Posted by
Playful Walrus on Wednesday, September 29, 2010 6:45:03 PM
Gregory Karp has a story in the Chicago Tribune and Los Angeles Times with the headline,
"Gender Gap Pesists For Managers' Pay".
Nearly half a century after it became illegal to pay women less than men, females who become managers still struggle to earn equal pay.
Don't forget that Obama has been President for over a year and a half, too. Wasn't he going to fix this?
Women managers make 81 cents to a man's buck, according to a report released Tuesday from the Government Accountability Office. That number from 2007 is up a couple pennies from 2000. It mirrors many pay studies that peg women's pay at about three-quarters of men's pay, and it highlights the glacial pace at which women are closing the gender pay gap.
Boo hoo. You know,some studies say female CEOs earn more than male CEOs. But we don't hear about them every few months. Hmmmm.
Managerial women with children haven't gained on men at all in those seven years, the GAO report says.
The kids aren't doing so well either, if their fathers aren't home taking care of them, because that means they are being raised by strangers and hired help.
Many studies, including the GAO report, control for such factors as job experience and gender preference for different jobs to make a fair comparison of wages.
That doesn't eliminate all the legitimate reasons for the gap.
"Even when that's all added to the analysis, there's an unexplainable wage gap," said Jenny Hoobler, a professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago who studies the glass-ceiling effect in America.
As yes – but I'm sure it will be explainable if your research gets more funding.
"This is something that's systematic. It's something that should have been remedied a long time ago."
Sorry. Men and women are different, and that's something that can’t be "remedied" - not with drugs, not with hormones, not with addadictomies or removadictfromies, not with wishful thinking.
Reasons for the pay gap vary, from equal-pay laws that aren't enforced and stingy family leave policies to women being relatively poor salary negotiators, experts say.
You see…
- it is someone else's job to make sure you get paid the same amount as the next guy;
- an employer who is counting on you to perform a service is just supposed to let you not work for weeks or months at a time because of issues that are not his or her concern, and then is supposed to keep paying you and act like you never missed any work when it comes time to promote someone; and
- someone you are negotiating with is supposed to give you everything you want, even if you didn't ask for it or know you wanted it.
Otherwise, they are a bunch of sexist haters who are trying to keep women down.
It might even stem from well-meaning managers who try to "save" their female employees from time-consuming projects that could lead to promotions — and higher pay, Hoobler said.
The soft bigotry of lowered expectations?
"jhklat" at 7:13 PM September 28, 2010:
Sound reasonable - even those women who are putting in enough hours to get to a managerial position might not be putting in as many as their male peers.
And later…
Oh, obligatory link to a thorough debunking:
http://www.iwf.org/campus/show/18948.html
"The 76-cent statistic (now actually 80 cents, according to the U.S. Census Bureau) is misleading because it is a raw comparison of all working men and women. Thus a female receptionist working 40-hour weeks is tossed in with the male orthopedic surgeon putting in 70-hour weeks.
A study of the gender wage gap conducted by economist June O' Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that women earn 98 percent of what men do when controlled for experience, education, and number of years on the job."
"MaleMatters" at 6:59 AM September 29, 2010:
Female managers not only average lower pay than male managers, but also average lower age. In addition, they tend to become managers in lower-paying professions.
And…
If millions of wives can accept no wages, millions of others can accept low wages, refuse to work overtime, refuse promotions, take more unpaid days off—all of which lowers women's average pay. They can do this because they are supported by husbands who must earn more than if they'd remained bachelors - which is how MEN help create the wage gap.
See "A Response to the Ledbetter Fair Pay Act” at http://tinyurl.com/pvbrcu
"disbelief" at 9:15 AM September 29, 2010:
If you can pay women 20-25% less for the same exact work, why would you hire men in this tough economy?
See my previous postings on this topic here and
here.