(This is one of a series of posts on the wage gap.)
This is a myth which is frequently repeated by anti-feminists on the internet. Although exact details vary, the argument is generally that the pay gap is a statistical illusion that has nothing to do with discrimination against women. Women are paid less because they work so many fewer hours; if US government statistics took account of hours worked, the wage gap would disappear. So the critics say.
There are two big flaws in this argument. First of all, the numbers don’t add up – taking account of hours worked does make the pay gap a little smaller, but not that much smaller. Second, the argument implicitly assumes that how many hours we get to work isn’t affected by discrimination; but there’s no reason to believe this is true.
How big a difference does hours worked make?
It is true that men work more hours than women, on average (at paid jobs, anyhow – but keep in mind women work many more unpaid hours at home). But the difference isn’t that large, among men and women who work full-time.
According to the US government’s Monthly Labor Review (April 1997, pages 3-14), the average full-time year-round woman worked 40.8 hours a week in 1995. Men, according to the same source, worked 44.5 hours – a significant difference, but not a huge difference (and not nearly as large a difference as anti-feminists sometimes claim). How much does that affect the wage gap?
Fortunately, we don’t have to do the math ourselves – the US Department of Labor has done it for us. According to a DOL web page in 2001 – a web page that, unfortunately, has since been taken down by the Bush administration – comparing only hourly wages, women were paid 83.2% of what men were paid in 2000. 83.2% is a noticible difference from the 76% figure for weekly full-time wages – but it still leaves the majority of the pay gap unaccounted for.
Is hours worked really a discrimination-free zone?
When anti-feminists say that it’s better to compare hourly wages, they’re sneaking an unjustified assumption into the argument. Because part of the pay gap can be accounted for by different hours worked, that part of the wage gap doesn’t, they say, have anything to do with discrimination. But is it really true that how many hours people work can’t be affected by discrimination?
Most people, after all, don’t have that much choice in how much they work. Once you’ve got a full-time job, whether you work 41 or 45 hours a week is as much up to your employer as it is up to you – and it’s quite possible for the hours assigned to be affected by discrimination.
In the eighties, for instance, I worked for a temp agency in NYC which discriminated against its black temps by giving white temps more and better assignments. (I found out when the Times printed a expose of the practice, after which I stopped accepting jobs from that agency). Presumably I earned more than black and latina counterparts that year in part because I worked more hours; but my working more hours was itself a result of discrimination.
The assumption that hours worked can’t have anything to do with discrimination is unrealistic. If discrimination exists in the job market, it potentially has effects on all aspects of the job market – including how many hours a week people work.
Indeed. And the vicious circle effect is worth noting, too. The lower your ranking is in the job food-chain, the less freedom you have to choose your hours. The higher you are, the more power you have to choose your hours and, of course, to shape the hours of those lower than yourself. Since men by and large are still in the bulk of leadership jobs in this country (ie- CEOs), well… :(
Now watch some ifem show up and dutifully trot out Secretary Chao. While I’m eating lunch, no less. Ick. :(
Any pay gap exists not because of any discrimination by employers (or a male-centric society)but by women making choices in the job market. Any number of studies have long since settled this.
If women, or minorities, were forced by some unseen conspiracy to accept lower wages for doing equal work then a smart business owner would hire an all female work force, pay them less than their competitors and reap the financial rewards. The reason this doesn’t happen is because the pay gap is in fact a myth.
Duane,
Have you actually read any of Amp’s posts? All of which respond to the position piece (not study) that you link to? Not that the NCPA doesn’t have any biases or anything. Just wondering.
If women, or minorities, were forced by some unseen conspiracy to accept lower wages for doing equal work then a smart business owner would hire an all female work force, pay them less than their competitors and reap the financial rewards. The reason this doesn’t happen is because the pay gap is in fact a myth.
This has a big logical fallacy in it.
If women and minorities aren’t getting paid as much at other jobs, a smart business owner would hire a staff of women and minorities and pay them less than what they’re making at other jobs and “reap the financial rewards.” How would this not result in women and minorities making less than white men at other jobs? Would that not create or encourage a pay gap?
And what financial rewards, exactly, are you referring to?
On second thought, I think I might see what you’re getting at… The “financial rewards” would be the rewards of the companies making more money because they have to pay their employees less, correct?
See, the thing of it is, the pay gap isn’t something that’s set in stone, or set in law, and, as such, a company that hired women and minorities exclusively wouldn’t be able to pay them less than other companies doing the same jobs because the women and minorities expect standard entry-level pay. The wage gap actually develops over time as men are promoted instead of women.
Let me explain it another way… Entry level pay is about eight bucks, so let’s say that a company decided to hire only women and minorities and decided to pay them seven-fifty because of the wage gap. Now, those other companies that pay eight bucks and hour are still hiring women and minorities, so not very many people would want to take a job that pays fifty cents less. The problem, the wage gap, develops over time as the men are promoted over the women (for various reasons, as Jake did, I refer you to Amp’s previous posts on the subject).
Thus, your idea of a hypothetical company that makes a profit off of hiring exclusively women and minorities wouldn’t turn a profit because the wage gap is not nearly as prevalent at the entry level.
Yes Pink that is what I was getting at. Dr. Herbert Stein does a better job explaining this.
Once you’ve got a full-time job, whether you work 41 or 45 hours a week is as much up to your employer as it is up to you – and it’s quite possible for the hours assigned to be affected by discrimination.
If you compare two equally qualified people in the same position and one is sent home early a disproportionate amount then this would be discrimination…and there are legal remedies for it. But is it a widespread phenomenon that incrementally adds to the pay gap?
What about the studies that show ugly men are paid 10 percent less than handsome men while ugly women are paid only 5 percent less than pretty women?
“…if you’re a seriously overweight white woman, losing 65 pounds is likely to be as lucrative as an extra year of college or three extra years of work experience.”
What remedies do we suggest for discrimination like this?
Duane, please. The so-called appearance wage gap is a matter of workplace choices. Any number of studies has shown that the reason ugly people make less money is because they don’t work as many hours. Their sour dispositions and general misanthropy (which manifest themselves as physical ugliness, see any number of studies) predispose them to turning down extra hours and overtime work when it’s optional. If you factor for this phenomenon, the appearance “wage gap” disappears.
(Really, it’s astonishing: people who disagree with a study’s methodology when they disagree with its results seem to have no trouble at all accepting the same premises and basic approach when the results are something they agree with.)
k.,
You’re absolutely correct. As someone who has come out on the short end of the stick vis-a-vis heightism, I have seen this in practice. All the people above me in the hierarchy have been taller than me throughout my career, while the people below me have been both taller & shorter than me. But, really, what it comes down to is that I, and others of my relatively diminutive stature, have made the choice not to work as hard as taller people generally choose to do.
Deities, that gave me a bigger reading laugh than I’ve had in ages.
Danke
I would be curious to know whether the
Dept of Labor numbers account for overtime
pay in their hourly pay figure. If not,
there goes another 7% points of the wage
gap, taking the gap to 10%.
Also, re: hours worked and discrimination,
isn’t it possible that blue collar physical
labor which must skew towards male employment
has more overtime demands than more white
collar office labor (e.g. secretarial) might?
If so, that’s not descrimination, them’s just
the breaks.
I know that to be true in regards to my own
work history (my assembly line job lo these
many years ago had mandatory overtime that
never was part of my stint as an assistant
in the purchasing department, and I never
felt discriminated against by my ability to
go home at quitting time in the latter job).
And what about interrupted employment? What
about seniority, careerism, and any number
of non-discrimination factors that differ
at least on the margin by gender and could
affect the gap?
And what about “the average full-time year-
round woman worked?” That’s a mouthful, and
screams What Was Left Out Here?
kip is indeed a genius, even if he refuses to weigh in on the Hulk/Hasselhoff/Thor/Thing… uh, Thing… :D
I’ve always worked in a position that was salaried rather than hourly. So the whole “hourly wage difference” thing mystifies me. I get paid the same whether I’m doing my normal 9-hour day or the occasional 12-hour one.
I’ve worked in crappy pink-collar jobs where my real hours worked just weren’t on the books, because technically I wasn’t allowed to work overtime, or because my boss didn’t want to pay overtime. In tight times, you put up with that crap. Or I’ve worked places where I was on a flat salary and hours simply weren’t recorded on the upside (but HR would sure have noticed if I’d worked fewer than the expected number of hours). And I’ve been in places where it was pretty obvious that only the men were asked to work overtime (the kind that pays). I can’t believe anyone is naive enough to believe you can just claim women are refusing to work the hours.
Thank you to Amp and Trish for posting about this. This is a great topic for discussion and it really demonstrates the usefulness of web logs of public policy.
Duane brings up an argument used by early students of economics. (For those who didn’t understand the argument, it goes like this: if women were paid less than men, employers would hire women since they would cost less. This would drive up the wages of female workers and the discrimination would vanish.)
There are at least two reasons why this is not true. The first is that the labor market is not the same as the market for–say–milled sugar. Discrimination by gender may occur inadvertantly because employers use it to reduce “search” costs, which reflects network externalities to hiring male employees. This is a standard problem in labor markets, which are notoriously inefficient. Not only that, but consider the cultural obstacles of a woman in a job search. Women are barred in nearly all cultures (including ours) from being aggressive in certain situations, yet aggressiveness is usually a decisive factor in selling one’s labor.
The other reason the argument doesn’t work is that labor markets are segmented. In theory, a market where laborers have unlimited movement between markets for which they are qualified, and where good information exists about prices, etc. would not be segmented. Competing firms would have every reason to hire workers from a “global pool” which included women. Discrimination would only harm the discrimator.
But in the world where we live, segmented labor markets can benefit the entrepreneur (in the sense that not discriminating against workers is not part of a Nash Equilibrium). The reason for this is that in most labor markets there is an oligopoly in each sector (e.g., there are only two department stores in my neighborhood) and an oligopsony in each labor market (i.e., there are at most only three plausible employers for a given worker at a given time). Now, because the firm is an oligopoloid firm it will produce at a point where its marginal cost curve intersects its marginal revenue curve. And because it is a monopsony in the labor market, it will hire more workers where the marginal revenue product of new workers is equal to the marginal expense of labor. (The marginal expense of labor is more than the marginal cost because a monopsonoid firm–yes, I spelled that correctly–is increasing the cost of labor as it hires more workers, just as a monopoloid firm lowers the price of its product by producing more).
Both attributes allow employers to make more profits in a segmented labor market than a non-segmented one. And as a result of game theory, which requires more explanation than I want to go into here, it is highly likely that in a realistic labor market discrimination will occur if it is the cultural norm.
The pay gap would go away if Congress passed a law that forced men to work less. So why don’t we work toward that?
I agree that there may be discrimination that leads to different work hours, but this doesn’t take into account that the men may be unwilling to work those hours.
Avedon made reference to a “pink collar” job where her real hours are never kept track of. I’m a male software developer, welcome to my salaried life. I make the same whether I work 8 hours a day or 12 hours a day. Sometimes its just “strongly suggested” that I put the extra hours in.
Two individuals, working the same job, have the same skill level,…. basically all other things equal, but one of them consistantly works a 12 hour work day, while the other consistantely works 8. If both are salaried, who is the employer getting more bang for the buck from?
Yes, I make more than my wife. I also put a lot more hours in. We are both salaried, but it is “strongly suggested” that I work overtime. I do. My company compensates me for that (somewhat). Sure, per year, I make more than my wife. If you divide our salaries by the number of hours we have worked to earn those salaries, she makes about the same as me. (Yes, we did figure it out last year).
Yes, I make more than my wife. I also put a lot more hours in.
How many hours does your wife put in at home?
Speaking as a fellow salary slave, it’s a hell of a lot easier to put in long hours when somebody else is feeding the kids and getting them to school, making sure laundry gets done, taking the sick pets to the vet, calling the repairman about the dishwasher, and so on.
And again speaking from experience, women who take time off for “chick things” (like a sick child) take a major hit on being seen as a serious employee.
Well golly lolly Kavius, aren’t you lucky to have a wife whose job has the flexibility that yours does not?
My husband and I are both salaried IT people, he’s more in a support role and I’m the programmer (with site support on the side). We both have jobs that demand overtime, “or else”.
Neither of us are supposed to have to take time off of work for a sick child, pet, or if we are bleeding from the eyes or coughing up a lung. We have had to arrange emergency babysitting because childcare stops at 6pm, only opens at 6:30am and both of us have to be at a specific site “until the job is done”. I wish I could say that emergencies have been infrequent, but they haven’t been.
I make just barely half of what he makes, salaried, and when we worked it out, I actually work about 7% MORE hours (when you take work from home into account) over the course of a year, because of course software is just one of those things where a 12 hour day is short, and it’s got to be done.
And none of that considers the regular “house” work like yard, repairs, laundry, child-care etc.
So in short, congratulations. I’m very happy you have a family situation where you have the luxury of working your software salaried job and your partner is able to support what your job demands of you.
I don’t. This could be why there are so few female programmers.
And since the conflicts have become so frequent, guess who gets to look at giving up her career so that she can work a midnight bakery shift and do the childcare doing the day (the 11pm-7am shift having the statistically least number of work emergencies over the past 18 months)?
It isn’t the partner making more $$, that’s for damn sure.
Or, both of you could shift into less demanding jobs. BTDT, and personally I tend to recommend against putting your own financial security on the chopping block in favor of your spouse’s status quo.
Sorry, I tend to lurk unless I have something valuable to contribute, but my need to vent overrode my common sense.
I am not recommending putting financial security on the chopping block, I don’t feel like I have any other option (other than an abortion?)… I don’t have family support to cope with the child-care burden, 1 kid + 1 on the way, job market sucks giant smurf butts across our entire section of the province, and the costs of moving are likely going to outweigh the benefits (we’ve been crunching numbers for awhile now, I don’t say that idly).
It’s not exactly my spouses status quo… he literally makes nearly 40% more than I do for similar work, so if you’re going to put someone’s career on the chopping block for a few years, it’s mine. We have bills to pay, and not a lot of directions to move in.
I love amp’s “another mom screwed over by a tiny advantage” cartoon… but damn does it make me bitter :-P
so if you’re going to put someone’s career on the chopping block for a few years, it’s mine
Except that careers don’t get chopped one time only; taking time off to do non-work related stuff has long term effects, and if God forbid your spouse and his greater income cease to be (layoffs, organic brain damage, pool boy), you’re really screwed.
I’m not telling you what to do or not do. Just worriedly piping up that it’s not as simple as whose paycheck is bigger.
“How big a difference does hours worked make?
It is true that men work more hours than women, on average (at paid jobs, anyhow – but keep in mind women work many more unpaid hours at home). But the difference isn’t that large, among men and women who work full-time.
According to the US government’s Monthly Labor Review (April 1997, pages 3-14), the average full-time year-round woman worked 40.8 hours a week in 1995. Men, according to the same source, worked 44.5 hours – a significant difference, but not a huge difference (and not nearly as large a difference as anti-feminists sometimes claim). How much does that affect the wage gap?
Fortunately, we don’t have to do the math ourselves – the US Department of Labor has done it for us. According to a DOL web page in 2001 – a web page that, unfortunately, has since been taken down by the Bush administration – comparing only hourly wages, women were paid 83.2% of what men were paid in 2000. 83.2% is a noticible difference from the 76% figure for weekly full-time wages – but it still leaves the majority of the pay gap unaccounted for.”
Help me to understand this. From this report, statistics indicate that for “full-time” workers, women work a little more than 90% as many hours as men. What is the breakdown of salaried vs. hourly wage earners? If we strictly apply the 44.5 vs. 40.8 hours worked figure to be hourly wages(which it isn’t), and add in overtime pay ( say $10/hour), then women would earn about 88% of men, if paid an equal wage for the same work. If women are more likely to work part-time (they are) then they wouldn’t be as likely to be paid an overtime premium (1.5x hourly wages). So, even if they were paid an equal wage for equal work, the average wage per hour would be skewed toward men- women’s average pay per hour would shake out to be 88% compared to men per hour. Do these studies take into account wage differences between full-time hourly employees vs. part-timers? Because a full-time employee is usually paid a higher wage than a part-timer for the same position, which is due more to expecting availability over competing interests. And what are the wages of the jobs in consideration?
If the overall hours are taken into account for all men and women employed in any position, then the hours worked by women drop to something like 75-80% of those worked by men. Obviously, part time employment choices need to be factored into the report. Salaried vs. hourly wages plays a part. How do men and women arrive at the acceptance of part-time work?
If marketers are to be believed- eek – and women hold sway in 80% of all spending decisions, then what does that say of the perniciousness of these studies? Are women not afforded access to wages earned by both men and women? If they are, then how do these stats really translate toward their actual economic well being? How many of the workers in question have secondary incomes to rely on? What is the average wage of women in a dual-income family, and how does that affect their need to earn?
It also assumes that straight wages paid are the only compensation–no bonuses, no goodies–and ignores the fact that more hours worked may well lead to higher-paying positions.
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Coming back to this from a long time ago…
How many hours does your wife put in at home?
I actually did most of the housework, to do otherwise would be dominating her and being sexist by forcing her into a stereotypical female role. I did the cooking, dishes, laundery and most other household chores. Once a week she did a dusting job. Further more, I was also required to “be a man” and do the yard work.
Yes, I’m single now. I was happily married at the time of my first post so if the tone of my posts has changed you know why.
Well golly lolly Kavius, aren’t you lucky to have a wife whose job has the flexibility that yours does not?
So in short, congratulations. I’m very happy you have a family situation where you have the luxury of working your software salaried job and your partner is able to support what your job demands of you.
Infact, my job has more flexibility. My employers are more inclined to give me a day off when needed than hers are. She is expected to be in her desk from 8:00-4:30 regardless of what is going on in her life. When we purchased a house together, I was required to go to all of the meetings with the seller because I can skip out of the office for a morning for personal reasons, if I need to. That is the primary perk of working 12 hour days when needed.
In the case that she was required to put in some overtime hours, and she was being payed overtime for it, she quit. Sure, we both agreed that she was being groomed for a promotion (after which she would have been making signifigantly more than me), but overtime is unacceptable.
In short, I worked harder than my wife at home and the office. I was rewarded at the office for working harder with a larger paycheck, and more flexible hours.
Just to head off the next attack: no I did not critisize her decision not to work around the house, nor her decision not to work as hard at the office.
It is true that men work more hours than women, on average (at paid jobs, anyhow – but keep in mind women work many more unpaid hours at home).
Perhaps true, (Not in my situation but I can’t speak for the rest of society) but we aren’t discussing unpaid hours. We are discussing the wage gap; employers paying females less than males. The most extreme example of this would be a housewife or househusband. In this case it is obvious that the contribution of the individual is to do the housework while the other’s is to raise the capital for the family.
ignores the fact that more hours worked may well lead to higher-paying positions
This is my original point. I work more hours than my wife did. I never received bonusses or overtime. What I have received is a bigger paycheck, and more promotions. My wife, who refused to work the longer hours, did not get the promotion and raise she was being groomed for.
Wookie & Kavius & Avedon, you guys need a union. A yearly salary should be for 48 or so 40-hour work weeks; anything above that should go on overtime. Not that that’s going to happen anytime soon; just about everybody in Congress (state and national) is working first and foremost not for their constituents, but for the big companies who make campaign contributions.
If everybody in your industries (and every industry in which workers are exploited) suddenly refused to work under those conditions, we’d have something. If everybody who wanted their politicians to work for them and not the companies who line their campaign pockets, stopped voting for those or similar politicians, we’d have something. Unfortunately the system doesn’t facilitate either option. And the fact that it’s a competitive job market makes it worse. A company which desperately needs help might agree to a potential employee’s demand of 8-hour days or else overtime, but nowadays every potential employee would have to demand it, or it wouldn’t work. More’s the pity.
And Rogue, you said
Because if we do, there will be a lot of bitter men complaining that women are taking men’s jobs, same as in the Great Depression (people said that if women went back to their homes and kitchens and gave their jobs back to men, the economy would go back to normal), the end of World War 2 (when millions of women were laid off because there were now men to do those jobs), and various other incidents where women started doing what was seen as “men’s work.”
This will create lots of male hostility to women’s rights and women’s equality.
By the way, here’s some pay-discrimination for you: some time in the past, before women entered the work force in any significant numbers, clerical work (secretary-type stuff) was done by men, and—get this—it was a good jumping-off point for a successful, lucrative career! But once the job became largely female, all of a sudden it became a low-paid, low-status, dead-end job. If anybody’s still reading this, Amp, you might write another piece for your wage-gap series on how various professions dropped in pay and prestiege and advancement opportunities as they switched from “male” professions to “female” professions. Secretaries are one such profession; teachers are another. There are more, but I can’t think of them just now.
Oops. Just read the rest of your wage gap series and found that you already did what I just suggested. My mistake.
Very good set of articles, by the way.
I find the argument persuasive that if there were really a wage gap and for a comparable job, either a man could do it or a woman could do it for however many cents on the dollar, it would make economic sense to hire the woman over the man and pocket the difference.
Maybe that is in fact the case and many more men than women are unemployed and underemployed as a result? The statistcs only take stock of the people who are working.
Sam, I address that argument at length in this post.
I live in Sweden and here we have a Statistical Central Bureau that keeps tabs on everything. If I remember correctly women earn about 80% of mens wages – after all other factors besides sex is taken out of the equation.
This in a country that according to all the official sources is one of the very most equal on earth.
I truly belive that it must be even worse in the US.
Sorry, it seems as though i got my facts wrong – 80% was the number before they accounted for all contributing variables. The actual number is that, generally, women in Sweden earn 92% of men’s wages.
Oh, and I found a really cool site:
http://genderstats.worldbank.org/home.asp
They’ve got it all.