Talking Points - Gender Pay Inequality

If this were a library, this entry would go under Current Events.

In conversations with my friends and while reading social news stories I come across many topics that polarize opinions and rarely involve direct access to the facts involved. I will use this place to list out common tropes and my personal take on the issue. I feel I am more often in the middle of some debate rather than a rabid supporter of one side or the other. I like to think this is the result of my recognition of a complicated reality. I could be wrong of course so I want to examine that idea here. When I find some researched essay I will post it here with salient points highlighted. If I choose correctly I can refer back to these articles and return to the factual defenses quickly and find out if I am as rational as I strive to be.

Gender Pay Inequality

• In most well-paid occupations, women earn far less than men... As President Obama likes to remind us, American women who work full time collectively make 77 cents on the dollar compared with men. 
• Most of the pay gap can be explained by other factors, such as career choice... While American women are generally better-educated than men, they tend to end up in lower-paying fields. About 76 percent of public school teachers are female, for instance, compared with just 13 percent of engineers and 6.5 percent of neurosurgeons. After adjusting for details like age, experience, occupation, and industry, Cornell economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that women earn about 91 cents on the dollar compared with men.
• Even when they work in the exact same occupations, women consistently earn less than men. Much (though not all) of the reason why it’s true can be summed up with one word: babies... once they reach their prime years for giving birth and raising children, the divide quickly widens... In a study of University of Chicago MBAs written with Lawrence Katz and Marianne Bertrand, Goldin found that female business school grads started off earning roughly on par with their male peers. But after 10 to 16 years, they were making 45 percent less per year.
• Because the corporate world placed a huge premium on long hours—in other words, doubling your workweek would far more than double your salary—and harshly penalized any time out of the labor force. Once they became mothers, the women of Chicago Booth couldn’t keep pace with their male classmates. Many took long career breaks, seemingly because flexible schedules and part-time work were hard to come by.
• Goldin’s new paper shows that the size of the pay gap in most occupations is closely associated with how employers reward long hours. In business and finance (shown in red on the graph below), workers are richly compensated for pulling marathon workweeks, and the pay gap looks like a canyon.
• [Where] income is less dependent on how much time they spend at the office—a structure Goldin calls “linear pay,...” the wage gap is less gargantuan. If those industries could change their business models in order to make their highly skilled employees more interchangeable, Goldin argues, the gender gap would shrink.
• To truly close the gender divide, Americans will have to stop treating child care as primarily a female obligation, so more women can keep working full-time.

- Slate