(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)
Over on Amanda’s blog, reader “JenK” writes:
Men are more willing to take on dangerous jobs so can find better paying jobs than those who are not willing to risk their lives.
This is an argument I’ve seen before. When anti-feminists explain why the gender wage gap doesn’t exist or is justified, they frequently claim the wage gap reflects men being paid more for taking hazardous jobs or dangerous jobs. Often men’s rights activist (MRA) Warren Farrell is cited. The following arguments are typical:
- John Leo: Farrell argues that many men outearn women by a willingness to take risky and dangerous jobs as well as work that exposes them to stress and bad weather…
- Arrah Nielsen (from the IWF’s website): The real reason than men tend to out-earn women is the choices they make. Men are far more likely to take unpleasant and dangerous jobs, what Farrell calls the “death and exposure professions.” For example, firefighting, truck driving, mining and logging — to name just a few high-risk jobs — are all more than 95 percent male. Conversely, low risk jobs like secretarial work and childcare are more than 95 percent female.
- Glenn Sacks: Of the 25 most dangerous jobs in the United States (according to the U.S. Department of Labor), all of them are overwhelmingly or exclusively male. Over 90% of American workplace deaths and serious injuries occur to men. It is not unfair in the least that dangerous jobs pay more than safe jobs at the same skill level.
The anti-feminist argument here sounds logical and just. It’s true that men are much more likely to die or to be injured on the job than women. Surely no one would be willing to risk their life without getting paid a premium for it; and no reasonable person would argue that extra pay for extra danger is unjust. So how could feminists object to a “danger premium” that raises men’s wages?
The problem is, there is no premium for dangerous jobs. And since the “danger premium” doesn’t really exist, it can’t explain the wage gap.
This post will first look at some general evidence, from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, showing that high pay doesn’t equal high wages. Next, I’ll discuss the dubious right-wing assumptions implicit in the belief that dangerous jobs are paid for with higher wages. Finally, I’ll briefly discuss some of the peer-reviewed economic studies showing that high risk isn’t associated with high pay (and is even associated with lower pay, for non-union workers).
There is no premium for dangerous jobs.
Let’s look at some graphs (all graphs in this post were taken from the Bureau of Labor Statistics website). Here are some of the most dangerous industries to work in in the USA, based on on-the-job deaths:
Just looking at that graph should make people suspicious of the “high risk = high pay” myth. Yes, construction workers and miners earn decent pay, but agricultural workers? They face the highest risk of death, and get paid less than almost any other class of workers in the USA. From a BLS page entitled “lowest paying occupations in 2002“:
If danger jobs really paid a premium, we wouldn’t expect the most dangerous industry in America to be the second lowest-paid. Indeed, when the Bureau of Labor Statistics investigated job traits that are associated with wage premiums, they found that “Job attributes relating to … physically demanding or dangerous jobs… do not seem to affect wages.” Here’s a bar graph. As you can see, what pays most is specialized knowledge. The very tiniest bar, all the way over on the right, that’s actually slightly negative? That’s the “death and exposure” effect on wages Warren Farrell is talking about.
The right-wing economic assumptions behind the anti-feminist economic theory
Many anti-feminists are conservative or libertarian in viewpoint (the IWF, for example, exists chiefly to put a “good for women” face on whatever the Republican party’s current talking points are). However, some MRAs – including Warren Farrell and Glenn Sacks – think of themselves as liberal on many issues, despite their opposition to feminism. This makes their easy acceptance of right-wing economic assumptions implicit in the “high risk = high wages” theory somewhat surprising.
The key right-wing assumption – one frequently used to argue against policies such as the minimum wage and worker protection laws – is the belief that the free market produces the best possible outcome for workers. Obviously, workers would never accept jobs that risk life or injury without getting paid extra for it, right?
Well, no.
Believing that high risk is paid for by a wage premium means making a lot of assumptions; and if even one of those assumptions is off-base, then risk and wages might not be connected at all. From an article by economists Peter Dorman and Paul Hagstrom:
The theoretical case for wage compensation for risk is plausible but hardly certain. If workers have utility functions in which the expected likelihood and cost of occupational hazards enter as arguments, if they are fully informed of risks, if firms possess sufficient information on worker expectations and preferences (directly or through revealed preferences), if safety is costly to provide and not a public good, and if risk is fully transacted in anonymous, perfectly competitive labor markets, then workers will receive wage premia that exactly offset the disutility of assuming greater risk of injury or death. Of course, none of these assumptions applies in full and if one or more of them is sufficiently at variance with the real world, actual compensation may be less than utility-offsetting, nonexistent, or even negative – a combination of low pay and poor working conditions. [Source: Dorman and Hagstrom, “Wage Compensation for Dangerous Work Revisited,” Industrial and Labor Relations Review vol 52(1) Oct 1998]
What would make a labor market less than perfectly competitive? Many things. Feminists and liberals are likely to think of the effects of discrimination and persistent unemployment, which may leave some workers without the option of refusing to take a low-paying, high risk job. There are also industry premiums – workers do not move freely between industries, and some industries simply pay higher than others, in a pattern that cannot be reliably accounted for by skill requirements, education, risk, etc..
And of course, workers often lack the ability to accurately access risks. For instance, an agricultural worker may assume that she or he (most likely he) isn’t doing anything risky if his job doesn’t involve operating heavy-duty farm equipment; but he’s far more likely to be killed on the job if his duties involve driving. And the construction worker hanging from a girder thirty stories above the ground? He’s much less likely to be killed than the construction worker who stays on the ground driving a pick-up. (Leigh & Garcia, “Some problems with value-of-life estimates based on labor market data” Journal of Forensic Economics, Spring-Summer 2000 v13)
Because workers do not move freely from one industry to another, differences in how much different industries pay may prevent wages from being perfectly competitive. (As I’ll explain later this post, this is a particularly important factor when looking at wages and risk).
The point is, the assumption that the marketplace compensates workers for risk is, in the end, another example of blind ideological faith in the market to always produce the best outcome. We should be skeptical of such assumptions.
What academic studies have found
Several academic studies have found a significant connection between risk and higher wages. These studies generally don’t include agricultural workers – which is possibly a problem, since this cuts out the US workers who face the highest risks for the lowest pay. Furthermore, these studies usually don’t account for the differences in pay between industries – meaning that they can easily mistake the higher industry wages in an industry like construction or mining, with higher pay for risks.
How do we know that higher average pay in those industries aren’t premiums paid to workers in physically risky jobs? By comparing employees who face comparable levels of risk in different industries. A secretary working for a mining firm is not more likely to die on the job than a secretary working for an elementary school, for example. But when economists J. Paul Leigh and Jorge A. Garcia compared clerks across industries, they found that the so-called “danger premium” paid to construction and mining workers applied even to clerks facing no danger. The standard economic theory – stating that firms pay a premium to workers facing a higher risk of death or injury – cannot explain why a construction firm would choose to pay a low-skill clerk much more than an insurance firm would.
Dorman and Hagstrom’s analysis (pdf link) found that if industry wasn’t accounted for (and agricultural workers weren’t included), higher risk seems to be associated with higher wages. But once other factors were accounted for, there was almost no association between risk and pay. And what little association existed was negative – that is, workers who face a higher risk of death actually get paid lower wages than similar workers facing less risk.
This “negative premium” – workers getting paid less for facing risk – only happens to non-unionized workers. This result is not easily explained by conservative economic assumptions. It is, however, not unexpected to left-wingers, who would expect that worker bargaining power would have more to do with wages than risky work conditions.
Conclusions
First conclusion: The anti-feminist argument that the gender wage gap is (partly or fully) caused by justified higher pay for men who take on riskier work is not true. Evidence shows that taking on risky work isn’t associated with higher pay.
(Note that a related argument made by some MRAs – that sexist occupational segregation leads to men being more likely to be injured or killed on the job – holds true. That is sexist, and unfair. Men’s greater likelihood of workplace injury and death has nothing to do with the wage gap, but that doesn’t mean it’s not unjust.)
Second conclusion: The widely-shared conservative assumption that the market produces just and fair outcomes is not supported by looking at how the market compensates for risk. Workers who risk their lives often receive very low compensation, and for non-unionized workers they may be paid even less than similar workers in less risky jobs. Quoting Dorman and Hagstrom:
In plain terms, nonunion workers in dangerous jobs are, in many cases, simply unlucky; they have found their way in to situations of high risk and low pay and would presumably move to a better job if they could. …
From the perspective of public policy, dropping the assumption that risk coefficients fully reflect workers’ desired tradoffs strengthens the case for regulatory policies to promote safe working conditions… [and there is a basis for] assigning a higher priority to policies that target the conditions of the less-compensated.
The bottom line: Neither the anti-feminist, nor the conservative, assumptions about risk and pay hold water. The wage gap between men and women is not fair or justified; and the market is not fairly compensating those workers (mostly men) who face the highest risk of death or injury at their jobs.
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If danger jobs really paid a premium, we wouldn’t expect the most dangerous industry in America to be the second lowest-paid.
Why not? There is no necessary correlation between these two concepts.
The dangerous jobs are also the jobs with fewer skills involved. This can be explained by a simple comparison of the differential costs in danger to two professions. If accountancy and lumberjacking start out at given levels of risk and danger to incumbents, and accounting takes 5 years to teach and lumberjacking takes six months to teach, where does it make sense to allocate resources on making the job more safe? Multiple that by the length of human history.
So it doesn’t follow that the highest paid jobs will be the most dangerous jobs. It does follow, in a reasonably free labor market, that danger is a factor which will contribute to a job’s compensation. Two identical jobs, add “and you get shot at every couple of weeks” to one of them, and we’d expect the compensation to go up.
The test of your theory is not in any of the supporting evidence you present. The test is to examine the salaries paid to workers in various dangerous fields over time and see if there is a relationship between increasing (or decreasing) occupational safety over time and declining wages. For example, did coal miners get paid more (in relation to other forms of work) back in 1850 when the fatality rate was probably ten times that of today? I don’t know what the test would show, but that’s the test you’d need to perform to validate your theory.
I never claimed that the highest paid jobs will be the most dangerous jobs; please take your straw man and shove it into a corn field, where it will perform a useful function and help farmers. ;-P
I did argue that if there’s a danger premium, then the most dangerous industry in the country should not be the second-lowest-paid. At that point, you’re really stretching it to claim that there’s any positive relationship between wages and danger. You can try special pleading about low skill levels, but it’s not like agriculture is the only low-skilled industry in the USA. If there’s a risk premium, why doesn’t agriculture pay significantly higher than low-skilled, not-nearly-as-dangerous industries?
Actually, I suspect that you wouldn’t be able to hire anyone to get definitely shot at (assuming real bullets) at any wage level. (There are jobs that make being shot at more likely, but even at those jobs – 7/11 clerk, say – there’s a real chance that any particular clerk will never be shot at).
But the point is, you’re talking pure theory, unmitigated by real-world evidence. Which is pretty typical of libertarian economics, in my experience. The fact is, in real-world high-risk jobs, the compensation does not go up.
I don’t understand. Why do you think a multivariate analysis with the standard tests for statistical significance is not “a test of my theory”?
The test you suggest, while interesting, would be impossible to actually do. We don’t even have a decent continuous data set for workplace deaths going back to the 1970s, let alone to the 1850s; death rates would be impossible to quantify in a way that would allow us to compare apples to apples.
But even if we could quantify death rates, you’d also have to control for factors such as union laws, union density, wage laws, unemployment levels, freedom of employee movement, etc. Which means we’d be back to performing a multivariate analysis – which you don’t seem to consider a legitimate means of testing the risk/wage hypothesis. So we’re back at square one.
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I’m not sure I’m comfortable with the attitude Robert’s giving off about “low skill” jobs like lumberjacking or agriculture. Sure, niether of these jobs are rocket science and in theory most people could learn them, but it was Barbara Ehrenreich who noted that the jobs Americans consider “low skill” can actually be very difficult. Acutally, I don’t think I’d ever discribe lumberjacking as “low skill.” To put it bluntly, I think your average agriculture worker or lumberjack could learn how to do my physics homework before I could learn how to farm or fell trees.
Plus, there’s something really small and mean about tying the level of workplace saftey investment to the amount of training required for the job. Ideally, everyone would get the safest conditions possible for thier job even if they didn’t spend 5 or 6 years in college-style job training.
excellent piece, Mr. Ampersand
one thing i was a bit curious about, however, was the grouping of such disparate fields as farming, fishing, & forestry – it would be interesting to see these groups broken out & see what correlations appear
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btw, Robert: your example is one of apples & oranges – i’m assuming by “lumberjack” (not a term frequently employed by forestry professionals, btw) you mean to refer to some nebulous unskilled worker employed on a timber harvest site. and you’re comparing them to a certified accountant?
hate to break it to you but being a skilled forester or timber harvester is hardly something that can be taught in 6 months (quite often timber companies will require anywhere from 2-3 years experience – & that’s not counting time spent in licensing & certification for various skills). and here we’re just talking about large-scale (ie, corporate) forestry. i think most small-scale & independent forestry workers would laugh themselves silly at the notion that their experience & knowledge somehow occured in the space of a few months. the same can be said for farming. i confess i don’t know much about commercial fishing, but i doubt it’s that easy to pick up.
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i’m always amazed at how many people, especially those sitting comfortably at their computers, seem to think that all manual labor is “unskilled” & therefore “easy” (ie, anyone could do it)…
Jam- You’re absolutely right about ignorance many have of what exactly “unskilled” jobs are like. My husband’s union (LIUNA) has strict requirements about skill aquistion, experience and pay. And let’s not forget that many skilled professions put up artifically high barrriers to acquiring credentials in order to exclude competition. Also, our ignorance and prejudices about any line of work can make it have less value. For example, 5 years seems like a long time to me to become a bean counter. To pretend that sexism doesn’t play a part in exclusion from some jobs and low pay and respect for others is disingenuous. Just compare your concept of a butler to that of a maid and you start to get the picture.
jam and amp,
Thanks for correcting Robert.
I worked one summer helping a guy cut down and/or prune huge trees.
The work required an ability to judge angles and velocity and then know how to tie off various parts of the branches coming down, so that they wouldn’t kill those of us on the ground. Plus there was the added skill of cutting into the branch at the correct angle to send it on its way.
Robert, after I saw a two hundred pound piece of lumber fly by me at thirty miles an hour, I appreciated the great skill of the foreman and knew that it would take me months and months to learn what he knew. The foreman’s skill inspired awe. He never missed
And I have an advanced degree and an IQ of “genius.”
Manual labor is manual; not brainless.
A large part of the wage differential is explained by the fact that women, at least a large perecentage of them, leave the work force for childrearing, and thus have discontinuous career paths (which is penalized even when male workers have this), and also thus do not have as much experience to list.
The only way to free women is to make sure they never bear children.
There is some discrimnation, as well, but it’s not as prevalent as people like to imagine, in most jobs.
Mike writes:
Hmmmm. No. The only way to free women is to make sure we support them in their child bearing endeavors. At all. Period.
As for women not having experience t0 list (presumably because they are mothers?), how is running a household any different from running a small business?
Mike:
This post is only one of a series of posts I’ve written about the wage gap. I wrote about motherhood and the wage gap in this ealier post.
>
No… that’s ‘a’ way – not the ‘only’ way.
Another way would be for the other parent to take equal responsibility. (radical concept I know)
Another way would be for there to be free quality childcare for all parents.
Another way would be to reframe what we value as ‘experience’.
Another way would be for us to restructure who has responsibility for raisding children (it takes a village an’ all…)
I’m sure others can come up with several more options other thasn telling women they should never become parents. After all, men don’t make a choice between career or family do they?
I do want to point out two things that are tangential to your argument. Okay, they are really totally off topic, so sue me! :)
One is that women participate in high risk jobs in greater number than men in the shadow economy that exists because of immigration restrictions. That is, women who are trafficked to the US from other countries in order to earn hard currency in the garment industry, as domestic workers, and in the sex industry, are in very risky work situations because of their illegality and are underpaid or unpaid because of that illegal status as well. I think the right word is exploited. Some illegal work is more profitable because of the risk, but not the illegal jobs that women typically do.
The second thing that occurred to me that is both women and men do take jobs in which they are likely to be in the line of gunfire. We are currently involved in two wars overseas and both men and women continue to enlist in the armed forces and to take jobs in the civilian workforce in Iraq. So such jobs do exist, and people of both sexes are taking them in ever larger numbers. There is a premium involved in the risks people face in those jobs.
I’d be very curious to see this, too because I highly suspect that commercial fishing would account for the bulk of the fatalities/ injuries in this group… not your typical field laborer. Commercial fishing is the most dangerous job in the world. But there is also a huge wage gap within the industry, itself. Deckhands on a commercial trawler/ crab boat will make very good money (actually a percentage of the catch) in a very short amount of time. But workers gutting fish for 18 hrs a day on a factory processor make borderline minimum wage. Which job do you think is primarily filled by illegal immigrants and 3rd World citizens? Not the high paying one, I assure you. But there is a higher level of skill & experience needed to work on deck than gutting fish, and a slightly higher risk of death/injury above deck than below.
I think you’re underplaying the unpleasantness factor. The weakness in the men’s rights’ argument is in assuming that danger & risk are inherently perceived as a negative to both sexes; and that compensation alone motivates people to put themselves at risk. This is not true. Society tends to glorify most dangerous jobs and I believe men are just as attracted to the higher social status as the better money. People want to become firefighters and work in construction not just because those jobs pay well, but also because those jobs and the results of those jobs are highly visible to society.
Mental/ emotional satisfaction in a job should not be overlooked as a motivating factor. And a big part of that non-monetary compensation comes from social status and to some personalities, the thrill of danger.
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I think there’s something to this. Certainly it’s an argument I’ve heard many times as to why people go into teaching and nursing (and consequently why the salaries are so low for “skilled professions”.)
Bless you Amp, for this post.
If there is one thing I’m sincerely tired of, it’s white-collar anti-feminist men like Warren Farrell, who spent a summer or two working as a “construction helper”, or whose daddy bought them a Laborer’s card to keep their asses doing somthing for the summer instead of lounging around the house playing video games during summer break, pontificating on why women don’t earn as much, and how women who do dangerous jobs don’t really do them, we sit around giving ourselves manicures while the men handle the “tough stuff” for us. He can kiss my Sicilian ass. I do this for a LIVING. Not summer fun. I EARNED my J.W. card, and I’m out here for keeps. I’m a bona-fide blue-collar woman, and I’m tired of his ilk co-opting a working-class voice when it’s convenient.
The fact is, in seventeen years on the job, I haven’t seen any “coddling” of females; he pulled that straight out of his ass, because it feeds into pre-existing stereotypes and bigotry. Women simply can’t get away with that shit. In fact, the only people who can get away with hiding out when the going gets tough, are sons and nephews of contractors (or high-ranking office personnel in the shop). Period. Everyone else earns their keep.
I highly recommend that everyone visit Confined Space every Friday, for a good overview of who is getting killed on the job, along with the where and the how. Do it. Every Friday. It’s a sobering look. Welcome to my world.
There is one reason and one reason only that I am paid a high wage. I belong to a labor union! Yes, I work hard. Yes, I am educated, experienced, and skilled. But the real reason for my pay is because I am organized. Union construction workers are highly paid because we fought for that pay and those benefits, on the jobsite, in the streets, on the picket line, in the voting booth. Do you like weekends? Thank a union member.
Now, with that said, there’s still a wage gap in construction, and it’s not related to childbirth. Most women in construction have their children before entering the trades, so we aren’t taking any more time off than the men. There are jurisdictions that are more advanced in terms of acceptance of women on the job, but there are a helluva lot more jurisdictions where women are first choice on the layoff list—not because they aren’t good workers, but because the contractors and/or foremen believe that the men “really need the job”, while the women always have the option of finding a man to support them. I’m still optimistic; I think that the more women enter the trades, the closer we get to “critical mass”, where we can be seen as common workers and not an anomaly, the sexism will decrease in intensity. It’ll get better.
I think the solution of not having children is that it’s the only one that currently exsists in this world, not an ideal one. Universal Health Care, joint parenting, et cetera would be nice, but I’m certainly not holding my breathe. I am fully aware that I have a choice of a good family or a good career, not both, and am consciously choicing to not have kids (or a husband, sheesh, what a liability they are). And for that, I will fight first for being able to have that choice (birth control, abortions) and then fight second for universal child care (although, I think that’s important and ultimately better for everyone). Because I think I have a better chance at keeping bc then getting universal health care.
*sorry*
Universal CHILD care, not health care. Although, I’d like universal health care too.
I have a great career and a great family life. My husband and I are self employed and share house/kid duty about 50/50. It can be done. although I admit I’m very lucky.
If the wage gap was primarily cause by men taking more dangerous jobs, why is it that when you compare the salaries of men and women in the same field with the same experience and job performance ratings, men frequently get paid higher?
I know are certain amount of that gap comes from women being a bit “socialist” in their salary negotiations but I have to admit to being absolutely mortified when I came into management and saw the differences in salary between staff of different sexes at the same level/same level of experience (mind you, not as disgusted as when I found out a guy who was denied a promotion to my level for performance issues and had less significantly experience than I did had a salary a good $15K/year more than I was making and that wasn’t because I’m a pansy negotiater).
In many of these high-risk jobs, there’s sexism, no?
Law enforcement is considered dangerous, though not among the most dangerous jobs and women are treated like pariahs there. Often in male-dominated jobs, women are treated very poorly on the basis of gender. At the very least, they are viewed as outsiders encroaching on men’s turf.
There are jurisdictions that are more advanced in terms of acceptance of women on the job, but there are a helluva lot more jurisdictions where women are first choice on the layoff list…not because they aren’t good workers, but because the contractors and/or foremen believe that the men “really need the job”?, while the women always have the option of finding a man to support them.
This, I believe, is why the “pink collar” jobs pay as little as they do – the single women who traditionally held them were never expected to support a spouse or dependents on that income.
Hell yeah, the most dangerous occupations pay real good, they shore do. I should know. My job, land surveyor, has an on-the-job death rate the same as that of policemen. And look at us with our gold-plated plumb bobs and our shiny Cadillacs and all, we’re rolling in the dough!
But statistics show my current job has only sixty percent the death rate of a job I used to have, convenience store clerk (125% of minimum wage if you’re lucky). As we all know, there simply aren’t any female convenience store clerks because, heh heh, there’s a job that takes a man ’cause the little ladies are just plain too delicate for rugged work like that.
It can be done. although I admit I’m very lucky.
It has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with picking a partner who will share in the work, and in not falling into stereotypes that get away from that.
I’ve seen plenty of posts on other feminists’ blogs where women admit they’re hesitant to marry and/or have kids with their boyfriends because they aren’t sure he’d do at least 50% of the work. Well, hell, why are you with him then?
Lack of better options? Easy tendancy to abuse for dinners and movies?
Easy out clause if there are problems? General desire to keep my stuff seperate?
Lack of better options?
Than staying with somebody who you know deep down is happy to buy into sexism when it means sticking you with the “girl work”? Wow. Great option.
I so wish I had time to read this whole post. I read the headline and the first few paragraphs. First thought that came to mind was — I did not get the effin memo!!! I did not realize my job paid better than, oh Jennifer Garner’s job or that other scum-feeding lawyer down the street who does not have to do a “friendly fire” investigation in Falluja! Armed with a pen and a law clerk — military lawyers investigate various mishaps, while getting shot at by Iranians, Jordanians and Syrians who are not happy that they can no longer systematically kill people for disagreeing with their policies like the Germans did over Europe.
Danger pay my ASS!
So—did anyone catch the two-week series where Mallard Fillmore made the point ad nauseum that the liberal media was suppressing Warren Farrell and only John Leo had the guts to talk about the end of the wage gap? Man, that duck ain’t funny, but he sure knows the value of repetition. I was waitin’ for amp to take on the duck.
I don’t see why anyone would think higher wages correlates to more dangerous jobs. If history teaches us anything its that the lowest paying jobs are dangerous because the people that do then are desperate for wages. Look at the history of coal ming for Gods sake, or factory work. In fact millions of women work in sweatshop in the third world under ridiculously unsafe conditions because that is their only job choice. Not to metion migrant farm workers in this country, or people that work in slaughterhouses. I would imagine many or even most of the injuries sustained by migrant farm workers go unreported so that we don’t have a good measure of how dangerous this work even is. And what about the dangers of prostituion? Also as far as state or city jobs go, I would imagine firerfighters don’t make tons more than school prinicpals, teachers, or beaurocrats. Of course the only way to settle this is to actually crunch the nubers but I can’t imagine that what they say is true.
A couple of things.
1. The so-called market theory of safety and health has a number of corollaries. First, that we don’t need the Occupational Safety and Health Administration because the market will take care of safety. If a jobsite is dangerous,the workers will just move to a safer job, or demand higher wages. The dangerous employer will thenbe forced to pay higher wages to attract workers, to the point where he is no longer competitive and has to make his workplace safer or go out of business.
Second, that all workplace accidents are therefore the fault of the worker for not just quitting and moving to another, safer , job.
Of course, this is all ridiculous. as Amp emphasizes, this is only theory, dependent on a number on assumptions that don’t exist in the real world.
2. This article is based on fatalities. Women suffer “only” 8% of all workplace fatalities. Injuries are a slightly different story. According to the BLS, women account for 35% of all workplace injuries:
Most of the injuries in “education and health services” are actually in health care where women make up the vast majority of hospital and nursing home workers.
Musculoskeletal injuries (MSDs), particularly back injuries, are epidemic in health are, particularly nursing homes. MSDs accound for one-third of all injuries and illnesses and most musculoskeletal disorders in 2003 were among the heavily female nursing aides, orderlies, and attendants. Many of these MSDs are permanently disabling, career ending injuries for which workers compensation is totally inadequate. The Bush administration’s repeal of OSHA’s ergonomics standard in 2001 was particularly harmful to women. (More on nursing homes here.
It’s also interesting to note that assaults account for almost 3% of injuries suffered by women, but just over 1% of injuries suffered by men. Assaults and violence are the second leading cause of death for women. Until recently, they were the leading cause.
I think amp has debunked the strong case that holds danger is the only reason for pay disparities. (was anyone actually making that claim?) I do not think he’s debunked the weak case, that danger is a factor in pay.
The weak case is enough to debunk the slogan “equal pay for equal work.” If job B has a 15x greater chance of death than job A, it’s not equal work.
Figuring out the multiple causes of pay disparity is hard, and it’s valuable that amp is trying.
I’m not sure childcare is low risk. Farmers may be underpaid, but a heck of a lot of them are millionaires. A bureau of labor statistics graph isn’t specific enough for the kind of nuanced contextual inquiry we need here.
Men choose jobs in part based on pay, risk, status among coworkers, status in the community, whether the job is fun, whether they are good at it, to meet chicks, to get out of the house… it’s complex, but it can be studied. Women, similar, not identical weighing of choices.
I’m guessing people who are primary caretakers for young children are more risk averse.
A significant factor in the pay disparity is sexual harrasment.
A few risky jobs are firefighter, ninja, panhandler, race car driver, austronaut, crack dealer, whore, cop, king, president. I think it’s fair to say these jobs show gender disparities beyond what is explainable by risk assessment alone.
Yes, but the academic studies I cited do provide nuanced contextual inquiries.
It’s impossible to entirely prove a negative, so I can’t prove that danger never contributes to wage disparities. All I really do is point out that the evidence doesn’t support the people who claim that such a thing is happening.
Risk Aversion or Discrimination? Understanding the Gender Pay Gap Using Matched Data from May 2004 has something to say about this issue.
It is, in all likelyhood, a must-read for everyone interested in this issue.
For those unwilling to read the paper, the paper concludes, in part:
It seems that the emperor has no clothes.
“preference.” Interesting word. Some people around here think that women simply prefer to not take tradeswork into consideration. But there’s more here than meets the eye.
When I entered the trades, the usual working hours were 8AM-4:30PM M-F. That has slowly morphed into 7AM-3:30PM, M-F; and some areas it’s 7AM-5:30PM, M-Th. And yeah, this has had an effect on the number of women who can consider going into construction.
I live in a city of 120,000 people, which by Internet standards is a very small town. By Illinois standards, it’s a decent size city. There is one child-care facility (three locations) that opens before 7AM. Just one. That facility, and a couple of others, are the only ones open after 6PM (most facilities require you to pick up your child before 5:30PM). There is only one child-care facility open on Saturday. There are no child-care facilities open on Sunday. None.
What this means, is that single women, or women with husbands that work difficult hours, or on the road, or who are in the military, or whatever, are unable to choose this line of work. “Flex-time” is not an option in my field. There have been cases of contractors adjusting the hours for male journeymen whose wives do shift-work, and thus had to take their kids to the SCOPE program (before and afterschool care within the public school system; the hours don’t begin until 7:30AM), but no contractor has ever made the adjustment for apprentices (male or female) because apprentices need supervision by journeymen (translation? someone would have to be paid overtime).
Single women have always been the largest group of women interested in tradeswork, and the largest group who’ve stayed. But not without a scramble. I’ve seen women drop out of the apprenticeship program because try as they might, they couldn’t solve the child-care scramble. For a while, my solution was to have my retired mother be my child-care provider. Now my mother is terminal, and that is no longer an option. I’ve been using the one child-care facility that opens before 7AM. They don’t accept kids older than seven. What will I do when my daughter turns eight? I don’t know yet.
The trades have had a difficult time retaining skilled women. A common scenario is a woman who has been in ten-fifteen years starts taking night classes and gets a degree, then gets out of the trades. Why? Well, because contractors aren’t promoting us to foreman’s positions; we get scads of opportunities to work for (white) male foremen younger than our old t-shirts (not much of an exaggeration, unfortunately). If you aren’t a foreman by the time you’re forty, your earning potential will plummet. There is plenty of documented eveidence of age discrimination in the construction field. The Labor Paper in Peoria had an article about it; unfortunately it is not available online.
We are also laid off first. I’m not kidding about the “but the men really need the job” attitude. Check out a book by Susan Eisenberg (a journeyman wireman) called “We’ll Call You If We Need You”. It’s an in-depth account of the struggles facing women in construction. See also another book by Victoria King (another journeyman wireman) entitled “Manhandled: Black Females”. It delves into racism as well as sexism in the trades, but Ms. King, like Ms. Eisenberg, still advocates for women entering the trades. Both were single mothers. Neither still works in the trades (I believe Susan Eisenberg is teaching now; Victoria King is an attorney).
Most of us who came into the trades and stayed come from a less-privileged background, so it takes a while for us to…not notice the discrepancies, we notice them right off the bat!…..but to assign them a value. Once we start comparing what our pension statements look like in comparison with our brothers, and how often we are laid off in comparison….we start looking for alternatives. That, and most women have to wait until their kids get older (and can watch themselves) before taking night classes. Some tradeswomen find their alternative in Civil Service positions. Some aim for administrative positions in their Local, or in their International. And some just get out, with most telling other women not to bother.
Not me. I still think this is an excellent way for women to make a living. It’s the best alternative if college is too costly an option for you. But job hours incompatible with child care options is a barrier. A huge barrier.
I’ve been lucky. For one thing, I had my child at an extremely advanced age by Illinois standards…32. And I’ve already attained journeyman status, and know a lot of the ins-and-outs. I can try to negotiate “flexible hours”, if need be (and file a grievance if the contractor in question provided that benefit to male journeymen, but won’t for me). My journeyman status also means I have the option of applying for Civil Service positions. I came into the trades during a decent economy, and so haven’t had a long-term layoff until recently. When work gets slow, faces on the job get more white and more male. Call it discrimination (because it is), or if the D-word makes you uncomfortable, call it the “halo effect”. There is a reason white male apprentices have an easy time finding mentors, and get invited out for after-work extracurriculars. There is a reason white male journeymen have an greater chance of staying when work gets slow. Hey, who wants to lay off a buddy? But the folks you don’t know so well? (That’s why I always advise female and apprentices of color to get seriously involved in the Local, in the labor community, and in political activities sponsored by the labor community…..it’s about the only way to jump-start a real professional relationship with one’s co-workers, that is anywhere near being on-par with what the white guys naturally fall into).
Hey, what’s life without the Struggle, right? But that doesn’t mean we have to fall into the “three monkeys” routine and act like all “choices” are equal, or even that they are really choices.
I love those that claim that it’s women’s choices about employment preferences that are one of the major reasons why women aren’t paid at the same levels as men.
For a start, women’s socialisation herds them into professions that are considered more ‘gender typical’, which also tend to be paid less (the reasons for such are a matter for another time). There is no such thing as ‘free’ choice, we all make choices based upon the cultural biases we have internalised, like any other good member of society. It’s like telling a girl “you can only be a teacher, you can only be a teacher” throughout her like, and then when she becomes a teacher, and complains about not being paid as much, then she is told “well, it’s your own damn fault for becoming a teacher”.
But even in professions where women predominate, there is a heirarcy in place. If you look at female dominated academic departments as an example, even though sociology as a discipline has a nearly 70% female graduation rate, but yet most of the senior, and well paid, positions are occupied by men. So, women are not only positioned hierarically between different professions, but within the same professions they are also positioned similarly.
I am actually about to start working for an initiative that is active working to increase the numbers of female faculty and researchers in the sciences and engineering. One thing you definitely learn right off the bat is that the reasons for pay gaps and employment gaps are multitude and varied (as is evidence by the above example of socialisation), but the gap is very very real, and the only difference between those that have closed the gap and those that certainly even close to such, is merely the degree of the gap.
Yes, things have improved (marginally) but anyone that honestly thinks that things are equal had really stop putting their heads in the sand.
(oh, and La Lubu, good to see someone else from IL! *smile* Plus its really wonderful to see a woman succeeding like you have!)
(Richard, would you mind if I quoted from that email you sent me? Let me know.)
Richard, I had some criticisms of the study by Black and company you link to, and of the conclusions you’ve apparently drawn from the study.
1. The study isn’t about “risk” as I’ve used the term “risk.”
I’m not sure that you understood what Black et al study you’ve linked to actually says. It has virtually nothing to do with “risk” in the sense of risk of death or injury; the risk your study talks about is the risk of wages falling after taking a white-collar job. (The Black et al study covered only white-collar employees, few if any of whom face significant risk of deadly job-related accidents).
2. The study’s results aren’t applicable to the US labor market.
It’s a little bizarre to apply a study about risk of white-collar wage cuts to the US, because large employers in the US don’t typically cut white-collar wages, as far as I know. I’ve worked in white-collar jobs all my life, and I don’t recall once taking “is this employer likely to cut my wages after hiring me?” into account when taking a job.
Indeed, Black et al flatly state in their conclusion that their results may not apply to the United States:
(They go on to point out that overall trends in the US and Norway are similar – that is, the wage gap has narrowed over time in both countries. That similarity, however, doesn’t change the fact that their data may not be applicable to the US labor market).
3. Where this study is about occupational segregation, it agrees with what I’ve said in the past; where it’s about discrimination, its findings are dubious.
The Black et al study is mainly about the controversy over whether occupational segregation (which means, the way men and women tend to work in different jobs) is the main reason for the wage gap (as I claimed in this post), or whether a substantial portion of the wage gap is caused by women getting paid less than men for substantially identical jobs. The Black et al study agrees with me that occupational segregation accounts for much more of the wage gap.
Then there’s the separate question of whether occupational segregation is caused by discrimination, by sexism, by pure worker choice, or some combination of the three factors. Here Black et al are simply bizarre. On page 3, they write:
Another, much more relevant possibility is that firms discriminate not by paying equally capable women less than men (pay-level discrimination), but by segregating who they hire into what positions by sex (hiring-level discrimination). In other words, to some extent, the sorting is done by firms when they hire and when they promote. If firms do this, then on paper women will be “less capable” than men, because they will not have job titles and job experience to match men; however, this doesn’t at all eliminate the possibility that the job market discriminates against women by sorting them into lower-paying jobs.
Black et al do not seem to seriously examine this possibility at all, and so cannot say if firm-level sorting is occurring, and how much of the wage gap might be due to such sorting.
Furthermore, there’s the matter of how sexism may constrain the choices women and men make, which I discussed in this post. Even insofar as the wage gap is due to choices made by women (and, clearly, some portion of the wage gap is caused by this factor), it’s assuming far too much to conclude that these choices have nothing to do with sexism. Black et al don’t address the question of broader social sexism at all. That’s fine – no study can discuss everything – but it also limits how broad a conclusion you can draw from their work.
Finally, “In order to treat measures of variability in profits as a proxy for risk,” they had to make a chain of dubious assumptions, none of which seemed fully supported by data. Indeed, on table 5 (which is essential for their profit/risk connection), you can see that once they controlled for both job and industry, their results are no longer statistically significant. (They mark statistically significant results with a **).
4. This study doesn’t include dummies to measure the impact of industry-level wage biases.
Although they include a lot of information about industries, which is good, they don’t include any dummy variables accounting for industry-level pay differences. As the studies I discussed in my post show, at least in the USA, not including those dummy variables leads to inaccurate results when looking at risk (in the injury/death sense) and gender. Does it lead to inaccurate results when looking at risk in the wage cut sense? I don’t know, and since this study didn’t account for this factor, we can’t eliminate the possibility.
5. This study, which doesn’t appear to have yet been accepted for publication or to have gone through peer-review, makes inappropriate conclusions.
For example, Black et al write:
If the wage gap is “exacerbated” – which means made larger – by industry sorting, that suggests that women are sorted into lower paid industries and occupations, not higher paid ones. Is this a wording error – did they actually mean to say “lower” and not “higher”? Or are they saying that the gender wage gap is exacerbated in a counterintuitive manner? I’m not sure which they meant.
I’d really like to see where this paper ends up being published, and what sort of changes the peer review process causes. I’m guessing that bizarre statements like the one I just quoted will be explained or corrected; that the fact that some of their important results were not statistically significant will be pointed out more clearly; and (I hope) the weakness of their case for concluding that firm-level discrimination is ruled out will be made more clear.
* * *
Bottom line:
The paper you cite has nothing to do with “risk” in the sense I was discussing, is not really relevant to the US labor market, hasn’t been peer-reviewed, and has questionable (and sometimes not even statistically significant!) results supporting questionable conclusions.
If your goal was proving me wrong, I don’t think you’ve succeeded very well.
Sarah, thanks! Women in academia don’t really have it much better than I do. My last next-door neighbor was a PhD. in Business Administration, with over twenty years of teaching experience, with publication up the ying-yang. The university she formerly worked for saw fit to hire a young (white) man, sans PhD, not published yet, for a teaching position and pay him more money. That was the last straw for her; she now works at another university, in another state.
I remember reading an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education on the difficult time women have getting tenure. Again, people who are happy with the status quo make the assumption that it is because of temporarily leaving the work force to have children, but the same conditions are operative in the lives of women who either had their children beforehand, or who don’t have children. No matter our actual parental situation, it is practically universally assumed that we will be mothers, and that therefore we will drop out of the workforce.
The Building and Construction Trades department of the AFL-CIO has (finally!) saw fit to launch a committee for Women in the Trades, to address the problems of recruitment, retention, and leadership of women in the trades. I’m anxious to see what the committee comes up with.
Ampersand says:
Thank you for asking, but yes I do mind. Until we have gone around the issues for a while, and I have had a chance to think about them further and deeper, I would prefer email correspondence.
Ampersand writes:
Firstly, I would like to point out that despite some of the issues (errors) some of which I noted, they deal with the issues with a lot more rigour than is evident, for the most part, on this blog.
Secondly, I don’t think the issue is actual “risk” but the perception of risk, and the differing ways in which males and females respond to the perception of risk. A well known result from other areas is that young males (in particular) discount risk, on average, and females are much more likely to be risk-averse, on average.
Lastly, one common tendency I see in many responses to these articles is to automatically label outcomes they dont like as being the result of discrimination without being prepared to look at what actual processes are operating, and to what extent the gender-gap can be explained natually and not as the evil female-exploiting proclivities of white males.
Yes, that’s true. Are you seriously suggesting that a blog should deal with social science and economics issues with the same degree of rigor evident in papers written for peer-reviewed academic journals?
A better question is, does the paper you cited deal with these issues with more rigor than the peer-reviewed papers I cited? I don’t think it does. However, it has not yet been through the peer-review process, and in fact states that it is only a working draft. It is therefore very possible that the paper will be improved in the future.
The paper you cited dealt with real (albeit dubiously measured) risk. It did not include any direct measures of perception of risk. Nonetheless, I agree with you that this is an important distinction to keep in mind; you’re right to bring it up.
Returning to the MRA and anti-feminist arguments I was responding to, however, clearly their claims assume that we’re talking about actual risk, not just perceived risk. When Glenn Sacks writes “It is not unfair in the least that dangerous jobs pay more than safe jobs at the same skill level,” his statement only makes sense if he’s referring to actual risk, not just perception of risk. So I don’t think you can rescue their arguments by saying that “the issue is… perception of risk,” because that’s not the issue they were talking about.
By using the passive voice (that’s bad prose, by the way), you’ve made it impossible to know if what I’ve written is included in your statement. But regardless of what you intended, most readers will assume your criticism was meant to include what I’ve written in this discussion. So I’m going to respond as if it were a critique of what I wrote.
I think there is clear-cut evidence of discrimination in labor markets in the USA, some of which I’ve discussed in this post. In fact, I spent years of college studying the processes accounting for the gender gap; and any fair reading of my views makes it clear that I don’t think discrimination accounts for 100% of the wage gap.
In regards to studies such as the one by Black et al, I don’t assume that they prove discrimination and sexism matters in the labor market. I just point out that they don’t disprove that discrimination and sexism matter in the labor market.
Anything more than that you read into my words is the result of your own bias, not the result of an accurate reading of anything I’ve written in this thread.
Needless to say, I’ve never said the gender gap is caused by “the evil female-exploiting proclivities of white males,” per se. I doubt any serious feminist economist has ever said such a thing. That you think in such stereotypical and shallow terms (not just here but also in the email you sent me, which you’ve wisely asked me not to quote), however, says a lot about the low quality of your thought process, and how non-serious you are about attempting to have a respectful exchange of views.
Feminists are not the simplistic stereotype you imagine we are; and by bringing up such tedious stereotypes, you’re wasting my time. Please attempt to provide posts more worth reading in the future, by 1) cutting out the feminist-bashing stereotypes, 2) cutting out condescending remarks (e.g., “the empress is naked,” and 3) cutting out the reliance on the passive voice.
Richard Sharpe, I have a few observations:
1. What subjects are considered worthy of study, and what studies get funded, has a lot to do with who is already in a position of power. As a female journeyman, I would love to see some in-depth studies on why so few women enter the trades, and what we can do to increase the number entering, staying, and getting promoted. But this is not considered to be a subject worthy of study. Women have been working in construction on a regular basis since 1972 (apprenticeships are covered under Title IX), yet it is only now, in 2005, that the AFL-CIO has committed to pushing this particular envelope. Right now, women in my trade represent one percent of all the workers. In the construction field at large, we are three percent. That two percent difference can basically be chalked up to the Laborers having a higher female percentage on road crews, which as publically-funded projects, are required to have their workforce resemble (somewhat) the population. Road projects are very visible to the public, hence enforcement of the “quota” (6.9% if you’re curious) is not as lax as it is behind the walls of publically funded building sites. If it wasn’t for the Laborers, the percentage would stay around one percent. This is not considered to be a problem by many; in fact many people in my area think fewer women should be in construction, as it is a well-paying job that should be occupied by a man. Women don’t really need to earn that much money, is the common belief. Thankfully, not just the AFL-CIO, but many individual labor unions (such as my own, the IBEW) and even contractors’ associations, are beginning to wake up to the fact that by creating artificial barriers that keep women out, they are shooting themselves in the foot. The times, they are indeed changing….they could certainly pick up the pace a bit.
2. What do I mean by artificial barriers? Well, for one thing, like the child-care grind. Greater availability of child care, and employment hours that coincide with available child care (since latchkey-kid arrangements, like how I grew up, are now illegal) will remove that barrier. Other artificial barriers are assumptions about what women can or should do, assumptions about how the job dynamic will change if women enter, assumptions about the type of work women will take on, hours of apprenticeship classes, lack of orientation programs (the jobsite is quite a bit different from other work environments, on several levels), lack of effective recruitment programs (my Local’s recruitment program consists of a small ad in the back of two area newspapers. If you don’t read the paper, you’ll never know when apprenticeship applications are being taken), limited time-frame for applications (as opposed to open applications, with periodic testing whenever a certain number of people have applied to make the expense worthwhile), etc.
3. Talk of the level of “risk aversion” being linked to sex is specious, at best. I don’t know where you live, but I live in one of the more conservative, traditional parts of the U.S. Even here, I see a significant number of women, especially under forty, who take on all kinds of “risky” avocations, giving precious little thought to their likelihood of broken bones, scrapes, or worse. The local BMX track is probably at least a third female, for example. And as for vocations, the military is a pretty risky endeavor, yet has many more times the number of female applicants as the average trade. Why? Better recruitment, retention, and advancement strategies. Also, better support and orientation systems. A short look over the past few decades of history should prove that when barriers come down, female participation increases, including in nontraditional areas. This has nothing to do with nature, and everything to do with nurture.
4. Please point me in the direction of the fire-breathing feminists who are exposing the inherent eeee-vil of white males. In my post, you’ll notice I mentioned one aspect of the dynamic, the halo effect. The motivation of most of the people who are actively, de-facto discriminating isn’t to shut the door on women (some of them do take exactly that stance, but they are the minority), but to give others who resemble them opportunities. They see young white men coming up in the trades who remind them of their younger selves, and they pave the way forward for those individuals. For the most part, they aren’t even aware that they aren’t behaving equally to all the apprentices. The feeling of discrimination can be subjective, on the part of both the discriminator and discriminatee. The effects can be objectively measured. One notable job of a few years ago had the travelers (first layoff, as by contract–the travelers must go before the Local hands) and the three females on the job laid off first (I was not on that job). Two of the women were apprentices. One of them had the highest grade point average in her class. Both were always there on time, ready to work, doing their job, no problems. Both had good apprenticeship reports. They were laid off before two (white) males who literally showed up if and when they felt like it. Not calling in absent for days. These white guys were kept for several weeks like this, to give them a chance to “straighten up”. You can tell me this is just an anecdote, and it is. But it’s also an anecdote writ large, across the nation, as is evidenced in Ms. Eisenberg’s book. I’m still waiting for the study to come along, so stories like this (complete with the employee records and apprenticeship records to prove it) can be entered as actual evidence. The hard-copy evidence is available. Someone has to want to look.
5. And for more reading, Richard, feel free to check out my post on the topic: Gendered Bodies, Gendered Minds. Just as prejudice can be learned, it can be unlearned. You have to want to unlearn it.
Ampersand says:
I don’t think the MRA groups actually know what is going on. They appear to be, for the most part, floundering around making noise trying to absolve themselves from their part in the tragic personal situations they find themselves in.
However, it seems to me that in this topic you have not handled their argument properly by dismissing it without any discussion of whether it is all bogus or only partially bogus. You rightly point out that there are industries where there is high risk but where there is no income premium, but it seems to me that there are other industries where there is risk and there is a risk premium to be had, which are also predominantly occupied by men. It is not the level of risk that is at issue here, rather it is the level of the premium available and what percentage of the wage-gap that can be explained by this argument.
In addition, you never quantify the actual wage gap you are arguing for here, it seems to me*, and leave us to infer that you are refering to the 75 cents in the dollar claim (that we hear so frequently in the press, and which seems very outdated). Now maybe that is because you are simply reacting to the arguments of the a group of people who don’t have very many interesting things to say, and if that’s the case, then I am in the wrong place.
You also say:
But, even here you make it possible for your readers to walk away with the impression that it accounts for, say, 95% of the wage gap. However, people like Marie Drolet at Stats Canada, and others point out that some (large) portion of the gap is explainable, and she goes to great lengths to explain her methods. Sure, her articles are not peer reviewed, but I don’t think that means we can dismiss them.
Finally, discrimination is, I suspect, a bad word to use in the context of these discussions, because it carries so much emotional baggage, but it is also used as a technical term in some of the papers I have seen. However, I can’t suggest a better term. The problem is, though, a great many of the your readers will walk away with the perception that the reason they are working in the lower end of the restaurant industry (pick any you like) and are earning a fraction of what a CEO does is due entirely to active discrimination all their lives.
* Of course, this could be because I have not read your postings closely enough, even though I did read them all.
La Lubu, I can’t thank you enough for what you’ve written here. Good writing about labor issues, with concrete detail, is in far too short supply.
Well, there are always individual exceptions, so I try to avoid absolutist statements. For almost all practical purposes, however, I think the risk/wage connection MRAs believe in is entirely bogus.
And why do those industries pay the so-called “risk premium” even to people who face no extra risk, such as secretaries? And why does the risk premium lose all statistical significance once industry differences in pay scales (which are well-documented, and which don’t exist exclusively in high-wage industries) are controlled for?
Interesting point.
It’s true that I don’t pick one figure (60%? 75%? 85%?) and argue that it’s the One True Number. That’s because I don’t think any One True Number exists. As I wrote in part one of this series, there are simply too many ways to measure the wage gap. To quote myself:
From my perspective, all that really matters is: do unfair factors, such as sexism and discrimination, account for a significant portion of the wage gap? If so, then that’s a problem which needs addressing.
Other questions – like what is the True Wage Gap Number, or Precisely What Percent of the wage gap can be accounted for by non-sexist factors – are interesting, but not nearly as important.
I think that reports from Stats Canada – and, for that matter, studies from the US Federal Government – maintain high standards and have an internal review process similar to peer review. (Anyhow, it’s not fair to imply that I said that all non-peer-reviewed studies should be dismissed; that the study you relied on was not peer reviewed was only a small part of my overall critique, most of which you didn’t refute).
I think you underestimate my readers intelligence (possibly you’re stereotyping feminists again?). I think most of my readers understand that many factors – including luck, race, gender, class, ablebodied/disabled status, body type, choice constraint, and other “unfair” factors, and also including “fair” factors like choices, effort and skill – determine how much money most people earn. (Although there are always individual exceptions).
I don’t know of any feminist who’d say that choices, effort and skills matter so little that they basically don’t matter at all. On the other hand, it’s common for anti-feminists and MRAs to claim that gender accounts for 2% or less of the wage gap, which is essentially saying that it doesn’t matter at all. It seems to me that the extremists are to be found mainly on that side of the debate, not on mine.
La Lubu,
damn girl, colour me more impressed by the minute :)
But you are right, it is funny how academia gets painted as a bastion of liberal bias where one would expect the most gains to have been acheived there (this is aside from one of my lesbian professors recently having her office door plastered with homophobic slurs). But in reality it’s not much different on the whole (there are exceptions of course, but they are just that though; exceptions).
We are actually noticing that something quite insidious is going on right now. With the swing to a more conservative political mileau and the budget crunches for public tertiary institutions occurring there has been a upswing in women being denied tenure, particularly so if they have a more liberal, feminist, queer or non-white bent.
I can speak specifically of the woman that used to be my dissertation advisor, so last year got her tenure denied. She had a number of articles published, had a number of others and a book pending, and was consistently rating as the top teacher in our department. but because she had requested two extentions on the tenure process because she had had three kids during that time with her husband, this was all seen as ‘evidence’ of a perceived lack of committment to academia. Of course, the fact that one of the senior white professors was overheard saying “I know this [the increase in non-white and female professors] is going to happen, but I am going to resist it as long as possible” AND most of the male professors have kids of their own (oh, but guess what? Wives at home! How handy …), don’t have ANYTHING to do with it.
My advisor is now looking elsewhere than academia, and I don’t blame her. I have been told by a multitude of female professors (some post retirement) that unless I really really want to be an academic, I should avoid it and the tenure process like the plague. And that’s what I am doing; once my doctorate is done I am look research and real world consultancy positions.
But La Lubu, if you’re ever up Chicago way and want a beer … :)
Well, there are always individual exceptions, so I try to avoid absolutist statements.
I just wanted to thank you for this priceless gem. Can I quote you?
Death to all fanatics!
Sarah, I don’t quite get what you’re saying.
It sounds to me like your professors’ peers were correct – she isn’t committed to academia. She decided that being a mother was more important, and she didn’t have someone at home willing to shoulder a larger share of the parenting burden, the way some of her peers did. There’s an interesting discussion to be had about why that is – and as a stay-at-home dad, I’m one of the people who do think that men should take their turn as the main parent when women want to be careerists – but the institution simply isn’t treating her in a discriminatory fashion. It would be discrimination if male professors who made mutiple requests for tenure track extensions didn’t have that count against them – but I am sure that they would have it count against them. It DOES show a lack of commitment to academia.
It sounds like her beef ought to be with her husband, for not being willing (I assume) to do the heavy family lifting needed for one partner to achieve the pinnacle of success in their chosen field.
Robert –
*blink*
*blink blink*
I don’t know what is more amazing, the fact that you said the above, or the fact that you actually seem to believe it. Tenure track systems AREN’T neutral; there ISN’T a level playing field. It’s inherently set up (unsurprisingly so from a historical perspective) to follow a traditionally masculine life-course. It’s not surprising then that she ‘failed’. There, in our culture, isn’t a equitability between expectations of a woman to stay home and look after kids and a man to do the same, as I am sure you have experienced (like studies have shown) regardless of your own thoughts on the matter of what ‘ought’ to be done.
This goes way beyond discrimination to look at the underlying structure and culture of the institution (something on a wider scope others have been talking about in this thread).
This isn’t about a fictional lack of committment to academia, this is about how the system and process itself are gendered.
For a start, women’s socialisation herds them into professions that are considered more ‘gender typical’
It’s not merely socialization; it’s a (usually accurate) perception of the hurdles that will be in their way.
Nah. There’s nothing that requires stay-at-home parents to be mothers. It’s purely cultural. Nothing gendered about it.
The system and the institution aren’t set up around a “masculine life course”, unless you’re an essentialist and believe that prioritization of career over family is inherently masculine. The institution is set up around a PROFESSIONAL life course – around the assumption that the primary life function of the institution’s members is the furtherance of the institution. That has nothing to do with the admittedly sexist way in which our particular culture has evolved. In the mirror-universe where Spock wears a beard, Barry plays pro ball and spends his weekends bashing fags, and men are the ones who stay home with the kids, the academia is dominated by women – with the occasional spinster man who decided profession was more important than family. The institution doesn’t care what shape your uglies are, it cares about whether you’ll be working 6 to 8 every day.
It’s a simple test. If the institution finds ways around its us-first rules for men, but not for women – so you have a school full to the brim of male profs who work half days because they’re raising toddlers too – then it’s a very fair cop to say that gender discrimination is behind it. If the institution turns a cold shoulder to men who don’t fit the mold its looking for – men like me, for example, who want to spend most of their time with their family and make career/profession/academy a secondary priority – then the discrimination isn’t taking place at the locus of the institution. It’s taking place at a different locus, perhaps – in the case of the academics I’ve known, in their family dynamics.
I’ve worked at an institution (Microsoft) where there WAS a lot of slack cut to men but not to women – and that was clearly sex discrimination. I’ve also worked at institutions (University of Colorado) where nobody got cut any slack (except for America-bashing fake Indians). So I think I can recognize the difference when it’s staring me in the face.
I will grant you that there isn’t a level playing field. There never is.
Ampersand, it seems that there is a problem with the data you used for your refutation. Lets see if I can include the first diagram:
OK, see the total down the bottom. It is only marginally smaller than the wholesale trade. This means that the number of people in the Ag, Forestry, Fishing and Hunting industry is quite small compared to, say Mining, or Construction, or the whole sale trade.
Next, let’s look at your next diagram:
You quote hourly wages. The BLS wage-gap data is quoted in median weekly wages not hourly average wages, which these look like.
So, firstly, you focussed on Ag, forestry, fishing, and hunting, which has the smallest number of total workers, and has the second lowest wages. Lets look at median weekly wages for a variety of industries, which can be found here:
cpsaat43.pdf
This shows both 2003 and 2004 data. What we see is that Ag, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting has a median income of $369 per week, although there are some categories in there which do not get numbers because there are less than 50,000 of them. I think this means your objection is irrelevant.
Now, lets look at Mining and Construction. They have median weekly wages of $599 (combined, they are not broken out), but look at the union members: $852!
Why is this relevant? 1. The preponderance of males in those industries, and 2. The wage gap figures that are quoted by everyone are quoted from the BLS data, which shows a male median income of around $700. The male union members are pulling the male median figures up.
Now, to your third figure:
These are averaged across the whole workforce! We do not know from these figures what the substructure is. There may well be a premium paid in Mining and Construction.
I don’t know, but I don’t think you do either, and I think there are holes in your refutation.
Arrgh, I submitted a reply, but it disappeared, perhaps because of the pictures I included. Damn.
Oh, silly me. It didn’t disappear, just the diagrams.
Robert writes: Nah. There’s nothing that requires stay-at-home parents to be mothers. It’s purely cultural. Nothing gendered about it.
cuz, y’know, there’s nothing cultural about gender….
The system and the institution aren’t set up around a “masculine life course”?, unless you’re an essentialist and believe that prioritization of career over family is inherently masculine.
and, of course, none of the folks involved in the establishment & administration of the system/institution are essentialists in any way & not a one of them believe that prioritization of the career is inherently masculine.
The institution is set up around a PROFESSIONAL life course – around the assumption that the primary life function of the institution’s members is the furtherance of the institution. That has nothing to do with the admittedly sexist way in which our particular culture has evolved.
because in Bizarro world everything is weird & different, except for the structural aspects of capitalist industrial organization… “professionalism” being, of course, a trans-dimensional universal.
It’s a simple test.
why can’t you idiots all see how simple it is?
the discrimination isn’t taking place at the locus of the institution. It’s taking place at a different locus, perhaps – in the case of the academics I’ve known, in their family dynamics.
as usual, it’s your own damn fault!
Robert, and Richard: There is inherent discrimination when men who have children are still assumed to be capable of working a full work-week, yet women who have children are assumed to be incapable of working a full work-week. There is inherent discrimination when men who have children are assumed to retain all of their mental faculties and committment to quality work, and women who have children are assumed to lose their abilities and committment.
Call me a hardass here, but why can’t someone’s committment, professionalism, and quality of work be judged on their actual work production and actual on-the-job assessments, rather than one’s marital or parenting status? Universities that routinely grant tenure to men, yet seldom do to women with the same (or greater) levels of experience and qualifications…yet who have that pesky problem of being mothers, are discriminating. They are assuming that the status of motherhood—but not fatherhood—is going to affect the quality of a person’s work (something for which there is no evidence, BTW).
How you cannot see that this dovetails with assumptions about gender roles, and institutional structures that reward those who fit the pre-existing assumptions, while punishing those who do not fit the pre-existing mold, is beyond me. There are also strong class considerations here. In the academy, everyone is assumed to be middle class or above. What is expected of middle class women is radically different from what is expected of working class women. Working class women aren’t assumed to be leaving the workforce for extended periods of time; we simply can’t afford it. In the academy, women are thus put into a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” position, where they are judged harshly for having children (not committed to their profession) and also judged harshly for not having children (not a ‘real’ woman, just another ballbusting ‘careerist’). A larger number of women than men who hope to find success in the academy come from a working-class background. They’ve fought tooth-and-nail to get where they are. They are coming up against not only sexist assumptions, but classist assumptions about women’s roles and their ‘proper’ trajectory. Women who thought all they would have to do is their job (like the men), find themselves burdened with extra baggage; more obstacles to negotiate. It doesn’t have to be this way.
‘Cause life is a series of extremely difficult choices and most women have to choose between being with a man even though there will be struggles with his male entitlement or not having any relationship/family/sex at all? Many good men don’t intend to take advantage of the male privilege to avoid housework–it doesn’t even occur to them how much they rely on their wives and girlfriends to do it all. They literally don’t see what they are doing. It’s perfectly understandable why you don’t hate on someone just because he’s blind when he means well.
It’s perfectly understandable why you don’t hate on someone just because he’s blind when he means well.
How do you get from “why are you dating him” to “you should hate on him”?
I’m not even talking about acknowledging that our male partners may be “blind” (though you know the saying about none so blind as those who choose not to see), but about the attitude that that our male partners won’t step away from their privilege. Or, I suspect, that we don’t want to do the hard work of challenging them because we fear deep down that if they have to choose between privilege and us, we’ll be out on our asses.
but why can’t someone’s committment, professionalism, and quality of work be judged on their actual work production and actual on-the-job assessments…
They can, and should be.
For example, you could judge a tenure-track applicant’s commitment to academia by, I don’t know, checking to see how many times they had to ask for special treatment or extensions on their tenure process.
So, what you’re saying Robert, is that the fact that a female tenure candidate who had a number of articles published, several more articles and a book pending, and who was consistently rated as the top teacher in the department, should have those aspects of her job performance given less weight, than the fact that she requested two extensions during the tenure procedure to accomodate her bona-fide medical condition? Do you feel that male tenure candidates who request extensions for their medical conditions should also be viewed as “not having the proper committment to the job”? That a man who requests an extension for, say, back surgery, or cancer treatment, is also asking for “special treatment”?
What are you really saying? That she should have just kept her legs closed? Used birth control? Had an abortion? That having children is only a option for male professors? Because her pregnancy obviously didn’t keep her from continuing to produce quality work. It just kept her work from taking center stage in the eyes of her evaluators, as opposed to her growing midsection. And I suppose you think the senior professor’s comment about resisting the influx of women and people of color into academe had no bearing, either.
she requested two extensions during the tenure procedure to accomodate her bona-fide medical condition
What medical condition? Being pregnant?
Do you feel that male tenure candidates who request extensions for their medical conditions should also be viewed as “not having the proper committment to the job”?? That a man who requests an extension for, say, back surgery, or cancer treatment, is also asking for “special treatment”??What are you really saying? That she should have just kept her legs closed? Used birth control? Had an abortion?
As far as I know, she is not asking for my advice on how she and her husband should plan their family life.
Because her pregnancy obviously didn’t keep her from continuing to produce quality work.
Then why did she need an extension?
It just kept her work from taking center stage in the eyes of her evaluators…
I’m confused. Did SHE request the extension, or did her evaluators? Because you haven’t presented any evidence that her pregnancies caused her work to change status in the eyes of her evaluators.
And I suppose you think the senior professor’s comment about resisting the influx of women and people of color into academe had no bearing, either.
No, that’s problematic. It certainly could be used as an indicator that there was a hostile work environment, or that her peers were not giving her a fair shake.
But other than this guy, what evidence is there that her peers didn’t give her a fair shake? She was viewed as being not sufficiently committed to her academic career. From what’s been presented, she does seem less committed to her academic career than other potential tenure candidates. It’s problematic to assert discrimination when there is also an admitted performance differential.
Sorry, I seem to have munged something up there. In response to:
“Do you feel that male tenure candidates who request extensions for their medical conditions should also be viewed as “not having the proper committment to the job”?? That a man who requests an extension for, say, back surgery, or cancer treatment, is also asking for “special treatment”??”
My response should be:
Yes, obviously they are asking for special treatment. A man who seeks extensions to the process is showing a similar lack of commitment to the process.
Robert –
those extensions she asked for were NOT ‘special treatement’. They were about tilting the playing field back in the oppsite direction to compensate for how much it privileges traditional male career patterns and discriminates against the traditional female ones. It’s about attempting to create a sense of balance, a balance that isn’t there to begin with.
And moreover, the quality of her work was never at issue, what was questioned was simply the quantity, something that was not taken into consideration given the particulars of her case.
Further, talking about masculine and feminine lifetracks or careerpaths is not essentialising. It would be essentialising IF I was talking about male and female lifetracks or career paths. Talking about masculinity and femninity means we are operating in a context of a gendered system, one of cultural beliefs, practises and prejudices. In this context masculinity and femininity are instead operating as institutional social categories, ones that not only are discursively and culturally constructed but construct and effect the social world as well. Hence when we talk about career options being ‘gendered’ we are talking about how well they fit with the social categories of masculinity or femininity, and which one they tend towards and which one then do not.
Oh, and returning to my professor, the breakdown demographically was also straight down “white men” voting against her, and “women and minorities’ voting for her. There’s more going on here, and elsewhere, than any of your arguments allow for Robert.
those extensions she asked for were NOT ‘special treatement’. They were about tilting the playing field back in the oppsite direction to compensate for how much it privileges traditional male career patterns and discriminates against the traditional female ones. It’s about attempting to create a sense of balance, a balance that isn’t there to begin with.
What by you would be special treatment then? Tilting the playing field “back” is pretty much the definition of special treatment. It seems to me that if you want special treatment and attempts to balance things out, that’s one thing. If you want equality and non-discrimination, that’s another thing. Saying you want equality and non-discrimination, but then expecting treatment that requires discrimination to implement, is simply incoherent.
And moreover, the quality of her work was never at issue, what was questioned was simply the quantity, something that was not taken into consideration given the particulars of her case.
This, too, is incoherent. The quality wasn’t at issue, it was the quantity that was at issue, except that wasn’t at issue either. Huh?
and returning to my professor, the breakdown demographically was also straight down “white men”? voting against her, and “women and minorities’ voting for her. There’s more going on here, and elsewhere, than any of your arguments allow for Robert.
Yeah. It sounds like the university in question is pretty far gone down the identity politics toilet.
Mythogo:
Yep, that’s why I don’t want to challenge his deeply held beliefs about house work. Cuz I’m afraid that he’ll say “I’m not going to date you if you want me to do the dishes”. *rolls eyes*
Sorry. I just don’t want to get married because why buy the pig when all you want is a little bit of sausage?
That is it alright. Demanding straightaway that a man give up all his privileges at once, privileges we all agree he doesn’t see, and watch how quickly he thinks you hate him. Because you are telling him that he does something he doesn’t think he does. Educating men on their privilege is long, hard, miserable, tear-filled work that usually goes nowhere fast. And yes, in the end, most of us then choose the easier route of just accepting that we will have to handle more of the housework. It’s not like a man just decides all at once one day that he’s not going to take advantage of his privilege any longer and just does it. This isn’t one fight you are asking women to take on so that men can be better men. This is giving up peace and quiet in the house, giving up sex, giving up everything and for what? Honestly, don’t women have enough duties without having the extra one of sacrificing love and companionship altogether so as to make men somehow better, which we will end up failing at anyway?
Or, in other words, women usually live by the motto, “Pick your battles”.
Robert, you have children, right? Did your wife give birth with medical personnel in attendance? Did she have periodic medical assessments of her pregnancy? Yes, pregnancy is a medical condition.
I don’t know the specifics of this particular tenure candidate, but having three children within the course of two years means she probably spent a certain amount of time physically recuperating from the childbirths themselves. If she had c-sections or complications, she may have needed more time. If she had gestational diabetes, preeclampsia, or HELLP, she probably needed a significant amount of medical intervention. I don’t know if these were three separate pregnancies, or a singleton and twins. I don’t know if they were term babies, or preemies. I do not know if she needed to be on bed rest to insure a term birth. What I do know, and what you probably know but aren’t willing to admit, is that even if she had perfectly healthy, full-term pregnancies, is that she was limited at some time during the course of her pregnancies to attending or reading at certain conferences, or limited in her abilities to research or complete some of the projects she was working on, due to the inherent physical limitations of pregnancy. I assume that like most pregnant women, she was well aware of the fact that she would be judged harshly by some of her contemporaries, and thus had many projects on several burners, so that upon giving birth, she could finish them up. Thus, the need for the extensions. I haven’t heard any criticism of the volume of her work, or the quality. Like most pregnant women in a hostile work environment, she probably “protected herself” by working on projects furiously before and during the early stages of her pregnancy, so she could have the same prodigous amount of publication after her pregnancy as the male tenure candidates.
You say that the academy isn’t discriminating because it discourages pregnancy in both female and male tenure candidates. I say bullshit. Men don’t get pregnant. The academy did not question the quality of her job performance. It did not question the quality of her research or publications. It did not even question the number of her publications. But magically, she was determined to not have the “committment” to her career. Work not up to par? No. Quality of publications not up to speed? No. Not enough publishing? No. So…..how could she possibly be objectively seen as “not having enough committment”? Hmm?
I’ll agree with you on one point though; it does seem that that particular institution has gone down the identity politics toilet. The white men seem to be completely wrapped up in their identity politics, and unwilling to look objectively at those who don’t fit their chosen demographic.
You do a good job of presenting the traditionalist case for why child-rearing women shouldn’t be treated equally in the workplace. I think feminists have pretty much torn that argument to ribbons, though, so I’ll leave your argument with them between y’all.
As for this:
So…..how could she possibly be objectively seen as “not having enough committment”??
The tenure process is set up to take place over a number of years. There is a schedule. The ability to mold one’s life to that schedule is taken, not unreasonably, as a proxy for one’s commitment to the institution. Requesting to extend the schedule – to say, I cannot complete in “X” years what you believe should take “X” years to complete, so please give me “X+Y” years to do the same work – seems about as objective a marker for not-quite-100-percent commitment as I can think of.
Look, there’s a strong case to be made that the academy discriminates against women. I’ve seen it happen myself; I certainly believe that it happens elsewhere; in some places it’s really, really bad. But THIS INSTANCE is a bad exemplar for the case, and that’s all I’m arguing. When you want to argue that the packing plant discriminates against black men, you don’t try to prove the case by bringing in the town drunk, who happens to be black, who got fired for wandering off the job for the eleventh time. He wasn’t fired for being black, he was fired for being terrible at his job. This lady wasn’t denied tenure because she has a vagina, she was denied tenure because it was obvious that her family was more important to her than her job.
If you want to try and make the BROADER case – and argue that all of these many, many jobs that require total dedication should lighten up on both men and women so that people can have decent family lives as well as careers – well, there’s an interesting set of arguments to be had there. But that isn’t the argument being had here, that I can see.
Robert –
Please do not insult my intelligence, because I have not done such to you. This case was held up not because it was a special case. It was held up as indicative of the way in which sexism in the academy IS OPERATING. I have not picked something ann exception, and to imply otherwise is to insult me as a social scientist and a doctoral candidate for suggesting I would make the kind of mistake a freshman undergraduate would. For you to honestly to say otherwise ensures that I am going to stop conversing here, particularly since you have not wished to listen to any of the arguments La Lubu and I have made, and I find myself repeating myself, which is something I am loath to do.
La Lubu hon – I have been impressed and wonderfully pleased at being able to engage with you on this topic, and I look forward to doing such in the future :)
“Hell yeah, the most dangerous occupations pay real good, they shore do. I should know. My job, land surveyor, has an on-the-job death rate the same as that of policemen. And look at us with our gold-plated plumb bobs and our shiny Cadillacs and all, we’re rolling in the dough!
In our city, LE pays $51,000 a year to start, not counting overtime. Many pull in near $100,000 a year. It goes up substantially as the rank increases.
But statistics show my current job has only sixty percent the death rate of a job I used to have, convenience store clerk (125% of minimum wage if you’re lucky). As we all know, there simply aren’t any female convenience store clerks because, heh heh, there’s a job that takes a man ’cause the little ladies are just plain too delicate for rugged work like that. ”
Well I don’t think it’s that it’s too rugged for women to be convenience store, liquor store or gas station cashiers. Here since most of our convenience stores are family-owned franchises and the sons do most of the work. The sons are given the businesses by the fathers when the fathers step down.
More women in the liquor stores? Too dangerous for them? The cashier who shot two robbers who held her up, a few years back, killing one was a woman. Most of the stores here are run by families including women although more and more hiring of outside employees including women.
The convenience store clerk who shot and killed Latasha Harlins, who was trying to purchase items, not steal them, was a woman. She shot Harlin in the back of the head while Harlin was leaving empty-handed.
But I had friends, male and female, who worked as cashiers in gas stations, another really, really safe job, given the supply of money, the hours and the proximity to highways. There are many female cashiers at gas stations, and most of our armed robberies of businesses are actually at gas stations.
oooh, that last post got a bit messed up. Sorry. The part about the police and salary was mine.
My point about the liquor stores is that yeah, it’s a dangerous, low paying job but men and women run the cashiers, and they’ve both been involved in shooting people who try to harm and rob them, and people who don’t do anything and are shot anyway, as occurred with Harlin and several other teenagers shot in L.A.
It’s difficult to make gender generalizations in some of these jobs, particularly in some instances when women don’t have an “in” to these jobs not necessarily because or just because they are rugged or dangerous, but b/c they are family owned and some might be more father-son, than others. Others might be husband-wife.
I used to go drop in on weekends when a friend of mine worked at a gas station nearby from 4-2am.
Robert, how on earth are you possibly reading into my response that I am providing a good argument for traditionalists who believe that child-bearing women should not have careers? She met her tenure requirements; her extensions were for the mitigating factor of pregnancy, a recognized medical condition! You are familiar with the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978, aren’t you? The one that finally made it illegal to treat pregnancy different from any other medical condition? Well, they had to give her the extension. If they give extensions for any medical condition at all, they must do so for pregnancy also. Period.
I went through this. I was having the dream pregnancy, no problems, everything running like clockwork, no morning sickness even! And then I went into premature labor. Surprise! I had none of the risk factors, and my last checkup just a couple weeks previous indicated no signs of what was to come, but that’s the breaks. I was put on hospitalized bed rest, and I asked for Family and Medical Leave. I was terminated instead. Two men who worked for the same contractor were granted as much time as they needed for their broken arms (off-the-job accidents). One of them literally had half of my years of experience.
I appealed to the Department of Labor, who investigated and ruled in my favor. The contractor even lied and told the investigator that everyone who was working that job was laid off, and that it was a routine layoff. The employee records proved otherwise. Busted! I received back pay and benefits. The contractor probably paid more to his high-priced lawyer trying to get out of giving me my lawful benefits than he did paying me! He lived to learn; the next woman who got pregnant in that shop (I was the first in the Local) was treated just as the law provides, as it should be.
The woman refused tenure was assumed to have less committment not because she didn’t meet the requirements; she did. She was assumed to have less committment because she has a family. Men are not assumed to have family conflicts, even though they do, and will. Men are not assumed to have medical complications, though they do, and they will. Only women are assumed (as you assume) to lack committment to their jobs when they have the audacity to have a family.
As for the tenure process taking place over a number of years, and one having to adjust for that and let nothing interfere….hey, where do you keep your crystal ball? Would you be in favor of slamming the tenure door firmly shut on a cancer survivor whose chemo didn’t fit in with the time frame? No? Because that’s not the fault of the cancer survivor, is it? But that little bitch, who does she think she is, just should have kept her legs closed, right?
And I just love how you compare pregnancy to being the town drunk. Real class, that is. But since you mention it, it brought to mind another incident in my local, of a contractor (same one!) firing a black guy for excessive absenteeism. Was he absent quite a bit? You bet. He certainly was. No denying it. However, the records clearly indicated that two white men had a greater number of unexcused absences. They were not fired or disciplined in any manner. The black employee received back pay, and his job back. Why? Because you have to treat employees equally. The same standards have to apply to everyone; otherwise, they aren’t standards.
and Sarah? I’m about ready for that drink right now!! ;-)
La Lubu:
how on earth are you possibly reading into my response that I am providing a good argument for traditionalists who believe that child-bearing women should not have careers
Because you’re going on and on about how debilitating and crippling pregnancy is. If it’s that bad, then women are de facto less capable than men. Put it another way, if radiation hit the earth and suddenly most men had to spend between 12 and 36 months, on average, being bloody useless in a job situation (per your description) then it would be entirely fair to say that men were suddenly less capable than women over the course of their careers. That’s the inexorable logic of the “strong” case for pregnancy as debilitator; if you REALLY MEAN IT, then the old traditionalist case has MERIT.
I don’t happen to believe that the case has merit in this particular field. I don’t think women are that debilitated by pregnancy, by and large. But if you do think that, then you should own up to the implications of what you believe. Reproducing women are a huge drain on any enterprise that hires them, and that’s an empirical fact rather than a sexist assumption – if what you are saying is true.
Is what you’re saying true?
Would you be in favor of slamming the tenure door firmly shut on a cancer survivor whose chemo didn’t fit in with the time frame? No?
As I’ve said before on this thread, YES, I do think that. (Or more accurately, I think that if the university wants to count extensions against you, then an extension is an extension.)
Because that’s not the fault of the cancer survivor, is it? But that little bitch, who does she think she is, just should have kept her legs closed, right?
There is one person on this thread who is using offensive terms for women and making assertions about their reproduction. That person is not me.
To take on the question without being offensively sexist, however: the family choices of people who select high-demand careers are going to be constrained versus the choices of people who select less demanding careers. That seems to have been a factor in this particular instance. That’s regrettable, in the same sense that all exclusive choices are regrettable; life options are being left on the table. But that’s just life.
I have three kids – same as this professor in question. I’m not seeking tenure, but I was looking at a doctoral program. I decided against it – because the time increment taken up by parenting my children adequately was not compatible with the time increment demanded of the doctoral programs I wanted admission to. Recognizing that I could not have it all – very few people can – I made a priority choice about what was more important at this time and place.
Is there a bias against family in the academy? Yep – albeit not a consciously chosen one, just one that’s a side effect of the demands of that life. But it’s a bias that affects both men and women. The fact that women have to have the kids and there are physical consequences to that is interesting but not particularly material. Men have obligations and responsibilities that carry consequences as well. That there may be an overall social difference between these responsibilities that unfairly penalizes women is VERY interesting – and a fruitful area for discussion. But it’s not the same thing as saying that a particular person is being treated unfairly.
Because you have to treat employees equally. The same standards have to apply to everyone; otherwise, they aren’t standards.
Yes. I absolutely agree with this. I should not be in a doctoral program right now, unless I can somehow get my wife to cover my parenting responsibilities in a heroic fashion to allow that. Women who want to have three babies should not be trying for tenure unless they can somehow get their partners to cover their parenting responsibilities in a heroic fashion to allow that. Most people do not have the capacity to do two full-time things at once.
Sarah:
to imply otherwise is to insult me as a social scientist and a doctoral candidate for suggesting I would make the kind of mistake a freshman undergraduate would…
Well, then I guess I’m insulting you as a social scientist and a doctoral candidate, because the example case you have selected sucks, and I’m saying it right out, not implying it. If it’s any consolation, it’s not your education that’s being devalued, it’s your logical coherence. The mistake you’re making, from where I sit, is conflating someone being discriminated against because of their actual behavior with someone being discriminated against because of their group identification.
Whether that’s a freshman mistake I’ll leave for you to decide. I see that error at all levels, but that’s just me.
If it’s that bad, then women are de facto less capable than men.
Assuming that all women become pregnant and that men have no similar offsets. Because I know you’re not stupid enough to claim that if some women are debilitated by pregnancy, all women are de facto ‘less capable’ than all men.
He wasn’t fired for being black, he was fired for being terrible at his job
Unless white men who are similarly terrible at their jobs, show up drunk, etc. are not summarily fired by that company. Then the picture changes a little bit (I assume you are familiar with the term ‘pretext’ as it applies to employment discrimination).
Because I know you’re not stupid enough to claim that if some women are debilitated by pregnancy, all women are de facto ‘less capable’ than all men.
“All women” as viewed as a statistical class by an employer who is considering a business model and who is doing his or her best to estimate empirical costs. Not “all women” in the purely nominative sense, as in “every single woman”. But realistically, I know that every identifiable demographic has a particular risk profile. The costs are going to vary. I have no idea whether “women” or “women of childbearing age” have particularly high or particularly low costs. (Further, the costs are multiple and independently variable on an employer-by-employer basis. For example, an employee who needs time off occasionally may not burden one employer much, but may be a deal-killer to a different employer with a different business.)
Unless white men who are similarly terrible at their jobs, show up drunk, etc. are not summarily fired by that company. Then the picture changes a little bit (I assume you are familiar with the term ‘pretext’ as it applies to employment discrimination).
Yes, I quite agree that there must be formal equality in terms of the rules that are followed.
(My usual response to friends’ arguments that the death penalty is wrong because the system treats white people better is that to the extent that is true, fine, we should treat white people worse and kill more of them.)
Robert. Tenure candidates, be they male or female, are generally loathe to ask for extensions unless absolutely necessary. They know that while some of their evaluators are going to recognize that life indeed throws curve balls, some of the evaluators (generally those who have not been tested much by life) are going to take a more hardline view. Female tenure candidates know that the deck is already stacked against them, and are even more reluctant to ask for extensions. So, it is a reasonable assumption that there were mitigating circumstances involved in this particular case. However, since the number of her publications was never brought up (which you know it would have been, if she had fewer), I stand by my assertion that the denial of her tenure was not related to bona-fide job-related concerns.
No, pregnancy does not necessarily have to be fraught with medical issues. But it can be. And pregnancy must be treated (as it should be) the same way every other medical condition is. Even if the pregnancy is perfect and right-on-time, there is still a physical recovery period. There is a reason its called “labor”. Interestingly enough, when employee records are examined over the course of a career, of those who have not taken furloughs, women actually take off less time than men! So, any employer resistance to women, because “she’ll just get pregnant” is bogus. More women stay in their careers than leave, both for financial and personal reasons.
But pregnancy and childbirth continue to be viewed with hostility by employers and colleagues. I was the talk of the contractors’ association for a while, as the first pregnant electrician in the Local. I was shocked that it was assumed by all of them that I would be leaving the trade! Apparently, my over a decade of being an electrician, of continuing my electrical education, and tireless work in the Local union meant nothing. Zip. Zero. Zilch. Nada. I was one of the more ruthless overtime hounds. I was always first to volunteer for odd shifts, or “portability” (on-the-road) jobs. Yet one pregnancy erased all that hard work, all those obstacles I jumped over in order to prove my dedication. White male apprentices who don’t quit in the first year are assumed to be there for life.
In my world, that “special treatment” you deride extends to males, but not for females. The next woman to get pregnant in the Local worked for the same shop I did. She was treated by-the-book for her that pregnancy. That pregnancy was “approved” because she was recently remarried, and while she had a daughter already, her husband wanted a child too. So, that met with everyone’s “approval”. She got pregnant again unexpectedly. That pregnancy did not meet with everyone’s approval. How could she? She did not have the required number of hours to qualify for FMLA this time (as she had taken her 12 weeks during that year), so she was laid off for the second pregnancy. This contractor does have a history of making exceptions for white males.
Another sister in a neighboring Local adopted two boys. She had biological children of her own from before she entered the trade, and they were ready to attend college. She told her contractor she would be using FMLA to help the boys adjust to their new home, and that was met with gritted teeth. There were words about “making up your mind what you want to do with your life”. This is a woman in her late forties, who had well over twenty years of experience under her belt. She is a knowledgeable, repected journeyman who taught journey-level courses in her Local. Yet she was told she needed to “make up her mind” if she wanted to be a mother or an electrician.
I have yet to meet a man, in any field, who has had a similar experience.
And as for academe being a high-pressure career, gimme a break. The most grueling part of it is the tenure process itself. University professors generally have a small teaching load, in order to allow them time to publish. And they have graduate assistants to do the grunt work. No, the “high-pressure” comes from the attitudes of the administration and the politics of academe, not the work. The work itself—the teaching, the research, the publication—is easily managed by a married, professional mother of three kids. You wanna talk about high pressure? Go talk to a mother of three who is juggling two part-time service industry jobs because she hasn’t been able to find a professional job since the last downsizing. You can’t look me in the eye and tell me that Sarah’s professor wouldn’t have been able to do her job because she had three children.
Women in nontraditional fields are vilified for having children. It doesn’t matter what we’ve done to get where we are. It doesn’t matter how much education we have. How many years of work experience and dedication under our belts. We can move the earth, sun and stars, and it doesn’t matter. It. Doesn’t. Matter. Those barriers have not been broken yet, and those attitudes are amplified in the midwest. And every time another article comes out about some female executive with more money than God deciding to “leave the rat race”, the rest of us have that much more baggage piled on top. We have to do that much more to prove that we aren’t going anywhere.
And I don’t apologize for my illustration of the hostile attitude. I have heard that commentary about my own pregnancy, and I have heard that said about other women and their pregnancies. That’s actually one of the more mild versions of the typical Neanderthal rant. Behind a woman’s back, they are usually more vulgar, more graphic, and contain various animal analogies. Wonder what a fly on the wall would have heard about the tenure candidate when the white men were talking amongst themselves?
Ampersand raised some issues about the paper I found on differences in risk aversion. So I emailed the the lead author (Black), and got back this response:
“Actually, we stopped working on that paper because I didn’t think we could make a strong case for the idea that it is differences in risk aversion.”
Just thought you would like to know.
Ampersand, I have now read the Dorman and Hagstrom paper Wage Compensation for Dangerous Work Revisited and I no longer think that being paid for risk is what is going on.
While I don’t think your explanation was complete, I am sorry I missed the reference to the above paper in it. I can only apologise for my intemperate remarks.
Richard,
I’m very impressed by the intellectual honesty it takes to post those last two posts; thank you for posting them. Thanks as well for the link to Dorman and Hagstrom’s paper (which I hadn’t known was available online); I’ve edited my post to include the link.
And I agree that my explanation wasn’ t complete; in my own defense, I was trying to sum up for blog readers a moderately technical 18-page paper in just a couple of paragraphs. But that isn’t to say that I couldn’t have done a better job.
To me, this brings up one of the most interesting and frustrating biases in the social science literature. In theory, “we can’t make a strong case for X” should be just as interesting and important a finding as “we can make a strong case for X.” In practice, however – and speaking only in general – such papers carry less prestige and are less likely to be published. This can create a bias in the published literature towards finding that relationships exist, even when they don’t.
My usual response to friends’ arguments that the death penalty is wrong because the system treats white people better is that to the extent that is true, fine, we should treat white people worse and kill more of them.
I’d recommend your friends (and you, if you like) read Scott Turow’s book Ultimate Punishment. The race issue, as with so much about the death penalty, is not nearly so clear.
“All women” as viewed as a statistical class by an employer who is considering a business model and who is doing his or her best to estimate empirical costs.
Problem is that you run into the self-fulfilling prophecy. If women realize that the employer doesn’t want to hire them, doesn’t trust them, and expects they will just get knocked up and take maternity leave, how motivated will they be to put much effort into being present, productive employees?
Word, La Labu and Sarah. Female doctoral candidates at my graduate school take off their wedding rings when going in for job interviews with certain companies because they know they are less likely to be hired if the prospective employer knows they are married. (The old, “Gosh I’ve got a job with benefits so now I can start a family” thing, you know.) The only married woman who did not do this was in her forties and had 3 mostly-grown kids, and recruiters were flooding her in-box with requests for interviews. Because she was had already done the mommy-thing, so they didn’t have to worry about her not being dedicated to her job. One of the top candidates in the department, a really brilliant scientist, only got a job offer, 6 months after she defended her thesis, when her husband, who was also brilliant but in another field, made it a condition of his hiring that she be hired, too. Hell, when I was hired into my current job, my supervisor told me flat out that she preferred her young married women to wait two years after starting the job before having kids. But not so the men. The men generally wore their wedding rings to interviews, the men in my department were not told to delay starting families. Because men generally do not take advantage of FMLA for when they have newborns at home or when they adopt. My husband tried to take the time (the first one ever in his department!) but ended up working 3 days a week for a month instead because his supervisor and his colleagues refused to reshuffle the workload to make it possible.
The basic assumption in many workplaces still is that childcare is the woman’s job, and if she can’t bend her family life around her job, then she needs to go elsewhere.
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Spicy said:
After all, men don’t make a choice between career or family do they?
Not in the same way that women often have to, but this is still worth talking about.
For example; I have a lot of specialized and valuable knowledge in network management. If I set myself up as a consultant, or worked for a consulting company, I could make twice what I make now. But then I’d be doing a great deal of travelling. I would not have been able to have been my son’s Cubmaster and Scoutmaster. I would not have been able to attend my daughter’s softball and hockey games. I wouldn’t have been around to help with homework, or do the 1000 other things a parent does.
Men do have to make choices regarding work vs. family. The difference is that men are expected to choose work over family quite often. If they don’t, it impacts their income levels, make no mistake.
I agree – but the point I was making is that in general, no-one asks men how they intend to balance a career and family and don’t make sweeping statements like ‘the only way to free men is to make sure they never bear children’ such as made in post 8 about women.
Having said that, I did read this article: Is being a good dad ruining your career? earlier today…in the Observer Woman. **sigh**
This is an interesting take on an age-old question.
My two cents: I agree that the wage gap is not strictly a result of danger-premium, but I disagree that there is some sort of overarching discrimination at the root either. Looking at merely one facet in a multi-faceted concept such as a wage does not provide a clear picture.
It has been shown through several studies, for example, that men take more job risk (read: not riskier jobs) than women, meaning they are more willing to jump ship and join a new company, fight for a promotion, or move to an undesirable area. This, obviously, gets rewarded with higher wages. Avoiding this risk does not receive the same reward.
There are also many studies that show that the average woman favors time at home with lower wage above less time at home with a higher wage. This is the reverse for most men. Now, I know this doesn’t prove anything in the slightest, but it does show the propensity for the average woman to make career choices that increase their likelihood of spending more time at home.
Also, it is inappropriate to compare the “gross” riskiness of different positions to determine if there is a pay premium attributable to risk. I would argue that this riskiness needs to be weighted by the skillset required for the job; for example, even though mining is very risky, it carries low training costs, which increases the applicant pool and consequently decreases the going wage. In this instance, it would be appropriate to compare mining to a job requiring a similar skillset (lumberjack or janitor, for instance) and see if miners receive higher pay as compared to the jobs requiring a similar skillset. If they do, then this increase can be safely (but not totally) attributable to a risk pay premium. It is worth noting that I have no idea if miners do or do not receive a pay premium as compared to lumberjacks or janitors, but I would most definitely be interested to know.
I’m not citing anything here, so you’ll have to forgive me for sounding general. I did a basic write-up on the topic on my own blog which does include citations, and can be found here:
http://inserttitleblog.com/?p=72
I look forward to your comments!
PS – This is totally unrelated, but I would be interested to hear your views on the concept of equality. It gets thrown around so much these days that I tend to think that people do not put a whole lot of thought into what it actually means. Can and should wages be equal across gender? I’m sure you would say yes, and so would I. What about race? Yes again. Class? Maybe. Education level? Probably not. Where is the line and who draws it? Can two different people every be truly equal? If so, how?
Sorry for all the questions and hypotheticals; I’m kicking around a new article and would be interested in some thoughts.
Wages should be the same across gender, provided the skills, experience, time working, career choices and drive are the same. Basically equality of opportunity not equality of outcome is the only fair measure of equality.
That’s an excellent point, Chris. The only argument that broad statistics can make concerns equality of outcome; the problem is, people often use them when arguing that there is unequal opportunity, which is a terrible mistake.
The author of this piece did not make this mistake, however s/he did fail to (in my mind) correctly weight the riskiness of a particular job based upon skillset, which would highlight the job riskiness premium (if there is one).
The bottom line is that the wage gap exists between women without kids and working mothers, and there is no gap for most professions when women are unencumbered. In fact, when comparing the data for even the risky jobs, the few women who are in those professions are paid less than male counterparts. Similarly, the men in traditionally women’s professions (teacher, nurse, etc.) are paid more in those jobs than their female counterparts.
The issue is actually not the Wage Gap, but what I call the Wealth Gap, in which women face at least eight barriers that men don’t that cause them to end up less wealthy than men in general. The wage, leadership, gender role, credit report, resume, education, credibility and retirement gaps collectively converge to keep women upset with men while men scratch their heads as to why. Most of these issues are direct consequences of childbirth and the biases around bearing and raising kids.
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Golly, what on earth could account for the gap in wages between genders then? Whatever could it be?
Rachel, sounds like a Baby Gap to me. Perhaps this is enough evidence that women should get a bigger tax break. Just to be equal. I understand men are big on that, or is that only when it directly benefits them?
It’s funny isn’t it? Children are the future, but the work from half of the population who must sacrifice to bring them to fruition is not valued at all. Maybe we should stop having babies, since they’re obviously a liability.
Or seriously, let the dad take several years off from work to care for it, and the woman takes no time. Then in twenty years all the boys can complain how their daddies didn’t wuv them enough, and in the meantime child care will become Entitlement City.
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ETA: Sorry, didn’t realize how old this was when I replied. :)
THANK YOU.
Coal mining is not high paying. Neither is fire fighting. Neither is police work. Construction is not bad at all, but it’s hardly high. The military is known for its low pay. None of these jobs pay better than advanced secretarial positions requiring a B.A. or a few years’ experience.
So, yeah, clearly not the reason for the wage gap.
And while it’s sexist that men are more likely to work these jobs and suffer for it, the larger point is that these jobs do not pay what they should when you consider the likelihood of injuries – including injuries that could force you to change careers in mid-life or go on disability.
Only a bunch of rich white guys who earn money sitting on their ass could dream up the insulting idea that men earn more for risking their lives – they’re the ones exploiting (mostly male) workers who are desperate enough to take this crap or committed enough to serving the community that they would choose these jobs no matter the salary. It’s wrong and it sucks, like you said, but it’s a bullshit propaganda effort by the very people pushing men to take these jobs.
One additional factor that pisses me off: the risks in most of these jobs can be minimized if companies follow safety regulations. They don’t. Who owns the companies and says, “Screw the safety regs – the workers can be replaced!” Fat cat white guys who’ve never done an ounce of manual labor.
I worked as a firefighter for three years and it was shocking how little the pay was, yet most of the husbands simply worked other jobs in order to support their famlies. Often unable to spend as much time as they would like with their own kids and family. In all of my career choices, I have never worked in a position that was capable of paying workers different amounts based on how they were brought into existence as far as physical characteristics, which by the way nobody has any control over and it seems narrowminded when ever anybody points a finger and says “bad”, metaphorically, at an entire group born in the same fashion. But, it’s too easy to identify one’s personal characteristics with other individuals that appear the same and form a view of US against THEM when the individuals in question ALL want happiness and ALL suffer.
I think that one issue that needs to be addressed more assertively is the objectification of men as financial success objects. I’m not saying that this is a main reason for any financial gap, but it bothers me that in order to feel attractive that most guys feel they must earn alot of money. The reverse with women needing to feel “sexy” in order to increase their sexual appeal as sex objects is equally degrading.
Also, the housework area is sort of a double edged sword in that the minimum requirement for acceptable housework is different depending on the individual in question. Needing to meet the need of the individual with the highest standard, which may be seen as excessive, exagerates the difference.
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