Posted on 04/23/2007 6:58:28 AM PDT by presidio9
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.
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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.
I experienced this first-hand just as this article says. I became a programmer right out of college (mainframes) in 1979, and I was paid significantly less than my male colleagues with the exact same experience and background.
I can certainly understand the pay gap years later after women spend time out of the work force, but right out of college it should not exist. Granted, it’s anecdotal, my experience was some years ago and I have no pay disparity issues now, but I was by no means the only woman so affected. I wasn’t even married at the time. My best friend was passed over for promotion a half-dozen times by male colleagues with less experience and fewer skills, until she finally left for a friendlier company.
It seems to me to be more of a corporate thing rather than a small business problem. Small businesses appreciate talent more than personality - again, anecdotal.
Ping to post #21
Operative word is “earn”. In three different factories, it’s almost always been men who half-kill themselves scrounging for all the overtime they can get, and it’s been men who volunteer for the special installation and start-up projects with hard deadlines. Many of my coworkers, through the years, have been warned that they were bumping up against internal “maximum work hours allowed” rules, and ordered to take a day off. None of those so warned were female.
One of the reasons I joined the Navy was to be paid the same as men. And I was. Women tend to choose fields where the pay is lower and they spend less time in the workforce due to childrearing. These are CHOICES women make. There is no conspiracy to pay women less. Once again, the liberals are pointing out a “problem” which doesn’t exist.
Your real-life experience is precisely the truth. I have NEVER seen even one example of gender-based wage differences. I have worked in computers for over 30 years, and the pay scales are identical, as adjusted for individual experience. Not only that, every government installation must as a matter of law and policy have identical scales. This whole thing sounds like feminist propaganda. If some women prefer to go into fields other than those that have identical pay for productivity, that is no concern of mine.
Same background my wife has, with the same resulting equal pay.
“It seems to me to be more of a corporate thing rather than a small business problem. Small businesses appreciate talent more than personality - again, anecdotal.”
My wife had similiar experiences in the late 1970’s, but that pretty much ended by the mid to late 1990’s. No disputing it was the case ‘back then’.
I just don’t see anything to support thats the way things are Today.
Maybe its because I’m a small business owner, and can’t afford to lose high quality staff over something so ridiculous.
Isn’t it also coming up on “Take your kids to work day”???? (Used to be Take your Daughter to work day) Seems they trot this out at that time of the year also...and I think it’s in May....I wrote an op-ed on it once....
Most of the teams that I've been on have been disproportionately male. The women on them have been very, very smart and even more meticulous - IMHO, because they needed to be in order to keep up with the guys. To clarify that statement... I haven't worked with *any* women (yet) that have been either willing or able to pull the incredibly long hours, travel, and frankly, BS, that the job sometimes demands - If I make a mistake, I may work all night to fix it. The women on my teams, as a rule, don't make mistakes and don't put themselves in positions like that. To quote Dilbert, they "Work Smarter, not Harder."
I've no idea about pay, from what little idle office gossip I've picked up, I'd say that it's competitive. When I was a manager of a PC team, I know for certain that the jobs paid the same irregardless.
Where my complaint with studies like this comes from is that they're non-specific. If, for instance 1000 IT staffers (mostly male) were compared with 1000 Day Care Workers (mostly female)...the pay discrepancies would be huge, I'm sure. Comparing 1000 male IT workers, with 1000 female IT workers, would lower the discrepancy, I would think.
I've been playing with computers for almost that long...nothing like mainframes though. I got a TI99/4a Home Computer (you know, the ones that plugged into your PC) when I was a kid, and I haven't stopped since then.
How old are you?
PC=TV. Nothing like PCs back then. LOL!
If you can in fact get away with paying women less, wouldn’t you as an employer choose to hire ONLY women? Think of the savings!
You have to remember what the study is not saying. They are not saying it was for the same jobs. So they are comparing comparing apples and oranges and making a conclussion about them.
I have a neice who is one of the brightest people I know, Scored top of the charts in all tests, graduated first in her class, state sience fair champion. She is now in college. Is she studying science, engineering or medicine? No! She is majoring in art and languages! Incredible waste of talent in my opinion.
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