US Gender Pay Gap Emerges Early, Study Finds
New York - A dramatic pay gap emerges between women and men in America the year after they graduate from college and widens over the ensuing decade, according to research released on Monday.One year out of college, women working full time earn 80 percent of what men earn, according to the study by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, based in Washington D.C.
Ten years later, women earn 69 percent as much as men earn, it said.
Even as the study accounted for such factors as the number of hours worked, occupations or parenthood, the gap persisted, researchers said.
“If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay?” the study asked. “The answer is no.
“These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force,” it said.
Specifically, about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender — 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation, it said.
One year out of college, men and women should arguably be the least likely to show a gender pay gap, the study said, since neither tend to be parents yet and they enter the work force without significant experience.
“It surprised me that it was already apparent one year out of college, and that it widens over the first 10 years,” Catherine Hill, AAUW director of research, told Reuters.
Among factors found to make a difference in pay, the choice of fields of concentration in college were significant, the study found. Female students tended to study areas with lower pay, such as education, health and psychology, while male students dominated higher-paying fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences, it said.
Even so, one year after graduation, a pay gap turned up between women and men who studied the same fields.
In education, women earn 95 percent as much as their male colleagues earn, while in math, women earn 76 percent as much as men earn, the study showed.
While in college, the study showed, women outperformed men academically, and their grade point averages were higher in every college major.
Parenthood affected men and women in vividly different ways. The study showed mothers more likely than fathers, or other women, to work part time or take leaves.
Among women who graduated from college in 1992-93, more than one-fifth of mothers were out of the work force a decade later, and another 17 percent were working part time, it said.
In the same class, less than 2 percent of fathers were out of the work force in 2003, and less than 2 percent were working part time, it said.
The study, entitled “Behind the Pay Gap,” used data from the U.S. Department of Education. It analyzed some 9,000 college graduates from 1992-93 and more than 10,000 from 1999-2000.
(Editing by Cynthia Osterman; Reuters Messaging: ellen.wulfhorst.reuters.com@reuters.net)
© Reuters 2007
The pay gap in part reflects the greater power/money addiction of men, particularly in the United States. It is better that women stop chasing that lunacy and start leading in the other direction, the common sense, sustainable direction. To be fair, there is also a provider instinct that also drives men to accomplish. It’s just human nature. People don’t need money. Money needs people.
If I have a money/power addiction then I should be in withdrawals I suppose.
But is this partly a symptom of capitalism. I mean, it’s almost the nature of this beast to be unequal. Can there even be pay equity in a capitalist society? Should women simply demand to be paid the same as men, or should they just be working to break down the machine altogether?
Height could be a factor in all of this, as women are shorter than man, thus that also negatively affects their earnings. In essense, shorter men and women are paid less than their taller counterparts for the same exact jobs.
So that’s a double whammy for women. Yet the height factor goes unrecognized and is oblivious to many. It would be interesting to see if the gap is mainly due to prejudice on height, or mainly due to gender. Difficult to see what combination of the two…
“A dramatic pay gap emerges between women and men in America the year after they graduate from college and widens over the ensuing decade, according to research released on Monday.”
This has been true since women started working.
“In education, women earn 95 percent as much as their male colleagues earn, while in math, women earn 76 percent as much as men earn, the study showed.”
That 95 percent figure in education most likely exists as a result of teachers belonging to “teacher’s unions”. Union members with the same level of education get the same pay. However, non-union, female educational administrators are likely to experience a considerable gap in pay.
I think women do not negotiate for higher salaries. Women put their own needs aside for others.
Administrators and Hr people will try to make women feel bad like they owe it to the company to work for less.
I always keep a daily jornal of what I do and occurances. That way if the man is making more you can have a discrimination suit.
Companies have eliminated pensions and such so it is time to look for other ways to make money.
This pay gap has remained the same for the past 40 years! No change. It doesn’t matter whether women work in unskilled or skilled occupations. It doesn’t matter whether the women are short or tall. Fat or slim. Educated or uneducated. Having unions help, but unions have been losing ground for years. Do you see unions in service jobs where women are the predominant portion of the work force? Walmart ring a bell?
I agree that the whole system sucks. And not just for women. They just happened to be the most vulnerable. It’s all about profits and corporate greed. It’s all about ALL of us just being cogs in the corporate machinery.
I don’t know what the answers are. I don’t even know where to start.
You know, lot of people seem to be rushing to say that it’s about something other than, or more fundamental than, discrimination against women as women. Interesting. I’d like to make a few points in response:
1. Appeals to “instinct” tend to serve the interests of the group in power. For example: Europeans justified conquering and colonialism based on instinct: the “savages” of other lands, they said, were ruled by instinct and therefore needed the Europeans to come in and bring them the light of reason (presumably by taking over their resources and subjugating all the indigenous people by force). So when it served the interests of the people with the guns, instinct was baaaaaad. But look what happens when we talk about gender discrimination: Oh, well, gosh, in THAT case instinct is quite all right, and male homo sapiens have this insurmountable drive to conquer, despoil, and “provide” for their weaker female conspecifics. In both cases, “instinct” has whatever status it has, simply because the privileged group says so. I don’t know about you, but I smell a rat.
2. Yes, capitalism, as an economic system, leads to a great number of abuses. And, ALSO, women face discrimination AS women, and did so BEFORE capitalism. That deserves to be talked about in its own right, and not just as a segue into a conversation about how bad capitalism is “for everybody”. For the record, there are anticapitalist feminists out there - a perspective with which I largely agree, btw. However, most of the anticapitalist feminists whom I’ve encountered are not *quite* so quick to dismiss the frustrations of a working woman whose wages are regularly shrunk by the no-penis penalty. Can we not so quickly turn a conversation about the wage gap into a conversation about how what women “should be” doing to smash capitalism? (Because, honestly, if I had to list some things that women in America need, “Ham-fisted instructions from self-appointed experts” would not be very high on the list. Equal pay for equal work? Yes. Bias-free hiring practices? Yes. Workplaces free from harassment? You bet. But, honestly, the self-help and cosmetics industries are doing a pretty good job telling us how to blame ourselves and fix our flaws without the anti-capitalists joining the chorus.)
3. Regarding short people and discrimination: Indeed, studies suggest that people tend to be perceived as more competent when they are tall… and, incidentally, when they have deeper voices. Might this not be, at least in part, a SYMPTOM of institutional sexism (whereby a more stereotypically masculine manner lends an air of authority and competence) and not an entirely different factor? What about studies demonstrating that lighter-skinned people tended to be hired more often and at higher wages, in general, than darker-skinned people? Would you honestly hear anyone on Common Dreams arguing that this is a factor distinguishable from racism, and that African-Americans (for example) just get dealt a “double whammy”?
Capitalism depends on scarcity and competition. In order for some to be well-paid, some must fail and be poor. We can embrace these distorted values, and abandond an age-old female culture of sharing and compassion for a system that is oppressive even to most men, or we can apply the same skills that got us the vote, and the right to education, to changing the system for the better. It is about time we made that decision.
That’s sort of what I was asking. Is capitalism inherently a male thing? Orri is right that sexism existed before capitalism, and I’m not dismissing anything that women experience. But imo you can’t talk about wage gaps without talking about capitalism either.