{"id":2257,"date":"2006-04-18T08:55:05","date_gmt":"2006-04-18T15:55:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2006\/04\/15\/inside-higher-ed-on-the-gender-pay-gap\/"},"modified":"2006-04-18T08:55:05","modified_gmt":"2006-04-18T15:55:05","slug":"inside-higher-ed-on-the-gender-pay-gap","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=2257","title":{"rendered":"Inside Higher Ed on the Gender Pay Gap"},"content":{"rendered":"

Here’s a recent article from Inside Higher Education<\/em> about a new study examining the wage gap between female and male professors. The study itself sounds useful, but what interested me is all the dubious assumptions about the wage gap embedded in the article (and perhaps in the study itself).<\/p>\n


\nExplaining the Gender Gap in Pay<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

Why do female professors earn less than male professors? Some charge that gender bias is at play, while others insist that once factors such as experience are accounted for, the gaps aren’t consequential.<\/p>\n

There may be truth to both views, according to research findings presented this week at the annual meeting of the American Educational Research Association by Paul D. Umbach, an assistant professor of higher education at the University of Iowa.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

An example of how the media misrepresents stories in order to seem “objective.” It’s not true that the study found “truth to both views.” The controversy is between those who say “human capital factors account for part of, but not the entire, pay gap” versus those who say “human capital factors account for all of the pay gap.” This study found that about two-thirds of the pay gap could be attributed to human capital factors, but almost a third could not be.<\/p>\n

Far from finding “truth to both views,” as the article reported, this study supports <\/em>the feminist view and refutes <\/em>the “human capital accounts for everything” view. But saying that would have compromised the faux-objectivity news writers specialize in.<\/p>\n

Umbach used a series of databases to calculate the gender gap in pay over all, and then to account for all kinds of factors other than gender bias that may contribute to the salary gap. In the end, he found that looking at those factors decreases the size of the gap, but that it remains meaningful.<\/p>\n

Leaving all factors out, the mean salary for women in the professoriate was 21.8 percent less than that for men. Add all the possible explanations and their impact, and the gap shrinks to 6.8 percent.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Before anyone says “6.8%” isn’t much, imagine coming into work tomorrow and being told that they’ve decided to give you a 7% pay cut. And remember, that’s an average pay gap. But in practice, the pay gap tends to get larger over the course of a career (see the discussion of “cumulative causation” in this post<\/a>); so what starts out as a small and relatively managable pay gap can grow very large by the end of a career.<\/p>\n

For example, the mean differential favoring men was $12,649 in English literature, $24,845 in chemical engineering, and $23,294 in economics. But these comparisons included men and women at all stages in their careers … so the senior faculty members with higher salaries (and who are more likely to be men) tilt the sample significantly.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

What’s not being counted here? Benefits. This arguably means that this study will under<\/em>estimate any pay gap, because more seniority, and higher rank, is commonly linked with higher-value benefits.<\/p>\n

So then Umbach ran a series of analyses designed to compensate for that and other factors. Years of seniority were factored in, as were books and articles written, career patents, whether the person was receiving outside support for research, professorial rank, and the general job market in the discipline (based on percentage of new Ph.D.’s who are employed), among other factors. When all of those factors were added, the gap still remained, at 6.8 percent.<\/p>\n

There are not clear explanations for the gap, leaving open the possibility that bias is at play, Umbach said.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s true that bias is a possible explanation for part or all of the unexplained 6.8%. What bothers me is the implicit, unjustified assumption that the “explained” factors can’t themselves reflect bias. But if job discrimination against women exists in academia, is there any reason to assume that sexism has nothing at all to do with factors like who gets grants for outside support, and whose articles are published?<\/p>\n

For instance, they list “rank” as one of the factors that explains pay. But if bias exists, one likely way for gender bias to be expressed is that men might be more easily promoted to full professor positions. By implicitly assuming that “rank” and other human capital factors are discrimination-free zones, this study’s design may overlook significant forms of gender bias.<\/p>\n

Another example is the assumption that women get paid less because women spend less time working and accrue less experience. This is no doubt true, but causation also goes in the other direction: women work less because they get less reward for working<\/em>. (This is called a “feedback effect.”) To some degree, then, women’s lesser experience is not only a cause but also a result <\/em>of gender bias.<\/p>\n

But he said that other parts of his study suggest that the bias may not be a simple preference for men, but may relate to biases based on disciplines and on how faculty members spend their time.<\/p>\n

For instance, Umbach found that as the proportion of females in a discipline increases, the mean salaries drop … for men and women.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This is something feminists have long argued, and that many other studies support. Gender wage discrimination is not just (or even primarily) a matter of women being directly discriminated against, but instead a matter of work done primarily by women being undervalued. In this way, even men who work in underpaid female-dominated occupations could be said to be hurt by the gender wage gap.<\/p>\n

Another factor that negatively correlates with salaries is the percentage of time spent teaching: The greater a discipline’s time spent on teaching, the lower its salaries … for men and women. The more outside research funding, the higher the salaries.<\/p>\n

In one respect, Umbach said, those findings don’t suggest bias because male and female faculty members in the discipline are affected equally. But when these figures are coupled with other studies suggesting, for example, that female professors may spend more time on teaching, questions are raised about underlying bias.<\/p>\n

“We know that women tend to be employed in disciplines with a lot of other women, in disciplines without as much funded research, in disciplines with more time teaching,”\u009d he said. “Is the reward structure more male? Are we creating structures that reward men?”\u009d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d say that worries about “structures that reward men” are legitmate, but have to be extended beyond what this article discusses. One major reason for women’s on average lower wages is that women who are mothers tend to spend less time in the workforce (both in terms of years in the workforce, and in terms of how many hours worked per year) while they take care of their children. As I wrote in an earlier post<\/a>, many feminists believe that in a non-sexist society, fathers and mothers would share equally in childcare – or at least, that fathers would take on a larger degree of childcare than they do now. Therefore, any “parenting wage penalty” in a nonsexist society would be split more evenly among men and women. The fact that women are virtually the only ones hit by the parenting wage penalty doesn’t prove that sexism no longer exists; on the contrary, it shows that sexism still matters, and has a big negative impact on women’s wages. (It also has a negative impact on men’s contact with their families.)<\/p>\n

But to take it a step further, arguably that there’s a “parenting wage penalty” at all is a sign of sexism. Why isn’t the workplace designed to accommodate parenthood? The American job market was designed for men – in particular, it was developed in a society in which workers were had a wife at home<\/em> to take care of the kids. Society has changed, but our jobs haven’t, and that works to the disadvantage of all working mothers (and to mothers who would like to work, but can’t find a job that will give them the flexibility they need to combine work and motherhood). Isn’t it sexist to expect mothers to fit into a work system that was designed for a Father Knows Best<\/em> family?<\/p>\n

(This post has been cross-posted at Creative Destruction<\/a>. If you have trouble posting comments here, try the cross-posted version.)<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Here’s a recent article from Inside Higher Education about a new study examining the wage gap between female and male professors. The study itself sounds useful, but what interested me is all the dubious assumptions about the wage gap embedded … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[94,54],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2257","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender-and-the-economy","category-media-criticism"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2257","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2257"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2257\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2257"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2257"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2257"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}