No Ladies’ Man (John Kerry has a lame pick-up line)

Desperate men often resort to clichéd lines when trying to snare women. Senator John Kerry must be desperate, because he dragged out the tired, misleading statistic about the so-called wage gap during last night's debate; namely, that women only earn 76 cents for each man's dollar.

This factoid comes from Department of Labor data on the average wage of a full-time working woman and the average wage of a full-time working man. And, yes, if you look at those numbers you will find that the average woman earns about three quarters of the income of the average man.

But that statistic ignores many relevant factors that affect a worker's take-home pay. For starters, it doesn't adjust for number of years worked. On average, women spend about a decade out of the workforce to care for their families. It should come as no surprise to Senator Kerry that a 35-year-old woman reentering the workforce after ten years off earns less than a man or woman who worked continuously during that time.

The wage-gap statistic also fails to consider educational attainment. Today, women earn more than half of all bachelor's and master's degrees, but it wasn't always that way. Older women in the workforce tend to have less education than their male peers, which affected their career path, their salaries, and ultimately Department of Labor data.

Women and men also often have different priorities when assessing employment opportunities. One survey of working women found that for nearly three quarters a flexible schedule was "very important" when considering a job. This means that many women are willing to trade more money for more flexibility or time off.

Salary gap smaller for tech women
Exclusive techies.com study finds women in tech jobs earn 92 percent of what their male peers make.

By techies.com staff

A female technologist is likely to earn as much as a man with comparable experience during their first five years of employment, a new techies.com study reveals.

Female techies at all experience levels earned an average of 92 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made, according to the study, which analyzed salaries reported by more than 106,133 registered techies.com members. That's significantly better than the national average: In full-time positions in all U.S. professions, women earn less than 75 percent of what men earn, U.S. Census Bureau figures show.

'Hiring managers are finding fewer reasons to differentiate between male and female employees.'
-Shuman Lee, techies.com

The virtual pay parity among less-experienced workers in the techies.com study "is good news," says Carolyn Leighton, chairwoman and founder of Women In Technology International, an organization formed to advance women in technology. She suggests that the hot job market may be giving these in-demand, less-experienced workers "more leverage" on pay, regardless of their gender.

The techies.com study compared salary data on 87,075 men and 19,058 women, from entry-level to executive technology positions and across 39 major U.S. job markets. In many technology jobs, women with up to five years of experience are essentially at par with their male counterparts, the study found. But in most cases, the wage gap between men and women increases as they move higher on the experience ladder.

The wage gap between more-senior men and women technological professionals may mean that "women aren't getting the kinds of promotions at the same rate as men are, and aren't moving into managerial positions," says Alyson Reed, executive director of the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of labor unions, civil rights groups, and women's organizations dedicated to eliminating gender- and race-based wage disparities.

"You have to wonder: What is keeping women's wages down as they put in the same number of years of service? Particularly if the data show men and women at pretty comparable levels to start out with," she says.

Shuman Lee, techies.com's director of Analytics, points out that the study takes a static snapshot of the technology employment picture today and doesn't reflect what happened last year, or what will happen in the future.

"I think everyone agrees there's an evolution in attitudes, as younger hiring managers are finding fewer reasons to differentiate between male and female employees," he says. "Right now people with three years' experience don't have a gender gap, and people with ten years' experience do have a gap. But seven years from now, those less experienced employees will have ten years' experience as well and quite likely will continue to have comparable pay levels."

Further findings

Of the 106,133 technology professionals studied, women averaged roughly $5,000 less in yearly pay than men.
Professionals in highly technical, hands-on job families such as software development and engineering, tended to report the smallest salary gaps.
Job demand isn't always a guarantee of salary parity. In fact, the high-demand data management field scored lowest of all job families, with women making only 84 percent of male earnings, at an average salary difference of $12,500.
Women in the study also paid a premium to work in marketing and human resources jobs. In recruiting/HR they gave up $11,300 in yearly salary to male co-workers, and female marketers dropped $7,900 below the men.
The percentage increase in earnings gaps varies with type of tech job. Rising in seniority increased the gender pay gap by only 7 percent for female systems analysts while female software developers dropped 9 percent. But the difference in earnings nearly doubles – to 16 percent – for female project managers at advanced experience levels.
A possible explanation for the wage gap, Reed suggests, is that more men than women may pursue – or be welcomed into – the more lucrative positions in the tech realm. "It's always a chicken-or-the-egg issue," she says. "Are those more-lucrative positions open and welcoming to women? It's very hard to know whether women are applying for those jobs and being turned down, or whether they're just not seeking those jobs because they have other interests."

Highlights of Women's Earnings, 2002

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The report, "Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2002," released in September 2003, is based on earnings data from the Current Populations Survey (CPS), a monthly survey of approximately 60,000 households conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau for the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The report shows a slight increase from last year. The earnings data show a wage ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly earnings of 78 percent in 2002. The earnings ratio in 2001 was 76 percent. Median weekly wages for women and men follow:

Women Men Ratio
Median weekly wages 2002 $530 $680 78%
Median weekly wages 2001 $511 $672 76%

Women between 45 to 54 had the highest earnings of any age group, with a wage ratio that increased slightly between 2001 and 2002. For women 20-24, the earnings ratio also increased slightly:

Women 45-54 Men 45-54 Ratio
Median weekly wages 2002 $603 $808 74.6%
Median weekly wages 2000 $588 $799 73.6%

Women 20-24 Men 20-24 Ratio
Median weekly wages 2002 $384 $410 93.7%
Median weekly wages 2001 $375 $410 91.5%

The earnings difference was widest among whites and the ratios of earnings by race and Hispanic origin increased slightly in the past year:

White Black Hispanic
Median weekly wages 2002 78.2% 90.6% 88.2%
Median weekly wages 2001 74.7% 85.2% 87.7%

In 2002, the median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary worker female college graduates was $809 compared to male college graduates earnings of $1,089, a ratio of 74.3 percent, a slightly higher ratio than last year. The comparable figures in 2001 were $784 for female college graduates and $1,082 for male college graduates, a ratio of 72.5 percent.

Women’s share of professional specialty and executive, administrative and managerial occupations, typified by high earnings, grew slightly. Women comprised 50.4 percent of those in professional specialty and executive, administrative and managerial occupations in 2001, up from 49.5 percent in 2001. In these occupations, women earned 71.4 percent compared to men in 2002, a slight increase from 70.5 percent in 2001.

Women who worked part-time (less than 35 hours per week) represented 25.2 percent of all female wage and salary workers in 2002, a slight increase from 24.6 percent in 2001, while the share of men who worked part-time was 10.8 percent in 2002, essentially unchanged from 10.6 percent in 2001.

Sources: U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2002, Report 972, May 2003 & Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2001, Report 960, May 2002.

Conclusion

During the period 1969 to 1999, the salaries and wages earned by women rose slowly but steadily moved in the direction of equality with those of men. The gap is still very large, but, by almost all measures, it is closing, because more women are entering the labor force, and many are earning higher salaries and wages.

Data Sources and Limitations

These statistics were based on samples of individual income tax returns--Forms 1040, 1040A, and 1040EZ--filed for Tax Years 1969, 1979, 1989, and 1999. For 1969, Forms W-2 attached to these documents by taxpayers were edited and keyed manually as part of the Statistics of Income (SOI) program. For 1979 and thereafter, Form W-2 data were obtained from the Internal Revenue Service's Information Returns Master File by matching the Social Security numbers of the primary and secondary taxpayers on the SOI file This matching process may have resulted in nonsampling error. Especially in the case of secondary Social Security numbers, IRS perfection may not have taken place at the time the tax return was selected for the SOI sample. While most false matches to the IRMF were corrected during SOI error resolution, data missing due to false nonmatches were generally not restored [4]

For 1969 and 1979, the sex coding was based on the judgment of editors, who generally had only the taxpayer's first name to evaluate. (In certain rare cases, an honorific such as "Mr.," "Mrs.," etc., was available.) Therefore, accuracy may have been compromised in the case of taxpayers with foreign or other unusual names. For 1989 and 1999, sex codes were obtained from the Social Security Administration (SSA). Whenever a new Social Security number is issued, SSA obtains data on date of birth and gender from the applicant. In recent years, SSA has shared this information with the Internal Revenue Service for tax administration and research purposes. For these years, the main cause of gender-coding errors was reporting or keying errors related to Social Security numbers.

Since the data presented in this article are estimates based on samples of tax returns filed with the Internal Revenue Service, they are subject to sampling as well as nonsampling errors. Coefficients of variation (CV's), computed from the sample, are used to measure the magnitude of the sampling error. CV estimates for key variables (including salaries and wages) are generally shown in each year's Statistics of Income--Individual Income Tax Returns report [5]. In the 1969 report, they are shown on page 357; in the 1979 report, on page 167; and in the 1999 report, on page 48. CV estimates are not available for 1989.

Gender Discrimination in the Workplace: A Short Literature Review
By Ellen Isaacs

This is a short article I wrote as a sidebar to a much more thorough (and thoughtful) article by Kathy Hemenway called Human Nature and the Glass Ceiling in Industry that was published in Communications of the ACM in 1995, Vol. 38, Number 1, pp. 55-62. A PDF version of Kathy's paper is available, and it includes my sidebar on page 58.

This survey was prepared for an industry task force report on women in software engineering. It was intended to supplement that report by providing context on gender discrimination in the workplace with a focus on software engineers.

Introduction
Data collected from a wide array of sources reveal the following pattern with regard to gender discrimination in the U.S. workplace. In general, the proportion of women employed as computer scientists appears to reflect the proportion of women graduating with degrees in that area. However, when women are hired, they tend to start at lower positions and/or earn lower starting salaries than men. Over time, the gap between men's and women's salaries and promotion rates grows at an increasing rate. The salary gap is found even in studies that equate years of experience, level of education and industry.
Hiring
There is some evidence that the proportion of women computer and mathematical scientists hired into industry jobs reflects the proportion of women graduating with degrees in those areas. Data from different sources indicates that women made up about 30% to 35% of all computer and mathematical scientists between 1988 and 1990 (Frenkel, 1990). This figure is somewhat higher than the proportion of women graduating with CS degrees over the past 10-20 years. According to the U.S. Department of Education, women earned between 30% and 37% of the bachelors degrees in CS during the 1980s, up from 14% to 28% in the 1970s (DOE surveys, 1990-1991). As for higher degrees, women earned between 21% and 30% of the CS masters degrees in the U.S. between 1980 and 1989 (Frenkel, 1990), and they earned between 9 and 14 percent of the CS PhDs in the U.S. and Canada between 1978 and 1990 (Gries and Marsh, 1992).

Promotion
In almost every industry, women occupy a very small proportion of the higher-level positions. For example, a 1988 study found that only three CEOs among the Fortune 1000 were women, and only 1.7% of the COOs, CFOs and executive VPs were women (White, 1992). In a 1993 study of Stanford MBAs, graduates from the class of 1982 were tracked over time. It was found that 71% of the men are currently in the top four rungs of management, whereas only 34% of women had reached those positions (Smith and Mitchell, 1993). A study of the 10 largest makers of weapons found that women made up 5.3% of the senior management positions (Sims, 1993). Business Week did a report in 1987 in which they tracked 100 women executives who were on the fast track from as far back as 1976. They found that none of those 100 women had made it to the top position in a public corporation unless they started the business or inherited the position (White, 1992).
Data from the computer industry in particular were not available, but the same pattern appears in the academic world. Women make up 10% of both assistant and associate CS professors but only 4% of the full professors, a rank that generally takes about 10 years to achieve (Gries and Marsh, 1992). (Recall that women have been earning between 9 and 14 percent of computer science PhDs in since 1978.)

As shown in the previous section, the problem is not that larger proportions of trained women are not available. Women are not represented at the highest ranks of companies and academia because, for some reason, their rate of progression is halted somewhere along the way to the top.

Salaries
The salary picture for women is even more inequitable than that for promotion. Women consistently make less money than men in almost every industry, even when they first start their jobs (Schwartz, 1988, Mahar, 1993). An American Demographics study found that women working full time with two or fewer years of experience earn 72% of men with the same experience (Schwartz, 1988). In the computer and mathematical sciences, women's wages as a percentage of men's has fluctuated between 74% and 86% between 1983 and 1992, although on the whole it has grown from 75% to 85% (U.S. Department of Labor statistics).
As women get older, they make less as a proportion of men's salaries. Although the gap has narrowed somewhat in the past 14 years, this trend is due to a drop in men's inflation-adjusted salaries, not a rise in women's (Pennar, 1991, Rigdon, 1993). And the gap has not been steadily decreasing. In 1955, women earned more of a percentage of men's salaries than they did in 1987, 63.9 cents vs. 63.7 cents (Mahar, 1993).

Part of the reason for the wage gap is that women don't get promoted as quickly as men. However, even when equating for rank, a gap appears. A 1993 ComputerWorld survey of IS managers salaries showed that the wage gap widened as the management level increased (Dwyer, 1993). For example, among " programming managers," women made 98% of men's salaries, but among IS directors or managers, women made 82% of men's salaries.

Other common explanations for the increasing wage gap are that women choose professions that pay less and that they have less experience than men of the same age because they take time off to raise children. However, Business Week reported on a study that compared the salaries of single white men and women between the ages of 20 and 40 (Koretz, 1990). When they factored out schooling, industry, skill level and work experience, the women still earned 91% of men's salaries. (Without factoring these out, women earned 86% of men's salaries.)

Another researcher analyzed the credentials of 194 corporate managers randomly chosen from 800 people who took a leadership course. He found that "if women were men with the same credentials, they would earn about 18 percent more" (Ridgon, 1993) And the 1992 edition of The Economics of Women, Men and Work found that less than 50 percent of the pay gap between men and women can be explained by differences in schooling and experience (Gries and Marsh, 1992). These figures are the closest estimate we have of the wage gap that can be explained only by discrimination.

References
Dwyer, Kelly, "IS Pay Dips; Women Still Lag," ComputerWorld, March 15, 1993, p. 1, 85-89.
Frenkel, Karen. "Women and Computing," Communications of the ACM, November, 1990, pp. 35-46.

Gries, David and Dorothy Marsh, "The 1989-90 Taulbee Survey," Communication of the ACM, January 1992, Vol 35, No. 1. pp. 133-143.

Koretz, Gene, "Economic Trends: Women Still Earn Less, But They've Come a Long Way," Business Week, December 24, 1990, p. 14.

Mahar, Maggie, "The Truth About Women's Pay," Working Women Magazine, April 1993, pp. 52-55, 100-103.

Pennar, Karen, "Women Are Still Paid the Wages of Discrimination," Business Week Oct 28, 1991, p. 35.

Rigdon, Joan, "Three Decades After the Equal Pay Act, Women's Wages Remain Far From Parity," Wall Street Journal, June 9, 1993, pp. B1, B10.

Schwartz, Joe, "Closing the Gap," American Demographics, January, 1988, pp. 10, 56.

Sims, Calvin, "The Unbreakable Glass Ceiling," The New York Times, June 7, 1993, pp. C1, C5.

Smith, Rebecca and James Mitchell, "A Stanford MBA Does Not Assure Equal Pay," San Jose Mercury News, Spring 1993

U.S. Department of Energy survey, "Degrees and Other Formal Awards Conferred," 1990-91.

U.S. Department of Energy survey, "Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System," 1990-91.

U.S. Department of Energy survey, "Completions," 1990-91.

White, Jane. A Few Good Women: Breaking the Barriers to Top Management. Prentice-Hall, 1992.

Wage Gap Between Men and Women Shrinks

February 17, 2003

By DAVID LEONHARDT

Most American families can thank the woman of the house for

nearly all of the pay gains they have received over the

last year.

While men's wages have failed to keep up with even the low

rate of inflation, women's earnings have continued to grow,

giving an important lift to many families and helping

sustain consumer spending.

The raises have closed the gap between men's and women's

wages to the narrowest on record, resuming a trend that had

stagnated for almost a decade, government figures show.

Women's pay still lags men's in virtually every sector of

the economy. Full-time female workers made 77.5 percent of

what their male counterparts did last year, according to

the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In the previous eight

years, the inequality worsened slightly, to 76 percent in

2001 from 77.1 percent in 1993.

"The wage trends for men are unequivocally bad," said Jared

Bernstein, an author of an annual study of the work force

and an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a

liberal research group in Washington. "The fact that we're

deep into a jobless recovery and women's wages are still

growing is good news."

The median full-time female worker received a 5 percent

raise in her weekly pay last year, while the median pay for

men - half made more, half made less - rose only 1.3

percent, to $692. The inflation rate was about 2 percent.

Women have benefited from an acceleration in the economy's

shift toward the services sector during the last two years

of economic weakness. Millions of women work in government

and health care, two of the only sections of the economy

that have added workers since 2001, while men dominate

industries like manufacturing and technology that have been

hit hard by layoffs and pay cuts.

A recent rise in the number of women who belong to unions,

even as the total number of unionized workers continues to

fall, may also be helping them receive salary increases,

economists say.

The pay gap in the United States is slightly larger than it

is in most other leading economies, according to the

Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development in

Paris. Australia, Denmark and Spain have some of the

smallest differences in the world, with women making

roughly 90 percent of what men do.

Over all, the gaps are bigger than the official numbers

suggest because in many countries women are more likely to

work part time.

American women made the largest relative gains last year at

the low and middle parts of the salary scale. Although the

current downturn has cut across all income groups, layoffs

have remained most common among lower-paid workers in

male-dominated industries, hurting the bargaining power of

other workers there. The economy's weakness has also led to

a shortening of the workweek for many manufacturers.

High-earning men and women have both received raises that

outpaced inflation over the last year, but women's

increases were slightly larger than men's, according to the

Economic Policy Institute.

"It's difficult to know how much we should make of one

year's experience," said Francine D. Blau, an economics

professor at Cornell University who studies the wage gap.

"It's an interesting jump in a year, however. It's a lot."

In St. Louis, for example, executives at BJC HealthCare, a

hospital system that employs 26,000 people, noticed last

summer that they were struggling to hire enough nurses,

technicians and pharmacists, among others. So to compete

with other growing health care companies, the executives

increased wages for about 5,100 employees - 4,500 of whom

were women - by 3 to 5 percent, Only six months later, the

executives decided they needed to raise pay again, by a

similar amount.

"The market moved," said Lincoln C. Scott, vice president

for human resources at BJC, whose network includes

Barnes-Jewish Hospital.

Lynn B. Johnson, a nurse at Barnes, still does not make as

much as her husband, who is an electrician, but her hourly

wage has risen to $28, from $26, while his has not moved in

the last year. Mrs. Johnson, who is 44 and works in the

intensive-care unit, called the raises a welcome reward for

the increasing difficulty of her job. "We have the ability

to do more things to help people, so we take a lot of

sicker people who used to die outside the hospital," she

said. "It is great to have a job you love and finally start

to receive financial recognition for what we do."

For decades after World War II, women made little progress

in closing the wage gap, with full-time female workers

earning about three-fifths of men's pay. (Economists noted

a Scriptural connection: in the Book of Leviticus, the

value of a man's life was put at 50 shekels and a woman's

at 30 shekels.)

By the early 1980's, though, more women than men were

attending college, and female graduates were no longer

overwhelmingly entering lower-paying fields. Nearly half of

women graduating from college in 1960 became teachers; in

1990, less than 1 in 10 did. "There was a huge switch in

college majors for women, leaning more toward what we would

call the more masculine fields," said Claudia Goldin, an

economist at Harvard, citing business, engineering and the

sciences.

Civil rights laws that were passed in the 1960's and 70's

and the sheer increase of women in the work force appear to

have reduced discrimination, economists say. The 1980's

were also a harsh decade in many of the well-paid

blue-collar fields where women rarely worked.

By 1991 - with women's pay rising and men's falling after

adjustment for inflation - the wage ratio among full-time

workers rose to 74.2 percent from 62.5 percent in 1979.

"The 1980's were kind of a golden period for the narrowing

of the pay gap," Ms. Blau said.

But as the economy began growing quickly in the mid-1990's,

women's relative progress largely stopped. They were no

longer making the rapid educational gains compared with men

that they had in earlier years, and the portion of them

working was not growing rapidly anymore. The welfare reform

bill passed in 1996 may have played a small role in holding

back the progress of women by causing a surge in the number

of women available for low-paid work, researchers say.

Men also tend to benefit from economic expansions because

they are often more willing to take professional risks,

said Heidi Hartmann, director of the Institute for Women's

Policy Research in Washington. In the 1990's, many of those

risks, like joining start-up technology companies, were

well rewarded.

"Women don't gain as much in a boom," Ms. Hartmann said,

"but don't lose as much in a recession."

Government agencies, which are typically a source of steady

if unspectacular salary increases and employ three women

for every two men, are a big reason for that phenomenon.

While the median worker across all industries received a

raise roughly equal to the inflation rate over the last

year, the average pay of federal employees rose 4.6

percent, to $54,656 a year, according to government

figures. In San Jose, Calif., which has the highest

unemployment rate of any large metropolitan area in the

country, city employees received increases of 5 to 7

percent last year, a city spokesman, Tom Manheim, said.

Government employment will do less to help women whenever

the economy begins growing fast enough again to create

large numbers of new private sector jobs, but few analysts

expect the pay gap to widen in future years. After previous

economic downturns ended, women held onto the relative

gains they had made.

The rising portion of unionized workers who are female -

about 42 percent, up from 39 percent in 1995, according to

the Labor Department - may also help bolster women's wages.

Organized labor has lost members in heavily male

manufacturing industries that have been shifting work

overseas, while nurses in Buffalo and Miami, janitors in

Los Angeles and on Long Island and other service-sector

employees have voted to join unions in recent years.

Unionized workers earn an average of 23 percent more a week

than other workers, according to the Labor Department. Some

of the difference stems not from collective bargaining but

from the concentration of union members in metropolitan

areas and big companies, where wages are usually higher.

Economists say the two biggest reasons that the pay gap is

unlikely to wither completely are discrimination, which is

difficult to measure, and the dominant share of housework

and child care done by women, which reduces their outside

job experience and causes them often to take more flexible,

lower-paid positions.

"I'm optimistic that momentum is going to continue," Ms.

Hartmann said of the shrinking pay gap. "It's just going to

take a while."

Examining the “Women’s Choices” Theory

Some argue that the wage gap is merely the result of women's choices -- mainly women taking time out of the workforce to have children.

What's the real story? Of course time in the workplace, education and experience all play a role. But there is more to the wage gap than "women's choices."

Let's not ignore the evidence on unfair pay. We cannot ignore a mountain of evidence documenting that a wage gap exists even when comparing women and men who have the same job, education, qualifications, and time in the workforce. Consider scores of studies such as:

• a survey of public relations professionals, showing that women with less than 5 years of experience make $29,726 while men with the same amount of experience make $48,162. For P.R. professionals in the 5-10 year category, women earn $41,141 while men earn $47,888. In the 10-15 year category, women earn $44,941 and men earn $54,457. In the 15-20 year range, women earn $49,270 and men earn $69,120.
•a salary survey of purchasers demonstrating that for professionals in the field of purchasing with 3 or fewer years experience, women earn $35,900 and men earn $47,700. For purchasers with 4-6 years experience, men earn $52,100 while women earn $38,300. Female purchasers who have 7 to ten years of experience earn $42,300 while their male counterparts earn $56,400. For those with 11-15 years experience, women earn $43,500 and men earn $63,400.

•a study of women in the telecommunications industry documenting a gap even when education was the same. For example, among video programmers, women with advanced degrees earn 64.6% of their male counterparts, and women with college degrees earn 80%.

Evidence of wage discrimination can be found in Department of Labor audits. The DOL conducts routine compliance reviews of companies that are federal contractors. Their findings include violations by companies such as:

Texaco, which agreed to pay $3.1 million to 186 female employees who were found to be systematically underpaid compared to their male counterparts.
Trigon Blue Cross Blue Shield, which paid $264,901 in back pay to 34 women managers who were paid less than male managers of equal qualifications and seniority.
US Airways, which agreed to pay $390,000 in back pay and salary adjustments to 30 women managers who were paid less than their male coworkers.
Corestates Financial Corp., which agreed to pay nearly $1.5 million in back wages and salary adjustments to women and minorities. The Labor Department found instances in which employees with more seniority or better performance reviews were paid less because they were women or minorities.
Other recent settlements include those by American University, American Greetings Corporation, Aramark Corporation, Fairfax Hospital, Marriott Corporation, and others.

Let's not ignore the women who face real-life experiences with discrimination. In a class action suit, more than 900 women recently filed claims of bias against Merrill Lynch -- some of them were told that they were paid less than men because the men had families to support. Universities in California, Idaho, and Georgia have all settled cases of bias. After conducting an in-depth study, MIT recently admitted discriminating against female professors and moved to change their practices. Private companies such as Ingles Grocery Stores and Home Depot have also settled cases. In May, Kodak conducted an internal study of its pay practices and voluntarily provided $13 million to women and minorities after finding discrepancies based on sex or race. In June, the EEOC sued PETCO Animal Supplies in California on the basis that it paid female managers in its East Bay stores substantially less than their male counterparts.

Individual wage discrimination cases are hard to prove and very costly to pursue, and we need better enforcement and stronger laws. But in the meantime, we cannot ignore documented cases of discrimination. Some of the women who fight and win don't have children, so taking time out of the workforce is not an issue.

Men recognize that wage discrimination exists, too. According to a 1998 survey by the Washington Post, the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University, 43% of men believe that a major reason why women do not advance to top-level executive and professional positions is because men don't want women to get ahead in the workplace. This survey echoes previous polling data on perceptions of inequalities.

What's the 74% figure really all about? The median earnings of women working full-time, year-round are 74% of the median earnings of men working full-time, year-round. Part time workers do not affect this figure.

For every woman, the wage gap is different. The wage gap is affected by many factors, including a woman's race, age, education, occupation, and geographic region. African American women earn 63 cents on the dollar and Hispanic women 54 cents compared to white males, who face no discrimination.

What about the rest of the women? An old figure quoted by opponents of pay equity solutions says that a group of women -- those between 27 and 33 who have never had a child -- earn 98 cents on the dollar. Even if this was true (which means women still earn less than men), where does that leave working women who are younger than 27 or older than 33? This single statistic has been used repeatedly by opponents since 1994, although they leave out scores of more current salary studies and surveys that find unexplained gender wage gaps.

The bottom line: Women know wage discrimination exists. Working women see the outdated attitudes that still exist today. Women are told by managers that men make more because they have families to support. They are asked about their "family-life" in interviews. They are told by employers that women are not capable of doing the "higher paying jobs" such as management. They are ignored or retaliated against when they pursue equal pay through normal company grievance procedures. These are just a few of the many, many real-life examples NCPE hears about.

Confronting the Gender Gap in Wages

By: Deborah M. Kolb, Judith Williams, and Carol Frohlinger

Inside Career Negotiation
Be Accountable
Proper Response
Me, Delegate?

Women are winning the numbers game in the workforce. They now fill almost half of the country’s managerial jobs. In 1999, about 60% of females, 16 years of age or older, worked outside the home, up from 20% at the turn of the century.

Source: Business Week
Despite equal representation among the ranks of wage earners, however, women continue to come up short in their paychecks. For the past two decades, optimists could take solace in the narrowing wage gap. For every dollar earned by a white man, a white woman now earns $.78. This figure represents a big improvement from the $.63 white women earned relative to white men in 1975.

Source: US Department of Labor
But recent trends give us reason for concern. The rate of improvement has slowed dramatically. Working from a lower base, white women made up $.11 in the 1980s, but only $.04 cents during the 1990s. And the statistics are worse for minority women: An African-American woman earns $.67 for every $1 a white man earns, while her Hispanic sister earns only $.56.

Source: US Department of Labor
The government’s General Accounting Office reports that in seven out of ten industries the gap has actually started to widen. Some gains have held. By 2000 women almost reached parity in educational services, taking home 91 cents on the dollar, up from 86 in 1995. But the big picture is hardly rosy. Over the same period, for example, a female manager in the entertainment and recreation services earned 62 cents for every dollar a male manager made, down from 83 cents in 1995.

Given the data, it’s surprising to discover that by a good margin most female managers think they have reached wage parity with their male colleagues. The statistics are sobering. 70% of female executives think they’re paid as much as males; 78% of men agree. The facts, however, show that women in management take home only 62.7% of what male managers earn (Source: Gallup, American Management Association).

The Realities and Myths Behind the Persistent Wage Gap

Like all entrenched patterns, the gender gap in wages is supported by both myth and reality. Some of the realities behind the differential require policy changes at the highest levels.

Gendered notions ofthe value of work

Traditional "women’s work" tends to be in the helping and support professions. These jobs are not yet considered comparable in worth to the work that men do.

Clustering
To the degree that women are clustered in lower paying positions, they may not think that they have much bargaining power in bridging the gender gap in pay. They compare their salaries towhat other women are making, not to what the job should command. In negotiations, when you don’t think you have much clout and are in a low-power situation, you can be overly reluctant to push for what you are worth

Interrupted careers
Women are also more likely than men to work part-time, take time off for family reasons, and to be the primary caregivers for their children or aging parents. This affects not only their take-home pay, but their career opportunities as well. Childless women, for example, currently earn 90% of their male counterparts’ salaries.

The myths, however, operate under the surface and color the perception of the wage gag - among men and women.
Work is seen as a choice for women, a necessity for men.
Forty-one percent of working women head their own households—they are single, divorced, separated or widowed - and 28% have dependent children. Yet American culture still buys into the myth of the male breadwinner.

It’s easier to say no to a woman.
People - men and women - assume that a woman will sacrifice her own needs for the sake of a good relationship and not push for what’s important to her. When a woman is perceived to be accommodating, it’s harder for her to get others to take her demands seriously or, in parallel, all too tempting to take the path of least resistance and notmake them.

Money is not a high priority for most women.
Money may be only a factor for women in salary negotiations, not the determining one. They may value other elements in a benefit package - time, ability to telecommute, etc. That does not automatically correlate to the prevalent assumption that women don’t care about being paid fairly for the contributions they make.

The Cumulative Price
Contrary to folk wisdom, women are just as likely as men are to negotiate compensation. The problem is, they don’t realize the same results from their efforts. When men negotiate an entry salary or a raise, they achieve on average a 4.3% increase from the initial figure. By contrast, when women negotiate, they realize only 2.7% more.

This gap adds up.

Over the span of a career, the lag translates into about a 35% wage differential that can be traced back to starting salaries. According to a recent study, if current wage patterns continue, a 25-year-old woman, who works full time, will earn $523,000 less than the average 25-year-old man will by the time they both retire at 65.

That’s a lot of money.

But the discrepancy affects more than a bank account or financial security. Salaries are important. They are a good index of the value an organization puts on your skills and contributions. In turn, they shape an individual’s notion of self-worth.

Narrowing the Gap

What can an individual woman do when she bumps up against the wage gap?

Plenty.

Take stock
Know precisely what skills, talents, and experience you bring to the table. Pay as much attention to your assets as your weaknesses. Once you identify your weaknesses, don’t dwell on them; consider ways of overcoming them. Get additional training where your skills could use some shoring up; figure out what strengths provide a counterbalance to a perceived weakness. Tie those skills and talents directly to what people are looking for.

Benchmark
Women often begin negotiations without the solid information about comparable salaries and pay scales that would allow them to be confident the demands they are making are both legitimate and realistic. Instead, they tend to compare their salaries to those of the other women in their field or organization and not to the full band characterizing the field.
Find out what your experience and talents command in the marketplace generally - don’t just swap stories with other women. Salary figures are readily available across a wide spectrum on websites like monster.com and hotjobs.com and in university placement offices. Talk widely to others in the industry. Tap your informal networks to find out about a specific company, whether you are thinking about joining its ranks or are up for a performance review. The more you know, the more easily you can defend a salary demand.

When you can’t figure out your worth, your chances of getting it are slim.

Develop alternatives
When you must accept what a prospective employer or a superior puts on the table, you are pretty much at his or her mercy. But if you have the possibility of another job offer or opportunities in other sectors to explore - even if they are not exactly what you want - you still have the luxury of choice. You are not held hostage to another person’s generosity.
Aggressively pursue those options; they give you greater flexibility, a better sense of the marketplace for your skills and experience, and confidence in what they are worth. When you meet challenges, this knowledge will help you push back.

Set realistic and defensible goals
Worries about encouraging unrealistic expectations for future performance can prevent women from setting their goals high and pressing those claims. For a variety of other reasons, women tend to bargain themselves down even before they open discussions. Instead of mentally whittling away at your demands, set the goals high and then test whether they are defensible, whether they can be supported by performance records and other informational resources.

Demonstrate value
Especially when the playing field is uneven, you must be prepared to position yourself to advantage. Going into a job interview or a performance review, know what you bring to the table and what you have accomplished. Lay out in specific terms what that experience could or has meant to the company and attach a price tag to it. Think of alternative ways of being compensated, not just a high base salary. Suggest a bonus contingent on performance, for example.
The gender gap in wages will not be closed overnight. As recent events show, the current backsliding must be stopped. Individual women, knowing what they are worth and ready to defend that value, can move to reverse the once-again widening gender gap in salaries—one interview and one performance review at a time.

© The Shadow Negotiation, LLC. Deborah M. Kolb is professor of management at the Simmons Graduate School of Management and founder of its Center for Gender and Organizations. She is also a senior fellow and former Executive Director of the Program on Negotiation at Harvard Law School. She holds a Ph. D. from MIT.

Carol Frohlinger is the founder of Crossell, Inc., a consultancy focused on advancing women in business. She has worked with major companies to identify and solve performance management problems. She has designed, developed and delivered highly effective training courses on negotiation, sales, sales management, leadership and team building. She holds a JD from Fordham University Law School.

Judith Williams is the founder of a not-for-profit corporation dedicated to the study of organizational change and how women can promote it. She has worked in publishing and investment banking and holds a Ph. D. from Harvard University

Kolb and Williams co-authored the award-winning book - The Shadow Negotiation, named by the Harvard Business Review as one of the top books of 2000 - and the expanded paperback edition, Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas in Bargaining, published by Jossey-Bass.

In 2001, Kolb and Williams teamed up with Carol Frohlinger of Crossell, Inc., a consultant in corporate training, to form theshadownegotiation.com. The site offers the first courses on negotiation designed by women for women. The interactive courses, available online or in CD-ROM format, feature practice cases taken from real-life situations and grew out of research for The Shadow Negotiation and Everyday Negotiation: Navigating the Hidden Agendas in Bargaining.

To find out more about current research or the challenges and opportunities women face at the bargaining table, visit the authors’ website - http://www.theshadownegotiation.com.

The Wage Gap is Alive and Well
We aren't surprised - But what can we do?
The Census Data has just been released – The Wage Gap between men and women still exists. In particular, men outnumber women in high paying jobs.

While 13% of men working full time make $75,000 or more, only 4% of women earn at this level.

The difference in wages has been decreasing steadily, but what can we do to make sure that we continue on the right path:

Employers:

Organizations need to re-evaluate their compensation plans. Do you utilize market surveys to determine what internal pay structures will be? This can perpetuate the issue of paying less for positions that have historically been dominated by females. Instead, look at the requirements of the job like experience and education and also the responsibilities. Does the job require overseeing others and using creative problem-solving or does the position have protocols in place for every task?

Implement or strengthen internal mentoring programs. These programs can provide valuable access to informal information about how to get ahead within an organization and can also provide exposure that would otherwise not be available. A strong mentoring program will increase the odds that women and minorities will receive promotions.

Look at your hire rate practices. Does your organization routinely ask candidates what they were last making and then offer a hire rate just above that? This can penalize women who have left the workforce for a period of time. Their last salary will not have kept up with the market. A better strategy is to place candidates into your wage structure at a salary that is consistent with others with similar education and experience in the role.

Women

Be an advocate for your career and wage. Know what the going rates are for your position and ask to stay at a competitive wage. If you don’t feel that you are being paid fairly where you are then go somewhere else.

Be a cheerleader for your own accomplishments. Obviously you don’t want to go overboard with this one, forsaking the team altogether. But, women tend to devalue their accomplishments and are not nearly as good as men at making sure that they get credit for their successes. If you complete a project and are proud of it, make sure that your boss knows. And let your boss’ boss know about it while you are at it too. An easy way to do this is to send out a monthly status report of all of your activities. Be sure to include any specific outcomes as well For example, “implemented “X” program which resulted in savings of $300,000 annually”. When it comes time for a promotion you will be more likely to be considered a strong contender right out of the gate.

If you do leave the workforce for a period try to stay current in your profession while you are gone. See Womans-Work.com article Preparing to re-enter the Workforce for strategies to help.

When you are ready to re-enter the workforce, do your homework before you begin to interview. Know what the going wages are in your profession for the local area. And when they ask you what you are looking to make or what your last salary was, don’t tell them. Instead, use either of the following strategies:

Tell them that you would like to make an equitable salary within their organization and pay structure based on your experience, education and anything else that you have to offer.

Use the Total Compensation defense. Tell them that you can not really quote a salary because you are interested in looking at their whole compensation program as a package. The health benefits, promotional opportunities, work environment and chances to learn, among other things, will all factor in to the salary that you would want. You can’t possibly give them an accurate figure without having all of the relevant information.

Government:

Continue the current "Glass Ceiling Audits" and expand the requirements to include a broader range of employers. Unfortunately, even though it is the right thing to do, not all organizations will work diligently to decrease the wage gap. The pain of staying the same has to be worse than the pain of changing. The added pressure of avoiding an audit, fines or lost business is an unfortunate necessity.

The numbers continue to look better. We’re making great strides but there is obviously a long way to go!

Kirsten Ross is mother of two sons and is a Certified Human Resource Professional (SPHR) dedicated to helping women achieve more life balance and to transforming the design of work.

Visit Womans-Work.com at http://www.womans-work.com to search our revolutionary flexible work job board featuring more than 35,000 fresh work from home, part time, job share, flex time and telecommuting opportunities, search for a job share partner or read valuable career, life balance and family articles. You may also email her at mailto:KRoss@Womans-Work.com

National Review
August 20, 2004, 9:39 a.m.
In the Crosshairs
Trial lawyers take aim at big-box retailers over gender discrimination.

By Carrie Lukas

The trial lawyers' hunt continues. Fast-food purveyors like McDonald's and Wendy's are showcasing salads and low-carb sandwiches to avoid drawing their attention. Tobacco companies have submitted to a slow self-annihilation, funding commercials warning customers away from their products. And now the predators have scented new prey: big-box retailers.

Costco is the latest in the crosshairs. Just this week, lawyers filed a case on behalf of 650 female employees who allege that they were passed over for promotions and are paid less than their male co-workers. Wal-Mart is already battling a similar suit, filed on behalf of 1.6 million female employees who claim the retail giant is hiding an insidious policy of keeping women down.

As the lawyers for the plaintiffs offer evidence purporting to prove systematic gender bias at Costco and Wal-Mart, they will rehash many of the arguments that feminists have been making for years. For example, feminists consider the "wage gap" — a disparity between men's and women's wages — proof positive that women are paid less because they are women. And indeed, the Department of Labor reports the average full-time working woman earns about 75 percent of the average full-time working man's salary.

The National Committee on Pay Equity uses the 75 percent figure to calculate how many extra days women must work to reach "Equal Pay Day" — it was April 20 in 2004 — when women have finally earned as much as men for the preceding year. Posters decrying "75 cents on the dollar" are regular features at feminist rallies. Press accounts often begin with this number to highlight women's poor lot in American society.

But does the wage-gap statistic actually prove sex discrimination? No. First, as often is the case, this statistic ignores as much as it reveals. The 75 percent number trumpeted by feminists doesn't account for critical factors like education, occupational choice, or years of experience. On average, women leave the workforce for about a decade in order to care for children. It's no surprise that a 35-year-old woman re-entering the workforce after ten years off earns less than a man or woman who worked continuously during that time.

Several studies have attempted to use control groups to eliminate these differences. One focused on childless men and women aged 27 to 33 and found that women in that group earned 98 cents for every male dollar. Other studies, however — such as a recent report by the General Accounting Office (GAO) — concluded that after controlling for factors such as work experience, education, and occupation, a measurable gap remained, with women earning 80 cents for each man's dollar.

Yet the GAO cautioned against attributing this difference primarily to discrimination, concluding that "we cannot determine whether this remaining difference is due to discrimination or other factors that may affect earnings." "Some experts," the report noted, "say women trade off career advancement or higher earnings for a job that offers flexibility to manage work and family responsibilities."

The GAO's admission highlights one of the great flaws in the "wage gap" debate: The assumption that all job applicants seek to maximize their pay. In fact, people consider many factors when choosing a job, including work satisfaction, proximity to home, and flexibility. For working mothers, flexibility is often a top priority. According to a Pew Research Center survey of working moms in 1997, almost three-quarters of women said a flexible schedule was "very important" when considering a job. It's hard to imagine that flexibility is as high a priority for men.

Women reading this should consider how factors other than wages have influenced their own work choices. Even women currently without children often realize that they've built in future flexibility when deciding on a career or evaluating a specific job.

Proposals to close the wage gap — like the "Fair Pay Act," sponsored by Sen. Patty Murray (D., Wash.) in 2001 — would backfire on women by undercutting incentives for businesses to offer flexibility. The Fair Pay Act would require employers to report to the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission their processes for establishing wage rates. Businesses may fear explaining that a female employee traded a cut in salary for the ability to leave every day at 4 p.m. or work from home when her child is sick. Those options might simply vanish — hardly a victory for women.

Discrimination certainly factors into the careers of some women — and no doubt some Costco and Wal-mart employees may have stories of truly unfair treatment from their managers. Yet in the coming months, as trial lawyers make a case against Costco and Wal-mart, Americans need to recognize that a statistical difference in pay isn't smoking-gun evidence of discrimination. It can be the result of individuals' acting in their own self-interest — which is usually a good thing, except perhaps when those individuals are trial lawyers.

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