The Wage Gap

I've written about the wage gap before on my old blog. Ampersand brought up the issue again yesterday. As usual, the comments section is interesting. His examples begin with the narrowest wage gap and end with the widest.

There are a literally unlimited number of ways one could go about measuring the pay gap between men and women. Here's six ways, for example. 1. Compare hourly wages among new college graduates just entering the job market. 2. Compare wages among relatively young workers. 3. Compare weekly wages among all full-time workers. 4. Compare annual wages among all full-time, year round (FTYR) workers. 5. Compare total annual income (wages plus benefits, pension, perks and bonuses) among FTYR workers. 6. Compare total income over the course of an entire work life.

Conservative anti-feminist groups such as the Independent Women's Forum misuse that first example to criticize feminists who work on rectifying the wage gap. They say there's no need to rectify it because women's wages today are 95% of men's. Regarding the first example, these aren't merely new college graduates. They are new, young, recent college graduates with little or no work experience who are unmarried and primarily childless. The comparable wages are within low-paying, entry level jobs. The wage gap increases between these men and women as they age. The paper "The Pay Gap - Causes, Consequences and Actions New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women" (Canada) goes into greater detail on this particular example. (This document is in Acrobat. For an html version, go here.) Bold below is my emphasis.

Both sexes begin their careers with similar, low, earnings. It is after their mid-twenties that the gap progressively widens. Canadian women aged 15 to 24 who worked full-time full-year in 1994 earned $19,269, 90% of what men earn, while women aged 55 and over earned $26,000, 65% of what men earn. As women age, their earnings remain almost static. Marital status is another, related, factor. Never-married (single but not necessary childless) women who work full-time earn 92% of what never-married men earn: both earn a relatively low wage. Never-married men, never-married women and married women all earn approximately the same (in Canada, $28-30,000; in N.B., $22-23,000 in full-time annual earnings), significantly less than married men (in Canada, $43,300; in N.B., about $37,000). Married men have higher average earnings than all other groups of men and women. No group of women, whether never-married, married, separated, young or old, earn as much as married men. The relatively small population of never-married women aged 35 to 44 who work full-time full-year earn $32,200, which is 85% of what never-married men their age earn and 72% of what all men their age earn; never-married women aged 45 to 54 earn $36,000, which is 93% of what never-married men their age earn and 78% of what all men their age earn. Higher levels of education correlate with higher earnings for both men and women. Women with post-secondary qualifications have higher average earnings than other women, but they have lower earnings than similarly qualified men. Canadian women with university degrees who worked full-time full-year in 1994 earned $40,252 or 72% of what men earned. (Never-married, therefore mostly young, women with university degrees who worked full-time full-year earned $38,871 or 95% of what their never-married male counterparts earned in 1994. Married university-educated females, an older group, earned 68% of what their male counterparts earned.) A study of one class of university graduates revealed that the women's earnings were slightly higher on average than the men's, but even for these highly educated workers, the gap widened progressively over time.