digg, and bloggster, I apologize for the spam and appreciate that you actually clicked on the link. In order for this blog series to have the desired effect of spreading awareness about the gender income gap I have to spread the word however I can.
With all of that out of the way, it’s time to get into the depth of my analysis. To start off, I figure I ought to simply introduce the basic statistics that demonstrate the income gap between men and women. The most common statistic that most of us hear when we are talking about the income gap is that women earn only 78% to each dollar a man earns. What exactly does that mean? Well it means that the average salary of women in the US is 78% of the average salary men receive. The average salary for women in the US is $37,791. The average salary for men in the US is $49,398. The income gap can be broken down more specifically by certain career-related categories as well.
Here’s a breakdown of expected salary for men and women based on education level. For those in the middle of the pack in terms of education (high school, some college, bachelors degree) we see the greatest pay disparity between pay for women and men. And we see a slight increase in pay equality amongst those with higher levels of education (masters, doctorate). It’s not surprising that, amongst those with the most education, we see the greatest equality achieved.
There is also significant variation in pay disparity in different industries. If you’re interested in learning a little more about the specific numbers you can find them here: expected wages of men and women by industry. Overall, we, surprisingly, see the greatest pay equality in the construction industry, an industry that is historically considered male-dominated. If I had to guess why the construction industry had 92% pay equality, it would have to be the domination of unions in that industry. Union tends to ensure greater pay equality across both gender and race.
So how is it that the average salary for men and women came to differ so much? It’s really not that hard to figure out. Anyone that has studied history in the slightest knows that women have played a subservient role to men in nearly every culture throughout history. There are, of course, examples of current and former cultures in which men and women were nearly or completely equal but throughout history most women in western cultures have been expected to remain at home, care for the children, and tend to the domestic responsibilities. (Random side note: in the 1800’s the second leading cause of death amongst women in the US, behind child birth, was burning to death. Women often wore long, heavy petticoats during the time period and the only form of heating was fire places in each room. As women would work throughout their homes, their dresses would often get caught in the coals of the fires. The petticoats were so intricate that it would take too long for women to get the dress off and they would burn to death. Just an interesting fact that I learned in my US History class back in high school) Most of the responsibilities historically relegated to women have rarely put women in a position to earn a salary. Unless you were a maid, no one would pay you to do work around the house.
All that said, substantial improvements have been made in the economic position of women over the last 150 years. Not surprisingly, that advancement in the economic position of women has corresponded to the development of the modern feminist movement.
The greatest advancements in job opportunities for women have come since the 1960’s when the Feminist movement really started to gain national popularity amongst middle and working class women. Through litigation, legislation, and literature, the Feminist movement became one of, if not the, driving force that helped achieve the greatest improvements in workforce and wage equality in the US. Pay equality represents a uniquely important issue for the Feminist movement because of the important role money plays in allowing one to achieve independence. Income equals power which subsequently equals independence. If women wish to be truly equal with men in society, they must first have access to their own equal resources so they can support themselves. As long as women make less than men, they will often be reliant on men in some way and thus won’t be able to achieve true independence.
I’m not talking about some unattainable utopian (Random side note: in its original Latin, the term “utopia” means “world that cannot exist”. Make of that what you will.) future that many skeptics of feminism think feminist are trying to achieve. Critics picture feminists as wanting a world in which women never get married, never have kids, hate all men, and everyone is a penis- loathing lesbian.
No. The sort of improvements I’m talking about are the kind of changes brought about in the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act passed in 2009. The ultimate goal for the Feminist movement, in terms of wage inequality, is for women and men to have equal opportunities to participate in the workface and earn an equal and fair wage. I personally think true equality will have been achieved when women have an average salary within 5% of the average male salary and all superficial barriers to male-dominated industries removed. (I also support the removal of entry barriers to female-dominate industries) The ultimate goal for feminism is that women receive equal pay for equal work.
And I have to agree that that sounds like a great idea.
If you’ve read this far then I applaud and thank you. I’ll be posting a new blog each Friday for the next 2 weeks in which I’ll expand on this issue. I’ll also be posting links to related articles and videos periodically so look out for those posts as well.
My next blog in particular will focus on specific policy options that I believe could help make progress in achieving pay equality. (I’m a double major with a degree in Political Science and Economics so I figured focusing on policy and economic analysis would play to my strengths) I’ll also provide a rather controversial analysis about how difference in average pay for men and women is attributed to other equally-problematic factors aside from different base wages. But I’ll touch on that more next week.
Thanks for reading. This is my first ever blog so I apologize for any mistakes. Have a nice day.
schoolblog55 
