The Bureau of Labor Statistics’ (BLS) annual study “Highlights of Women’s Earnings,” the source of the 77 cents to the dollar statistic (83 cents to the dollar as of 2014), states that of full-time wage and salary workers in 2014, “women’s median earnings were 83% of those of male full-time wage and salary workers.” The study compares the median earnings of female and male full-time (more than 35 hours a week) workers to find the raw gender wage gap. It does not account for factors like the job any given man or woman has, nor the hours they are working — as long as they are working more than 35 a week. The study does not, in any way, suggest that women earn 83 percent of what men earn for doing the same job.
The BLS annual study’s findings were misused so often that back in 2009, the U.S. Department of Labor released a separate study, “An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women,” which examined and clarified the causes behind the raw gender wage gap including occupation, hours worked, and job or educational experience. These factors accounted for the majority of the raw gender wage gap but still left an unexplained, adjusted gender wage gap of 4.8 to 7.1 percent; this gap suggests that on average, women who work in the same field, the same number of hours, and have the same amount of experience as a male counterpart earn about 92.9 to 95.2 percent of that counterpart.
The adjusted wage gap, of course, does not suggest that every woman will make less than their male counterpart. Nor does it suggest that some women— especially women of color— do not earn significantly less than this average. It is merely an average of the differences between comparable male and female workers.
Some conservative speakers and media outlets have cited feminists’ misuse of the raw gender wage gap statistic as evidence that gender discrimination within the workplace is a myth. However, an average adjusted gender wage gap of 4.8 to 7.1 percent is certainly still significant and unjust. The median women worker with an annual salary of $39,621 loses about $2,440 to $3,028 a year due to this unexplained wage gap. And equally important, the other sources of the raw gender wage gap — like how men disproportionally work in higher-paying occupations — can still be attributed to gender stereotypes and discrimination.
In sum, women do not make 77 percent of what men make for doing the same work or job, but gender disparities and discrimination in the workforce are very real. The following is an examination of the various factors that contribute to the raw and adjusted gender wage gap, and some potential solutions for these issues.
Occupational Decisions:
Women work in lower paying fields more often than men and work in higher-paying fields far less often. According to the Department of Labor, in 2014, more men than women worked in nine out of the ten highest paying jobs in America, while women made up more than half of minimum wage workers across the country. Consequently, addressing the reasons that keep women in lower-paying occupations will eliminate a notable part of the wage gap.
The first issue is that gender stereotypes push women into gender normative, often lower-paying careers from a young age. Addressing the root cause of this problem will be difficult, as gender stereotypes are deeply ingrained in American society.
But we can start with addressing gender inequality within schools. The Institute of Physics’ report, “It’s Different for Girls,” found that in 49 percent of Britain’s co-educational and state-funded schools not a single female student advanced to A-level (similar to AP in the US) physics. Even in the schools where girls did advance to higher physics, there were few cases in which females actually matched the number of males in the classes. The study also suggested that being one of the few non-male students left in a class often discouraged young girls from sticking with the class, exasperating the problem.
Other studies have found similar gender disparities within higher level mathematics and economics courses, while others have found the reverse effect in higher level English and language courses, where women generally outnumber men. These gender disparities in high school lead to imbalance in college, where men drastically outnumber women in STEM and finance majors, and thus in higher paying careers. According to Glassdoor and the Department of Education, of the 20 college majors with the highest salary five years after graduation, all but two were related to STEM or economics, and only one had more female graduates than male graduates — nursing.
To combat inequality in schools, The Institute of Physics suggests that public schools should be required by the government “to monitor and counter gender imbalance in progression, participation and achievement,” and to report and publish these statistics. The government can provide financial incentives to schools that encourage more young women to take higher-level STEM and economics classes.
Schools can provide extra encouragement for female students to take more advanced classes, and they can hire more female teachers for STEM classes to provide non-male role models and create a more inclusive environment for young girls.
The second issue is that even if women do chose to work in higher-paying and male dominated careers, sexism and a hostile work environment often drive them away or delay their career advancement. In a study by the Pew Research Center, 78 percent of workers in male-majority workplaces reported having experienced gender discrimination at some point in their career, almost twice the percentage of workers in equally gendered or predominantly female workplaces. In male-dominated jobs, which are often higher-paying, women face more discrimination.
Gender discrimination and stereotypes can prevent career success, as 48 percent of females in STEM who worked in male-dominated offices reported that their gender made it harder for them to succeed at their job. A female technical consultant at the PRC study explained that, “people automatically assume I am the secretary, or in a less technical role because I am female. This makes it difficult for me to build a technical network to get my work done. People will call on my male co-workers, but not call on me.”
While gender discrimination can make advancement difficult for those who remain at their jobs, sexual harassment — which 22 percent of women in STEM reported experiencing— can sometimes drive women out of careers all together.
Enforcing anti-harassment training and policies, particularly in STEM startups, will help address the problem. Legislation, like California’s 2004 Assembly Bill No. 1825, mandates that employers with above 50 employees must provide people in supervising positions with at least two-hours of sexual harassment training. Legislators should consider expanding the requirements to companies with less than 50 employees — STEM startups usually begin with less —, increasing the frequency of the training — the mandate only requires training every two years — and mandating anti-harassment training for all employees, not just supervisors.
Many other states have begun expanding anti-harassment and anti-discrimination laws in response to the #MeToo movement. Illinois, for example, passed a bill in November 2017 requiring all state employees to undergo annual sexual harassment training, and a bill that establishes a sexual harassment hotline where people can call and receive help filing a complaint.
Beyond passing legislation to eliminate discrimination and harassment, simply helping more women enter higher-paying jobs in the first place, like by improving gender-equality in schools, will tackle part of the problem too. According to the PRC study, there is notably less gender discrimination and harassment in workplaces with a higher concentration of female workers.
The “Motherhood Penalty:”
After having a child, the average woman earns four percent less than they did before children, while the average man earns six percent more, according to research by University of Massachusetts sociologist Michelle Budig. While the median childless, unmarried woman earned 96 percent of what the median man makes, the median married woman with children earned 76 percent of the median man, according to research from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth.
Even after adjusting for factors like hours worked after childbearing, Budig found that the majority of the motherhood penalty persisted. The motherhood penalty, according to Budig, is largely caused by discriminatory expectations that mothers will work less or be less committed after having children, thus limiting the promotions and raises that mothers receive. In their study at Cornell, researchers Shelley J. Correll, Stephen Benard, and In Paik sent fake resumes to hundreds of employers looking for job applicants. The resumes were identical except that some included a line indicating that the applicant was part of the parent-teacher-association. Mothers were called back for an interview half as frequently as childless women, while fathers were called back more frequently than childless men. When asked to recommend a starting salary for an applicant, employers offered mothers $11,000 less than childless women, and $13,000 less than fathers.
The societal expectation that mothers will not be as good of workers as childless women or men is evidently a significant source of the wage gap.
For mothers who feel discriminated against by employers who assume they will work less after motherhood, or who feel they are being punished for taking maternity leave, The Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978 prevents employers from discriminating against employees based on pregnancy-related reasons. It is still quite a long and difficult process to sue for discrimination, and many women may not because they are afraid of backlash or can not afford legal fees. However, proposed national legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act would place the burden of proof on employers rather than employees to prove that pay discrepancies are not based on gender, including pregnancy, which would allow mothers to more easily and successfully protest discrimination. Increased transparency about wages, another one of the goals of the Paycheck Fairness Act, would help mothers recognize when they are being paid less than men or childless women, allowing them to assertively ask for a raise or file a lawsuit for discrimination.
Beyond discrimination, the motherhood penalty can be partially attributed to the actual time women lose in the workforce during maternity leave. On average, women take nearly three weeks longer of parental leave than men, which — according to various studies — makes them less likely to receive raises or promotions following their return, as they are often required to play catch up.
One way to address the disparity in parental leave is to provide and encourage equal paternity and maternity leave — or just provide a universal parental leave — to balance the time that parents miss. However, the Pew Research Center found that countries with a longer average paid parental leave did not actually have a lower wage gap between mothers and fathers. The PRC suggested that even when women and men are offered equal time, women still take significantly longer parental leave on average. Offering equal parental leave could be a step in the right direction, but it is unreasonable to expect that mothers and fathers will always take equal leave when offered because of the influence of traditional parenting roles, or, of course, a physical necessity — the need to recover from childbirth.
Another source of the motherhood penalty is that typically gendered home responsibilities limit how much mothers work, leading them to work fewer hours than fathers on average. A solution to this disparity in the working hours of mothers and fathers is to create more flexible working schedules.
Maryella Gockel is the flexibility leader in charge of scheduling flexibility (among other responsibilities) at the professional services firm Ernst & Young (EY), which has more than 250,000 employees worldwide in jobs such as consulting and financial auditing. According to Gockel, mothers at the firm left the workforce 10-15 percent more often than fathers after having a child, and generally worked fewer hours than working fathers if they returned. Yet after allowing workers to adjust their own working schedules, EY found that mothers and fathers returned to the workforce at essentially an equal rate, and that mothers worked closer to the same hours as fathers. As such, if employers provide more flexible working schedules when possible, they could address some of the working disparities between mothers and fathers, and thus the wage gap.
Many jobs cannot provide flexible working hours. An alternative solution to the problem would be cheap, government-subsidized daycare like that in Sweden, which would allow some working mothers to return to a more consistent working schedule faster if they would like.
A nation-wide system would undoubtedly be blocked by a conservative Congress and is difficult to implement. A better solution would perhaps be for large companies themselves to offer better daycare programs when possible, as doing so would allow their employees who are mothers to work more consistently, thus helping the company.
Though of course, not all companies could afford or would be willing to pay for daycare systems, especially in the case of low-skill, minimum-wage jobs.
As such, though implementing better daycare programs and allowing more flexible working schedules will work to eliminate the Motherhood Penalty in some cases, addressing the universal pay discrepancies between mothers and fathers relies on making suing for discrimination easier, as aforementioned. Furthermore, the ongoing shift in gender parenting roles — mothers are working more frequently than they were years ago — will eliminate part of the median earnings gap, too.
Negotiation Disparities:
Another source of the gender wage gap is that men negotiate for higher wages more often than women. In a study by Glassdoor, which compiles research about the compensation and treatment of employees, 32 percent of women reported negotiating for a higher salary at their most recent job, compared to 48 percent of men.
As such, an important step to eliminate the gender wage gap is narrowing the gap between the negotiation frequency of men and women.
The first step is improving negotiation training in high schools and colleges. The American Association of University Women (AAUW), for example, provides workshops that train working women and college students on how to negotiate for salaries, benefits, and possible promotions. The workshops aim to help “women come away from the workshops knowing how to determine their market worth based on their skills, experience, performance, qualifications, and responsibilities on the job.” The workshops provide people “the tools and business strategies they need to successfully negotiate for fair pay for the rest of their careers.” Integrating workshops like AAUW into professional development at companies and incorporating negotiation training into high schools would help level the playing field of negotiation confidence and tendencies between men and women.
Yet a social study by Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda Babcock, and Lei Lai at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government found that the main reason for the negotiation frequency between men and women is not negotiation skills. Rather, it is that women feel they are — and often are — unjustly percieved as needy for appealing for more money by their employers, while men are viewed as confident.
Making discrimination lawsuits easier and more comprehensive is thus important to ensure that women can protest this employer bias. Establishing transparency about wages within companies will also help, as with the aforementioned Paycheck Fairness Act. The act would prevent employers from punishing employees for sharing their wages, hopefully increasing communication between employees about their salaries. If a male employee successfully appeals for higher compensation, then increased transparency about his new pay will ensure that his female counterpart can more assertively argue for equivalent compensation or sue for discrimination if unsuccessful.
By improving negotiation training and increasing transparency about wages, we can begin to eliminate the gap between the negotiation tendencies of men and women, and consequently move closer toward gender pay equality.
In sum, women do not make 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men; rather, the median full-time female worker earns 77 percent (now 83 percent) of what the median full-time male worker earns each year.
Gender stereotypes and discrimination in schools, homes, and in the workplace contribute to the wage gap, but there are tangible steps our institutions can take to address discrepancies.
