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In her column
"You've come a long way, maybe" (Viewpoint, May 25), Angela
Walters writes "According to the U.S. Department of Labor's
Women Bureau, women are paid 74 cents for every dollar that men
make." According to former U.S. Secretary of Labor Robert Reich
the current number is actually 76 percent, not 74 percent, but
the better question is "Why do men make more money than women?"
The answer has little
to do with discrimination.
To begin with, men
work considerably more hours than women do. Men work 90 percent
of the overtime hours in the United States and full-time
employed males work, on average, eight hours a week (or over 400
hours a year) more than women do.
The "76 cents for
every dollar" statistic is misleading because it creates the
illusion that women are making 76 percent of men for the same
number of hours worked. Women earn 76 percent of what men earn
but for working roughly 84 percent (not 100 percent) of the
hours that men work.
If we use wages based
on an equal number of hours worked (rather than gross income)
over half of the gender difference between men and women
disappears.
So, going by wages for
equal hours worked women are up to earning roughly 90 percent
(76 percent divided by 84 percent) of what men earn. What else
are we leaving out?
Plenty. Men earn more
money than women because:
1) Men do the
dangerous jobs. Every year between 6,000 and 10,000 people are
killed in work related accidents in the United States - roughly
95 percent of them male (U.S. Department of Health and Human
Services).
Ten times that number
die from occupational diseases, such as black lung disease and
occupationally related lung cancers - again overwhelmingly male.
Over 6 million suffer
work related injuries from broken limbs to bad backs to
blindness - again overwhelmingly male ("Death on the Job: The
Toll of Neglect," Bureau of Labor Statistics).
While even
working-class women are likely to work in safe, comfortable
offices as secretaries and file clerks, men are working on roofs
and sides of buildings, in sewers, in mines, in factories, on
power poles, in the heat and in the cold, at night and on
weekends.
Many of these jobs,
such as construction worker, fireman, roofer, miner, welder, oil
worker, forklift and crane operator, electrician, truck driver,
etc., pay better specifically because there are clear hazards
associated with them.
There is a straight
progression along gender lines between safe jobs and hazardous
jobs - the more hazardous it is, the more male it is (United
States Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employment and Earnings).
2) Men are far more
likely to work graveyard shifts, endure long commutes and
working weekends, and to travel for their work.
3) Because men have
been saddled with the breadwinner burden for longer than women,
there is a large experience gap between them. Full-time employed
females have, as a whole, 25 percent less job experience than
their male counterparts, which is (of course) reflected in their
wages (June O'Neill and Solomon Polacheck, "Why the Gender Gap
in Wages Narrowed in the 1980s," Journal of Labor Economics 11,
no. 1, Jan. 1993).
The majority of this
gap appears in older workers and, accordingly, the wage gap
among older workers is far greater than that among younger
workers.
The 76 percent
statistic is also distorted by the large number of 50 and 60
year-old males who, with 30 or 40 years of experience, are
making higher wages. Many of their wives spent much of their
lives working part-time or as full-time homemakers and thus make
far less money, even though they, as a group, spend more money
than their male counterparts.
4) Women entered the
workplace in large numbers at a time when unions were weak. Thus
the mostly male unions, largely formed 50 or 75 years ago, are
generally more entrenched and stronger than the majority female
unions.
5) Women often take
years off (or work part-time) to take care of their young
children. When women return to their full-time careers years
later they are way behind men.
It is upon the birth
of a family's first child that the wage gap between men and
women really kicks in. The man, overwhelmed with bills, sets
himself upon the task of supporting his newly enlarged family
and the woman takes on the burden of primary care-giver to the
children.
Because of the
far-more constraining gender roles imposed upon men, taking
years off to rear children is simply not an option, although
studies have shown that many men (wistfully) long for just such
an option.
So, accounting for all
this, what wage gap, if any, is left?
Not much. According to
surveys by the Independent Women's Forum and by the Cato
Institute, when all of the above factors are considered, women
earn over 98 percent of what men earn.
One of the problems is
that American society does little to compensate women or make
adjustments for the earning loss they take when they have
children.
An example in
university life is that women are often under pressure to
"publish or perish" in the struggle for tenure at just the same
time in their lives when their biological clock is putting them
under pressure to have children.
This is not
"discrimination" but it is insensitivity. Society could go a
long way toward eliminating the gender wage gap by trying to
institute measures to reduce the career damage done to women by
child-rearing. In turn, by reducing the damage done to women's
careers by child-rearing we could take some of the financial
burden off of men and free them to do more child-rearing, which
in turn would help women's careers.
Is the male role of
breadwinner and primary wage-earner a privilege?
For successful men in
safe jobs, perhaps it is. But for the majority of men it is not
privilege at all, even if their wages are still somewhat higher
than that of their female counterparts.
Interestingly, the
founders of the National Organization for Women (NOW) saw the
male breadwinner role as highly burdensome. The original NOW
Statement of Purpose reads:
"We reject the current
assumptions that a man must carry the sole burden of supporting
himself, his wife, and family, and that a woman is automatically
entitled to lifelong support by a man upon her marriage, or that
marriage, home, and family are primarily woman's world and
responsibility - hers to dominate - his to support."
And support men do, at
the expense of their health, their safety, and sometimes their
lives. Men earn more money than women because they make more
sacrifices to make money, not because of "discrimination."
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