The US Bureau of Labor Statistics recently released a report that found a myriad of interesting nuggets of information concerning women and the wage gap. One part of the report claims that the wage disparity between men and women is shrinking with younger women. Hooray! Let unchecked equality run rampant. The New York Times reports:
The data are for all full-time wage and salary workers, and do not attempt to control for the different types of jobs that men and women enter. …women under 35 who work full-time earn around 90 percent of what their male counterparts earn. But women over age 35 earn only about 75 percent as much as their respective male counterparts.
The New York Times cites a few different reasons why this disparity might exist. Summarizing, they reason that women of an older generation might have entered the workforce at a lower wage and despite raises have never caught up, and/or women of an older generation typically were attracted into careers that were lower paying in general. I think this last point is particularly encouraging. Whether or not the more “traditional” occupations for women (nursing, teaching, etc.) are lower paying because they are primarily comprised of women or whatever the reason, I find it encouraging that women are choosing to enter different types of occupations, as simplistic an idea as this might sound. Nothing is personally more frustrating to me than seeing women choose a career path that is “good for a woman” and not because it’s what they want.
The report goes on to look at the distinctions between full time and part time employees. Again, from the New York Times blog:
…among workers who work at least 40 hours a week, men still significantly out-earn women.But as soon as you drop below that 40-hour-a-week mark, the reverse happens: Most women make more than men who work equivalent hours, with the exception of workers who put in fewer than five hours a week.
There are a few things to consider when puzzling over why these pay gaps might exist. One is that these pay statistics do not control for what kinds of jobs these workers are in. And the type of work — whether it be education versus finance, doctor versus nurse, manager versus assistant — accounts for a large portion of the variation in the pay that people receive.
Additionally, men and women are not equally distributed amongst these different workweek lengths. Women are much more likely to be in part-time jobs than men. In fact, in 2009, 66.6 percent (about two-thirds) of American workers logging fewer than 35 hours in the typical workweek were women. By comparison, just 45.1 percent of workers logging more than 35 hours a week were women.
In other words, the “typical” workweek length for men versus women is very different. Men who work part-time are deviating from the “male” workweek norm, a fact that may say something about their quality, ambition or priorities, or at the very least how employers view their quality, ambition or priorities. Likewise with women who deviate from the “female” norm and work full-time.
There are a lot of disputations about the way the numbers shake out for these sorts of statistics. In examining complex situations like these, people want a simple yes or no answer to the questions of pay equality: do women get paid less than men? But in reality these statistics by their nature are very nuanced and are usually asking a different type of question. Without getting too mathy (I’m going to call that an acceptable adjective [Ed. Note: Works for me!]), it is important to understand exactly what question is being asked. To me, these numbers are answering if the average wage of all employed men and all employed women is different. There are much more informative questions, in my opinion, that we could be asking.
Do any of these statistics mean anything to you? Do you think they represent a change in the wage gap?