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Gender Pay Gap Underestimates Economic Inequality

Guest Blogger

by Joan Williams

The gender pay gap is standard measure of women’s economic inequality. At the dawn of second-wave feminism, it was 59 cents: women earned 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Today it’s up to 77 cents, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity. That’s progress, right? Here’s even more rosy news: women without children now earn over 90 percent of men’s wages. So maybe it is time to stop worrying about women and economics.

Not so fast. Let’s start with the 90 percent statistic, which describes childless women at age thirty. Conservatives like to point to that one, concluding that what ails mothers is not discrimination but their own choices. In fact, I have argued, what the 90 percent statistic really means is that women, if they want equality, should plan to die childless at thirty.

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26 thoughts on Gender Pay Gap Underestimates Economic Inequality

  2. Statistic clarification – the article states that mothers are 100% less likely to get promotions. Can you explain the numbers? Is it like, rounded up to 100? What this reads as is women who are mothers are NEVER promoted. Saying mothers are 100% less likely to get a promotion is not the same as saying fathers (men?) are 100% more likely to get a promotion. In the first case, 0 mothers are promoted. In the second, 1 mother is promoted for every 2 men. Brenda Barnes, for instance, has 3 children and probably wasn’t hired from school as a CEO which means she got promoted at some point, thus casting doubt on 100% less likely.

  3. Why would they compare full-time to part-time? Can someone explain (I’m being totally genuine, by the way, I really would like clarification!) why the author of this article thinks it’s fair to compare part and full time work and expect them to be equal? Because my knee-jerk reaction is to say that that isn’t fair…I’m also confused about the 100% less likely number.

  4. The issue of PAY is surely secondary to the issue of WEALTH. That’s stuff like oilfields, land, mineral deposits, etc. It’s what turns a wage slave into an independent person, someone who is in control of their own destiny and is a tough person to oppress. 99% of global wealth is owned by men (though of course there are many men who don’t have much of a share). You can be very well paid and even quite rich on paper, but if you don’t have concrete assets and solid laws protecting your rights to that wealth, everything you have can disappear in an instant. Until women learn better how to accrue wealth, and have something like a proportionate amount to our numbers, as a class we will remain unequal to men. Pay comes afterwards; if we had the wealth, we’d be deciding our own pay.

  5. YES! THIS! For the record, I’m a 30yo childless woman, so the chances are it’s all downhill from here.

    I know so many women who are a little older than me who don’t work cause they are raising young children, or work part time. For women who are mothers, they still get to do full time unpaid work and then get judged in the workplace because they are not ‘dedicated enough’ to their job. It’s one of the things that makes me think carefully about whether I’ll have kids or not.

  6. Why would they compare full-time to part-time? Can someone explain (I’m being totally genuine, by the way, I really would like clarification!) why the author of this article thinks it’s fair to compare part and full time work and expect them to be equal? Because my knee-jerk reaction is to say that that isn’t fair…I’m also confused about the 100% less likely number.

    What they’re saying, I think, is that when you control for the amount of time worked, part-timers earn much, much less than full-timers. So it’s not just that they work fewer hours, it’s that they make less money for each of those hours. We think of that as natural, but why? Wouldn’t it logically make more sense that people would work part-time at jobs where each hour was highly paid, and full-time at jobs where the pay wasn’t much? Why is, say, an IT professional required to put in a 40 hour workweek, when realistically most jobs only need them for 20 or 30 a week and have them doing makework that is actually below their skill grade the rest of the time? But, you know, benefits and all that… you can’t track an employee who works part time as if you own them, so you can’t give them any cool stuff, and that means no promotions or benefits… so the only people doing it that way are consultants who run their own business, and those people are working 60 hours a week or more because they have to actually do all the business-work like find clients, too.

    As for the 100%, I think probably another commenter had it right and what they really meant was that men are 100% more likely to be promoted than mothers are.

  7. The one thing I always see missing from studies on the wage gap is the Standard Deviation.

    It’s also always stated as a flat average of yearly earning, never looking at the hourly rate (if the company pays that way, which a lot of places do), or the number of hours the person has worked.

  8. I second Zes that wealth determines pay. Men own and have access to capital, women typically don’t. Capital determines your wealth, regardless of income. Until we have equal amounts of capital, we won’t have equal pay.
    If we want women to have control over their wealth and pay, we need to determine how to to get women access to and control over capital.

  9. This is when it’s time to stop worrying about women and economics: equal (not 90%, 77%, etc) pay, equal power, equal ownership, and Satan skating to work.

  10. I second Zes that wealth determines pay. Men own and have access to capital, women typically don’t. Capital determines your wealth, regardless of income. Until we have equal amounts of capital, we won’t have equal pay.

    This isn’t the whole picture, though. They intersect with each other. The majority of men do not have capital, and in the United States and other Western nations, the majority of men do not have significantly more capital than the majority of women, because we are nations where women are legally allowed to own property, keep property, inherit property, etc. So men with considerable capital who die leave it to their widows, or their daughters.

    The problem is that the pathway to gaining capital, while hard for everyone, has been made much, much smoother for men (and, specifically, white men who speak English well and have a certain personality type.) Because of the pay gap, and the opportunity gap, men are much more likely to be able to earn their way into wealth than women are. So women do not hold wealth, or capital, because they were unable to earn their way to wealth/capital, and because women do not have the power that having wealth/capital grants, they cannot easily fix the issue of the pay gap.

    This is even more problematic because of the circular nature of the problem. Because of the pay/opportunity gap, nearly every woman who has wealth has done one of two things to get it: a. be related to or married to a wealthy man (being related to is of course not a thing a woman “does”, precisely, it’s luck that happens to her, but often gaining wealth by being related to a wealthy person does involve a lot of catering to that person’s idea of how you should live) or b. rise to the top of an existing power structure/make her own power structure, which she can generally achieve only if she is childless and behaves in a “masculine” way, prioritizing work above all else in her life. So the women who do have wealth do not have shared experiences in common with women being hit with the mommy penalty; the childless women who worked for their money often end up believing that they made the necessary sacrifices to make it in a man’s world, and any woman who wants to succeed should be prepared to make those same sacrifices; the women who were born into or married into wealth may have no idea what barriers exist for working women. So the women who *do* have capital still don’t identify with the plight of working mothers or part-time workers, and thus, they do little to change the system to make it easier for other women to achieve what they did. The existence of Oprah doesn’t seem to have made it any easier for black women to become entertainment mega-stars who have their own talk shows (although I do see some white women pulling that one off, albeit not with Oprah’s success); the existence of Meg Whitman and Carly Fiorina doesn’t seem to have improved the rate at which women become CEOs; Paris Hilton’s wealth isn’t really being used for anything except enabling Paris Hilton to enjoy herself.

    When we say things like “men have capital” or “men have wealth” as an explanation for the pay gap, we’re treading on some iffy territory; the majority of men have no such thing. However, the majority of men *do* make more money than women who do the same job or a job requiring similar education levels. The people who have wealth are mostly male, and I think this has a profound impact on the pay gap, but it’s more embedded in the system than that, to the point where women who do have wealth can’t seem to do much to help the problem, and men who do not have wealth still benefit financially from the issue.

  11. Miss S – appreciated! Capital, that’s the word I was after. I’m not a communist by any stretch (clearly, since I believe capital can and should be owned individually), but I will say Marx had it right on this one. If you don’t own the means of production, whoever does own them can control you. As Chris Rock put it, “Shaq is rich. The guy who paid him is wealthy.”

    See charts on pages 7, 8 and 10 of this link for some sobering info on what women, and particularly women of color, are up against: http://www.cunapfi.org/download/198_Women_of_Color_Wealth_Future_Spring_2010.pdf

    I don’t know how we change the debate to be about acquiring capital. Sometimes I fear that the feminist movement, while full of amazing, noble people, has many allies and members who neglect the importance of capital or who regard accruing it as wicked, and lacks members who are, well, capitalists.

  12. Zes: I don’t know how we change the debate to be about acquiring capital. Sometimes I fear that the feminist movement, while full of amazing, noble people, has many allies and members who neglect the importance of capital or who regard accruing it as wicked, and lacks members who are, well, capitalists.  

    It doesn’t lack members who are capitalists – but there is a tendency for the movement to silence us.

  13. Alara – I think you are right, and I think my comment below yours, that crossed yours in posting, touches on the problem (though check out my link; as you can see, men tend to have more capital, even in America). Feminism is inherently a movement that seeks to better the lives of marginalized people. People with capital or the means to get it aren’t so marginalized. It can be unattractive to such people, even if they see the problem, to change the system that put them on top. It’s particularly problematic when you consider that the women in a strongest position to demand change, the wealthier ones, have, as you say, often had to make very serious compromises with the system to acquire their wealth, and have a great deal to lose from rocking the boat.

    I think another big problem is that in pre-Industrial times children used to be a net source of wealth – though the mothers didn’t own that, they did benefit from it. You had lots, invested in them for a few years and soon they started paying it off as workers. Now kids are primarily a cost, one that Men Inc gets to externalize (to women) while Women Inc doesn’t (except, in some cases, to poorer women). I’m not advocating putting kids down mines or anything! But certainly opportunities to gain wealth moved from the home(stead) and went into factories, offices etc. It was easy for men to follow, harder for women, but it’s impossible for children. Though without industrialization (the Pill, washing machines, etc) women would probably still be not much more than chattel, so we gained greatly too, and relatively perhaps even more so.

    Your point about how even men without wealth benefit from wealth being mainly owned by men is also well taken. I guess that’s what they mean by trickle-down.

  14. PrettyAmiable – If you meant that I was silencing you or anyone than I am very sorry! I will try and express myself better in future as I do not want to silence anyone. (And also I am sorry if I misread your meaning and you meant the movement generally and not me).

    I certainly agree with you. There are people both inside and outside feminism who find the idea of a capitalist feminist to be distasteful or even an oxymoron.

  15. Alara, very good explanation. It’s more than having capital and wealth- it’s also about access to it. And I agree with the both of you that it’s diificult to have this conversation in feminist spaces. I understand the critiques of capitalism, and I have a few of my own. But it needs to be pointed out that pay and wealth are very different. A person making a six figure salary may be considered rich, but if they don’t own capital, they aren’t wealthy. They are at the whims of someone else’s mercy. That’s the reality for most people, and it’s worse for women.

    Women are subjected to all sorts of biases. Most marginalized groups are. How do we increase the access to capital for women?

  16. Oh, absolutely not, and I don’t mean to derail the thread. It’s been a theme in threads past that people who believe in capitalism can’t be feminists to the extent that no one’s really asked us or thought about how we reconcile the failings of capitalism with our feminist stance – it’s assumed that we can’t, and that we are capitalists first, feminists second (if at all). THAT is silencing.

    You didn’t do that and I wasn’t being snarky (though I can easily imagine you reading that tone). I agree with what you’re saying, just noting that while we ARE here, those thoughts aren’t heard, or, most of the time, really wanted in the feminist blog-o-sphere. Shit happens, right? Not everyone wants to know what you’re thinking at all times and that’s life – but I agree with you. There’s thoughts from both economic models that can increase the well-being of everyone considered. It just won’t happen so long as people shut out others by saying, oh you like more aspects of this economic philosophy rather than that one… you’re not one of us.

    …[/derail, haha]

    To comment on the post, does anyone know a good link for what transgendered individuals are making to a dude-dollar? I wonder if the statistics on it would be easy since it would probably require that the person out themselves to bring meaning to the pay gap, and I’m not really fond of that strategy.

  17. Zes, I knew exactly what you meant 🙂 I believe there was a post on here or another website that discussed the findings of that study. It’s heartbreaking and it’s disappointing. I would love to see more discussions on ideas on increasing access to capital for women. As Alara pointed out, women have one of 3 ways to build wealth- genetics, marriage, and moving up the ranks. The first is random, the second isn’t very feasible for women of color and the third is damn near impossible.

    BTW, I think Alara meant being silenced by others who refuse to engage in discussions on acquiring wealth in feminist spaces.

  18. PrettyAmiable – that’s reassuring, thank you. And also thank you Miss S!

    I agree about silencing. As soon as I say I am (broadly) pro-capitalism in a feminist space some people look at me like I have grown a third arm or something. The exact same people congratulate me for making a monthly loan through http://www.kiva.org/ They don’t seem to click that microcredit IS capitalism.

    On the other side, when I am in a capitalist space (whatever that is, I guess an office or investor meeting) I get funny looks if I talk about feminism. For me, the enlightened self-interest principle guides both ideologies. Educated, free women generate more wealth and are stronger allies. If you’re a man surrounded by educated women, you may get only half the pie. But your half-pie is a vastly bigger meal than 99% of the pie a man can bake while surrounded by illiterate chattels. (A gross oversimplification I know, but you get what I mean!) Hence men’s best interest is to be feminists/allies. The same is true of selling equity in your business to grow it bigger. At first your pie feels diminished, but then it grows, and as with feminism, you end up with more pie in total. And who doesn’t like pie?

    I also find the capitalist perspective a powerful argument against the “feminism’s job is done” voices. Returning to the thread’s exact topic, if (some) women earn 90% of a man’s dollar, that is pretty close to equal, but owning 1% of global wealth is nowhere near. And when some women still ARE wealth in law or in practice, well, we have a long way to go.

    /derail – I’m sorry, I just got so excited to find people willing to discuss this!

  19. Zes- I get excited to. I will discuss economics and feminism with anyone with who will listen. In person, in class, online, at a party…
    I studied economics and women studies so I love discussions on how the two connect. I love your point about micro-credit. I want to learn more about the ways that we can use the tools of capitalism to correct inequalities. I think this can be done while still noting the ways that capitalism will fall short and discussing solutions for those.

    Distinguishing between income and wealth is very important if we want to correct this gender inequality. I also have personal vested interest in discussing ways that women of color can use capital to gain wealth and equality. I think that women of color are particularly vulnerable to being exploited by capital, because the typical ways of acquiring capital are particularly difficult for us.

    If you have time, check out the Economic Emergence of Women by Barbara Bergman. This is a good link for the gender gap on a global scale.

    http://www.weforum.org/pdf/Global_Competitiveness_Reports/Reports/gender_gap.pdf

  22. PrettyAmiable: Statistic clarification – the article states that mothers are 100% less likely to get promotions. Can you explain the numbers? Is it like, rounded up to 100? What this reads as is women who are mothers are NEVER promoted. Saying mothers are 100% less likely to get a promotion is not the same as saying fathers (men?) are 100% more likely to get a promotion. In the first case, 0 mothers are promoted. In the second, 1 mother is promoted for every 2 men. Brenda Barnes, for instance, has 3 children and probably wasn’t hired from school as a CEO which means she got promoted at some point, thus casting doubt on 100% less likely. (Quote this comment?)

    Fair question. 100% more likely just means twice as likely — not that no mother ever gets promoted!

  23. Alara Rogers: Why would they compare full-time to part-time? Can someone explain (I’m being totally genuine, by the way, I really would like clarification!) why the author of this article thinks it’s fair to compare part and full time work and expect them to be equal? Because my knee-jerk reaction is to say that that isn’t fair…I’m also confused about the 100% less likely number. What they’re saying, I think, is that when you control for the amount of time worked, part-timers earn much, much less than full-timers. So it’s not just that they work fewer hours, it’s that they make less money for each of those hours. We think of that as natural, but why? Wouldn’t it logically make more sense that people would work part-time at jobs where each hour was highly paid, and full-time at jobs where the pay wasn’t much? Why is, say, an IT professional required to put in a 40 hour workweek, when realistically most jobs only need them for 20 or 30 a week and have them doing makework that is actually below their skill grade the rest of the time? But, you know, benefits and all that… you can’t track an employee who works part time as if you own them, so you can’t give them any cool stuff, and that means no promotions or benefits… so the only people doing it that way are consultants who run their own business, and those people are working 60 hours a week or more because they have to actually do all the business-work like find clients, too.As for the 100%, I think probably another commenter had it right and what they really meant was that men are 100% more likely to be promoted than mothers are. (Quote this comment?)

    Fair question, again: why should part-timers be treated the same as full-timers, who after all, “give their all?” The answer begins by asking us to think a little more deeply about what “full time” means. It doesn’t mean every waking hour you’re not in the shower. So “full time” entails limits on a worker’s availability, just as “part time” does.
    In fact, the definition of “full time” has changed a lot over time. In the 19th century, full time often meant 12 hours a day six days a week. In medieval times, from what I hear, “full time” meant that you didn’t work about every third day due to the large number of religious holidays. The only thing that’s never changed is that “full time” is defined as the schedule a man traditionally has worked. That schedule really only makes sense for people who either don’t have children at home, or have someone else who is in charge of caring for them.
    The “full time” schedule has less to do with productivity — in fact, studies show that today’s long-hours full time schedule results in lower productivity and during WW II Kellogg (the cereal folks) came to the conclusion that their workforce was most productive when working six hours a day–than it does with social expectations. The sky-high penalty associated with “part time” reflects stigma, not productivity. As Cynthia Fuchs-Epstein said long ago (referring to lawyers) part-timers are penalized because they are “time deviants.” They violate the mandate of work devotion, which requires “serious” workers to signal their ability to put work ahead of any other commitment; in other words, to signal that they have their family life secured so as to be always available when the employer needs them. The only way to do that, in a family with children, is to have a spouse at home. That’s why the stigma associated with part-time seems to be part and parcel of discrimination against adults with caregiving responsibilities.

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  25. There is one other factor hidden in these numbers: there is a spectacular amount of wealth and income held by an absurdly small number of men. In corporate boardrooms.

    Some of the gender-gap pay figures are actually distorted by this. (The figures computed from individual professions aren’t.)

    So men who aren’t on the top of the heap could easily say “Well, I’m not doing *that* much better than the women around here” and be right. But on the other hand, up at the top levels? A few men are raking away billions, and there are very few women allowed in that racket at all.

    Part of the solution has to be to end the racket at the top.

  26. Oh, um, and after the discussion about capitalism, I’d like to make it clear that I’m distinguishing between market capitalism (a fine idea) and the self-dealing, monopolistic, looting-oriented crony capitalism which is so often practiced in the boardrooms of the very largest multinationals.

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