More of the same: Wage-gap edition

The usual stuff:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, single women between 22 and 30 years old earn an average of $27,000 a year, which is 8 percent more than comparable men. Women of that age earn more in 39 of the 50 biggest American cities. Source

PolitiFact debunking Obama:

In this item, we're checking the claim that "women (are) paid 77 cents on the dollar for doing the same work as men." [...]

While calculations that led to the 77-cent figure did not include any part-time workers, the label "full time worker" can actually be applied to employees with a wide range of hours worked per week.

The official Bureau of Labor Statistics definition of a full-time worker is someone who works at least 35 hours per week. Someone who gets no vacation time and works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks would work 2,080 hours in a year. By contrast, a worker on a 36-hour-per-week schedule who has two weeks off would work only 1,800 hours. Meanwhile, a worker with two weeks off who averaged four hours per week of overtime would end up with 2,200 hours. [...]

The other complicating factor involves seniority on the job. Men have typically held their jobs longer than women in the same position. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, men in 2010 who were between 45 and 54 years old had a median job tenure of 8.5 years, compared to 7.1 years for women in the same age group.[...]

The Obama campaign took a legitimate statistic and described it in a way that makes it sound much more dramatic than it actually is. The 77-cent figure is real, but it does not factor in occupations held, hours worked or length of tenure. Describing that statistic as referring to the pay for women "doing the same work as men" earns it a rating of Mostly False. Source

Kay S. Hymowitz on the wage gap:

In 2007, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 27 percent of male full-time workers had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 15 percent of female full-time workers; meanwhile, just 4 percent of full-time men worked 35 to 39 hours a week, while 12 percent of women did. Since FTYR men work more than FTYR women do, it shouldn’t be surprising that the men, on average, earn more.[...]

Among “physicians and surgeons,” for example, women make only 64.2 percent of what men make. Outrageous, right? Not if you consider that there are dozens of specialties in medicine: some, like cardiac surgery, require years of extra training, grueling hours, and life-and-death procedures; others, like pediatrics, are less demanding and consequently less highly rewarded. Only 16 percent of surgeons, but a full 50 percent of pediatricians, are women. So the statement that female doctors make only 64.2 percent of what men make is really on the order of a tautology, much like saying that a surgeon working 50 hours a week makes significantly more than a pediatrician working 37. [...]

Behind the Pay Gap, a widely quoted 2007 study from the American Association of University Women whose executive summary informs us in its second paragraph that “one year out of college, women working full time earn only 80 percent as much as their male colleagues earn.” [...] You don’t read until the end of the summary—a point at which many readers will have already Tweeted their indignation—that when you control for such factors as education and hours worked, there’s actually just a 5 percent pay gap. But the AAUW isn’t going to begin a report with the statement that women earn 95 percent of what their male counterparts earn, is it?[...]

A number of researchers have found that if you consider only childless women, the wage gap disappears. June O’Neill, an economist who has probably studied wage gaps as much as anyone alive, has found that single, childless women make about 8 percent more than single, childless men do (though the advantage vanishes when you factor in education). Using Census Bureau data of pay levels in 147 of the nation’s 150 largest cities, the research firm Reach Advisors recently showed that single, childless working women under 30 earned 8 percent more than their male counterparts did.[...]

Behind the Pay Gap found that “among women who graduated from college in 1992–93, more than one-fifth (23 percent) of mothers were out of the work force in 2003, and another 17 percent were working part time,” compared with under 2 percent of fathers in each case. Other studies show consistently that the first child significantly reduces a woman’s earnings and that the second child cuts them even further.[...]

If women work fewer hours than men do, it appears to be because they want it that way. About two-thirds of the part-time workforce in the United States is female. According to a 2007 Pew Research survey, only 21 percent of working mothers with minor children want to be in the office full-time. Sixty percent say that they would prefer to work part-time, and 19 percent would like to give up their jobs altogether. For working fathers, the numbers are reversed: 72 percent want to work full-time and 12 percent part-time.

In fact, women choose fewer hours—despite the resulting gap in earnings—all over the world. That includes countries with generous family leave and child-care policies. Look at Iceland, recently crowned the world’s most egalitarian nation by the World Economic Forum. The country boasts a female prime minister, a law requiring that the boards of midsize and larger businesses be at least 40 percent female, excellent public child care, and a family leave policy that would make NOW members swoon. Yet despite successful efforts to get men to take paternity leave, Icelandic women still take considerably more time off than men do. They also are far more likely to work part-time. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), this queen of women-friendly countries has a bigger wage gap—women make 62 percent of what men do—than the United States does.

Sweden, in many people’s minds the world’s gender utopia, also has a de facto mommy track. Sweden has one of the highest proportions of working women in the world and a commitment to gender parity that’s close to a national religion. In addition to child care, the country offers paid parental leave that includes two months specifically reserved for fathers. Yet moms still take four times as much leave as dads do. (Women are also more likely to be in lower-paid public-sector jobs; according to sociologist Linda Haas, Sweden has “one of the most sex-segregated labor markets in the world.”) Far more women than men work part-time; almost half of all mothers are on the job 30 hours a week or less. The gender wage gap among full-time workers in Sweden is 15 percent. That’s lower than in the United States, at least according to the flawed data we have, but it’s hardly the feminist Promised Land.

The list goes on. In the Netherlands, over 70 percent of women work part-time and say that they want it that way. According to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, surveys found that only 4 percent of female part-timers wish that they had full-time jobs. In the United Kingdom, half of female GPs work part-time, and the National Health Service is scrambling to cope with a dearth of doctor hours. Interestingly enough, countries with higher GDPs tend to have the highest percentage of women in part-time work. In fact, the OECD reports that in many of its richest countries, including Denmark, Sweden, Iceland, Germany, the U.K., and the U.S., the percentage of the female workforce in part-time positions has gone up over the last decade.

This one comes a bit out of the left field. Regrets people have on their deathbeds:

When Ms. Bronnie Ware, a woman who worked for years with the dying, wrote a list of the top 5 regrets people say aloud on their deathbed, we teared up a little bit here at TNW.

I wish I didn’t work so hard.

This came from every male patient that I nursed. They missed their children’s youth and their partner’s companionship. Women also spoke of this regret. But as most were from an older generation, many of the female patients had not been breadwinners. All of the men I nursed deeply regretted spending so much of their lives on the treadmill of a work existence.

Enough for now....(still too much on my to do list)

Surprise, it is a wage gap post....

We start with an excellent post via Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics
and I suggest you read it all because it is really good. Highlights:

[W]e cannot say women are paid less for doing the same work when men typically work longer, less flexible hours in more dangerous and uncomfortable positions. Warren Farrell’s calculations highlight the difference between the average hours worked, concluding that men who work full time work an average of 44 hours per week, while women who work full time average 41 hours per week. This represents a bigger difference than you’d immediately think, as a person who works 44 hours a week makes approximately 100% more than someone who works 34 hours a week. Warren Farrell concludes that this accounts for 70% of the wage gap in and of itself. [...]

Economist Thomas Sowell elaborates: “Not all domestic responsibilities can be shared equally, such as having babies, which is not an inconsequential thing since the existence of the human race depends on it. What it means is that women make choices that make a lot of sense for them. For example, the choice of occupations… women tend not to go into occupations in which there’s a very high rate of obsolescence. If you’re a computer engineer and you take five years out to have a child and [raise him] until the age you can put him in daycare, well my gosh, the world has changed. You’d have to start way, way back. On the other hand, if you become a librarian, a teacher or other occupations like that, you can take your five years off and then come back pretty much where you left off.”[...]

Denise Venable, of the National Center for Policy Analysis, further proves this point showing that, “in general, married women would prefer part-time work at a rate of 5 to 1 over married men.” Additionally, women over 25 years of age have held their current job for an average of 4.4 years vs. 5 years for men and pay raises come with seniority (Denise Venable, “The Wage Gap Myth,” National Center for Policy Analysis, April 12, 2002, http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba392) [...]

In 1982, never-married women earned 91% of what never-married men did. (12) In 1971, never-married-women in their thirties earned slightly more than never-married men (13). Today, among men and women living alone from the age of 21-35, there is no wage gap. (14) Among college-educated men and women between 40 and 64 who have never married, men made an average of $40,000 a year and women made an average of $47,000! (15)

Since 1960, and continuing through today, black women with a college degree earn more than white women with a college degree. In 1970, black women who had graduated college earned 125% of what white women who had graduated college earned. (17)

(12) “Current Population Reports,” Series P-60, No. 132, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1982, pg. 161
(13) “The Economic Role of Women,” The Economic Report of the President, 1973 Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1973, pg. 103
(14) Anita U. Hattiangadi and Amy M. Kahn, “Gender Differences in Pay,” Journal of Economic Perspective, pg. 58, Autumn 2000
(15) Warren Farrell, Why Men Earn More, Pg. 16-17, Amacom, Copyright 2005
(17) Richard Freeman, “Decline of Labor Market Discrimination and Economic Analysis,” Table 1, American Economic Review, pg. 281, May 1973

Another good one by Kay Hymowitz:

The Labor Department defines full-time as 35 hours a week or more, and the "or more" is far more likely to refer to male workers than to female ones. According to the department, almost 55% of workers logging more than 35 hours a week are men. In 2007, 25% of men working full-time jobs had workweeks of 41 or more hours, compared with 14% of female full-time workers. In other words, the famous gender-wage gap is to a considerable degree a gender-hours gap.

The main reason that women spend less time at work than men—and that women are unlikely to be the richer sex—is obvious: children. Today, childless 20-something women do earn more than their male peers. But most are likely to cut back their hours after they have kids, giving men the hours, and income, advantage.

One study by the American Association for University Women looked at women who graduated from college in 1992-93 and found that 23% of those who had become mothers were out of the workforce in 2003; another 17% were working part-time. Fewer than 2% of fathers fell into those categories. Another study, of M.B.A. graduates from Chicago's Booth School, discovered that only half of women with children were working full-time 10 years after graduation, compared with 95% of men. [...]

According to the Netherlands Institute for Social Research, in 2008 only 4% of the 70% of Dutch women who worked part-time wished they had a full-time job. A British Household Panel Survey interviewing 3,800 couples discovered that among British women, the happiest were those working part-time.

A 2007 Pew Research survey came up with similar results for American women: Among working mothers with minor children, 60% said they would prefer to work part-time, while only 21% wanted to be in the office full-time (and 19% said they'd like to give up their job altogether). How about working fathers? Only 12% would choose part-time and 70% wanted to be full-time.

An finally one interesting study:

Does Science Promote Women? Evidence from Academia 1973-2001 - Donna K. Ginther, Shulamit Kahn - NBER Working Paper No. 12691 Issued in November 2006

Many studies have shown that women are under-represented in tenured ranks in the sciences. We evaluate whether gender differences in the likelihood of obtaining a tenure track job, promotion to tenure, and promotion to full professor explain these facts using the 1973-2001 Survey of Doctorate Recipients. We find that women are less likely to take tenure track positions in science, but the gender gap is entirely explained by fertility decisions. We find that in science overall, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor after controlling for demographic, family, employer and productivity covariates and that in many cases, there is no gender difference in promotion to tenure or full professor even without controlling for covariates. However, family characteristics have different impacts on women's and men's promotion probabilities. Single women do better at each stage than single men, although this might be due to selection. Children make it less likely that women in science will advance up the academic job ladder beyond their early post-doctorate years, while both marriage and children increase men's likelihood of advancing.

Another wage gap tidbit....

How I hate it when an article does not give sources:

The Bureau of Labor Statistics looked at weekly wages instead of annual salaries, and determined that women earn 81 percent what men earn. That gap narrows to 86 cents on the dollar when hourly wages are examined.

And hourly wages among those with college degrees are at parity: The BLS figures show there is no gap between men and women.

So I looked up what the BLS had to say:

Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2010 - U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics - July 2011

Women earned 81 percent of the median weekly earnings of their male counterparts [...] Sixty-two percent of women and 56 percent of men employed in wage and salary jobs were paid by the hour in 2010. Women who were paid hourly rates had median hourly earnings of $11.83, 86 percent of the median for men paid by the hour ($13.76). (See tables 9, 10, and 18–21.)

That is where the first 2 are from, even though I am not sure if "people who were paid hourly rates" = "when hourly wages are examined". The last fact, I could not find in the statistics. Table 9 tells us that the gap by people who were paid by the hour for "Some college or associate's degree" is 83.4% while for "Bachelor's degree and higher" it is 96.9% which also isn't exactly parity but close.

These other tidbits were also interesting:

Earnings differences between women and men were widest for Whites and for Asians. White women earned 81 percent as much as their male counterparts in 2010, while Asian women earned 83 percent as much as their male counterparts. By comparison, Hispanic women had earnings that were 91 percent of those of their male counterparts, while Black women earned 94 percent as much as Black men. (See tables 1 and 14.)

Among younger workers, the earnings differences between women and men were not as great. Women earned 91 percent of what men earned among workers 25 to 34 years old and 95 percent as much as men among 16- to 24-year-olds. (See table 1.)

Among full-time workers (that is, those working 35 hours or more per week in their sole or principal job), men were more likely than women to have a longer workweek. In 2010, 25 percent of men in full-time jobs worked 41 or more hours per week, while 14 percent of females in full-time jobs worked the same number of hours. Women were more likely than men to work 35 to 39 hours per week: 13 percent as opposed to 5 percent. A large majority of both male and female full-time workers had a 40-hour workweek; among these workers, women earned 87 percent as much as men earned. (See table 5.)

The solution to figure out the wage gap usually is to keep in mind that the main reason is often women, going out of the work force due to childbirth / taking care of family obligation. Which of course correlates with younger workers who have a lower gap and men that work more hours to support their family. I looked into the data and tried to figure out if marriage rate and race could explain the racial wage gap (the idea is that if a fewer percentage of black women are married than white women this might explain the gap) but this didn't really work out.

And finally a summary of two tables in the BLS report of items where the gap is lower than 10%

Table 1. Median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers, by selected characteristics, 2010 annual averages - Women's earnings as percent of men's

16 to 19 years                   94.6
20 to 24 years                   93.8
25 to 34 years                   90.8

Black or African American        92.1
Hispanic or Latino ethnicity     90.7

Never married                    97.2

Table 9. Median hourly earnings of wage and salary workers paid hourly rates, by selected characteristics, 2010 annual averages - Women's earnings as percent of men's

16 to 19 years                   97.8
20 to 24 years                   91.7
25 to 34 years                   91.9
65 years and older               93.8

Black or African American        92.1

Never married                    95.1

Bachelor's degree and higher     96.9

A nice breakdown of the wage gap by Forbes

Hat tip goes to Reddit for that one. I do not want to copy that much so to give you the data. It is a great article though, straight to the point so I suggest you read it:

81:100 Median Wage Gap - based on 2010 data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics - compares median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers over 16

86.5:100 Weighted Median Wage Gap - based on BLS data - weighted according to the number of women in each occupation

84.8:100 Weighted Mean Wage Gap - see above

94.6:100 Weighted Median Wage Gap excluding non-discriminatory factors - based on 2010 U.S. Senate testimony from Heather Boushey, a senior economist with the Center for American Progress Action Fund, who cites an analysis by labor economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn - about 60 percent of the gender pay gap can be attributed to factors other than gender discrimination, such as choice of industry, choice of occupation, years of work experience, and union status - this does not mean that the remaining 40 percent are discrimination, just that the remaining 40 percent can not be explained by the data

92.4:100 Weighted Mean Wage Gap excluding non-discriminatory factors - see above

This reminds me of the CONSAD report that I did cite several times before:

An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women - CONSAD - 2009

There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively
account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.

The difference we see with the above (4.8 vs 5.4 and 7.1 vs 7.6) might be the difference between 2010 and 2009 numbers. Anyhow, interesting analysis. It also included a critic of how this issue is handled in the msm:

The statistic you should not be using is the 81:100 claim, and if you do use that statistic (even though you should not be using it), you should not imply that the gap is entirely or even mostly attributable to gender discrimination. To do so is beyond purposefully misleading — it’s purposefully lying. [...] I say this as someone who shares the goal of eliminating unjust discrimination against women in the workplace … but who is concerned that the inaccuracies and unfounded inferences made by movements like Narrow the Gapp and the NWLC ultimately undermine the credibility of the cause.

An important factor in women's career aspirations is their perception of how easy or difficult it is to find a husband.

An abstract found via Mensactivism.org from the Atlantic's Study of the day:

PROBLEM: These days, American women receive 57 percent of all bachelor's and 60 percent of all master's degrees in college. Are there repercussions to having this gender imbalance on campus?

METHODOLOGY: Researchers led by University of Texas at San Antonio professor Kristina Durante examined historical data on the ratio of single men to single women in each U.S. state and Washington D.C. They also looked into the desire of hundreds of female college students to focus on career or family after they led them to believe that there were either more men or less men on campus by reading one of two news article about the student population.

RESULTS: As bachelors became scarce in college, the percentage of women in high-paying careers increased, women delayed having children, and had fewer kids when they finally started a family. As for the experiment, when women read that there were fewer men than women on campus, they became more motivated to pursue ambitious careers than to start a family.

CONCLUSION: The gender ratio dramatically alters women's choices about career and family. When men are scant, women delay having children and pursue high-paying careers.

IMPLICATION: An unconscious but important factor in women's career aspirations is their perception of how easy or difficult it is to find a husband.

SOURCE: The full study, "Sex Ratio and Women's Career Choice: Does a Scarcity of Men Lead Women to Choose Briefcase Over Baby?" is published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

Women Charge Ahead At Work, While Men Lag Behind...

...is the slightly sensationalist title of this Huffington Post article. Some numbers:

In the CNN story, reporter Jessica Dickler writes that "a growing number of dads... are staying home with the kids." The story cites statistics from the Census showing that 32 percent of fathers with a wife in the workforce took care of their children at least one day a week in 2010, an increase from 26 percent in 2002. [...] BusinessWeek's story cited different statistics from the Census: Women hold more than half of all managerial and professional positions and 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands.

The Most Dangerous Jobs in America

Via the NYT, Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, 2010:

“Fishers and related fishing workers” died from workplace injuries at the rate of 200 per 100,000 full-time equivalent workers in 2009, according to the B.L.S., 60 times greater than the rate of 3.3 per 100,000 for the overall American work force. For loggers, the fatality rate was 61.8 per 100,000 and for aircraft pilots and flight engineers, 57.1 per 100,000. [...] Other dangerous occupations include farming and ranching (38.5 fatalities per 100,000 workers), roofing (34.7), structural iron and steel work– those who put up the steel frames for skyscrapers (30.3) and refuse and recycling (25.2)

[...T]he fatality rate from workplace injuries is more than nine times higher for men than for women: 5.5 per 100,000 for men, compared with 0.6 per 100,000 for women. The B.L.S. reported that 4,021 men died from workplace injuries in 2009, compared with 319 women.

Can we somehow correlate this with wage data?:

Median yearly wage (bls.gov data):
Fishers and Related Fishing Workers $30,220
Loggers $32,870
aircraft pilots and flight engineers $118,070
$60,750
farming and ranching $60,750
roofing $34,220
structural iron and steel work $44,540
refuse and recycling $34,420

Wiki gives us an overall median income for men and women based on US Census Bureau, 2003 data:

Male, age 25+: $33,517
Female, age 25+: $19,679

Black women with a bachelor's degree outearn white women with a bachelor's degree

As the headline says:

New census figures offer dramatic evidence of education's big payback: Income for African-Americans with a four-year college degree has increased so much since the civil rights advances of the 1960s that we have almost closed our historical income gap with four-year, college-educated whites.

In 2003, the latest year for which figures are available, blacks with a bachelor's degree had a median income of $36,694, which is almost as high as the $38,667 median income of whites with a bachelor's degree.[...]

The median income of black males with a bachelor's degree was $41,916, almost 20 percent lower than the $51,138 median income of similarly educated white males. Similarly educated black women had a median income of $33,142, which was lower than black male graduates, but about 10 percent higher than the $30,082 median income figure for similarly degreed white women.

White women's income appears to be lower than that of black women partly because college-educated black women are less likely to leave their careers in order to raise children, according to Census Bureau surveys.

The rich husband effect

Found via Genderama. The Reuters link:

It shows that between 1993 and 2006, there was a decline in the workforce of 0.1 percent a year on average in the number of college-educated women, with similarly educated spouses. That contrasts with growth of 2.4 percent a year between 1976 and 1992. The result: the labor force in 2008 had 1.64 million fewer such women than if the growth rate had kept up its earlier trend, slightly more than 1 percent of the total workforce in that year. [...] Albanesi links the decline in the number of well-educated, married women entering the labor force to a sharp rise in salaries for top earners in the United States, and in particular, for men. In 1975, college graduates of both sexes were making 43 percent more than non-college graduates. By 2008, the figure had risen to 92 percent for men and to 70 percent for women. "In the last 20 years, wages for highly educated males increased so much that they dwarfed the family's second income, usually the one of their wives," said Albanesi, who co-authored the study with Columbia University graduate student Maria Prados. "The result was that sometimes married women exited the labor force mid-career, exactly around the time their husbands are promoted to more senior roles. They stopped getting income they didn't need and so they left the labor force forever." [...] But as the economy stabilized in the past two years, there have been signs that the retreat has resumed, Albanesi said. Of all working-age women, 58.6 percent were either working or looking for a job in 2010, down from 59.2 percent in 2009. The Bureau of Labor Statistics expected the rate to fall further by 2020. According to Albanesi, it's not the tug of looking after young children that makes most educated women give up their career. "These women usually give up their jobs when their children are school-age and not babies any more," Albanesi said. Studies by the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and Harvard support that view.[...] But the trend is not limited to top earners. It has been detected among households earning around $80,000 per year.

Shorter work days and flexibility vs creating wealth

Found via a link in a link in a link or so. Sometimes I wonder if I even should give credit. The first link was via Reddit though. Anyhow we are talking about what different things men and women want in the context of work:

The study found that while 5.6 percent of men would opt for fewer work hours, 10.1 percent of women would prefer less time spent in the office. The gap might reflect women’s disproportionate share of household responsibilities, the researchers say. Another explanation might be that women just feel they need to spend more time at home with their children.

The results, detailed in the April issue of the U.S. Department of Labor's Monthly Labor Review, have implications for understanding why women’s participation in the labor force, which had climbed in the early 1990s, has leveled off over the past five to 10 years, said the study’s lead author Lonnie Golden, a Penn State University economist.[...]

Golden analyzed data from the 2001 U.S. Current Population Survey, in which more than 57,000 individuals responded to supplemental questions involving work-hour preferences. The survey, conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau, produces monthly and annual-average estimates of the nation’s employment and unemployment.[...]

The findings related to women in the workplace point out a need for re-structuring of the workplace, Golden said. Economists and other labor researchers have debated whether women leave the workforce because they are happier at home or because the workplace is too rigid and prevents a balanced work-home life.

There was also this study:

Differences between women and men MBA entrepreneurs: exploring family flexibility and wealth creation as career motivators - Richard DeMartino, Robert Barbato - 2002

The purpose of this study was to compare male and female entrepreneurs with similar backgrounds; in particular, all received MBA degrees from a top-tier business school. [...]

Although the male and female entrepreneurs have similar backgrounds, demographics, and timing and age of their businesses, several differences were found. When asked about the career motivators that were most important, women entrepreneurs preferred a career that gave them flexibility and allowed them to balance their career with their family obligations. While these were the most important considerations for women entrepreneurs, they were among the
least important for male entrepreneurs. In contrast, the male entrepreneurs were most motivated by careers that would allow them to create wealth, while female entrepreneurs indicated that creating wealth and career advancement were the least important motivations. The differences between these two groups were large and meaningful. This confirms the findings of previous researchers (Geoffee and Scase, 1983; Scott, 1986; Kaplin, 1988, Buttner, 1993) who also found similar differences. This finding also contradicts the findings of previous research by Fischer et al. (1993), who found that women entrepreneurs were more motivated by financial considerations than male entrepreneurs.

These differences became even larger when the comparison was between married women and men entrepreneurs with dependent children. This helps to explain the findings of Caputo and Kolinsky (1998), who found that the presence of children increased the propensity of women to start their own businesses. The percentage difference between the two groups increases in every career motivator in this study with the largest increases occurring in the motivations to meet family obligations and have family friendly policies. Most of the increase in difference occurs, however, because of the effect of dependent children on women entrepreneurs. For the most part, married male entrepreneurs with dependent children do not differ from unmarried male entrepreneurs in terms of their career motivations.
Conversely, an alternative dynamic appears to emerge when comparing single women and men without dependents to married women and men without dependents. When this comparison is made, gender differences emerge in only one of the six variables tested, i.e., wealth creation. This finding reinforces the importance of dependent status on career
motivators for women entrepreneurs and confirms the research of Still and Timms (2000).

In summary, the findings of this study support previous research that women are using entrepreneurship as a career choice that provides them flexibility to manage family obligations. It provides a nuanced view of these differences when the motivations of men and women are compared by marital and dependent status. Overall, women differ from men by possessing a higher intensity of preference for family-related motivators. The most significant differences, however, emerged when comparing married women with dependents and married men with dependents. Comparisons between single and married men and women without dependents did not demonstrate statistically significant differences. It is important to underscore that the gender differences detected in this study, which compares MBA graduates, are similar to those reported in other studies. This is an important point, because some researchers suggest that previously reported differences could be a result of women having less business knowledge and education and lower potential for advancement. This study, however, concludes that these differences can also be explained by differences in career motivators. The study provides evidence in support of those studies that suggest that women entrepreneurs are more motivated by the need to balance work and family responsibilities.

Entrepreneurship as a career can offer a degree of flexibility and balance that some other careers do not offer. This study provides some clues as to why women-owned businesses now make up 40% of all businesses and why women continue to start businesses at twice the rate of men.

To highlight one sentence from the above study "Comparisons between single and married men and women without dependents did not demonstrate statistically significant differences". This, as well as the wage-gap for single childless women, teaches us an interesting lesson, when it comes to the wage gap as well as motivations behind it, we will find less blatant discrimination and more different life choices. So everyone who points out the 77c number is missing the mark. It those differences come from nature or nurture is a different question. I am sure the answer is both, to what degree is debatable. As for nurture, one thing I'd like to mention as well which often is forgotten in feminist discussion on this topic, it goes for both men and women. We raise men to be the provider and raise women to be the nurturer. Depending on the influence of nature (I always like to cite a women's experience during pregnancy / breast feeding, which gives women an edge when it comes to bonding, as an example) we might not be able to produce equal results (= no pay gap), we should however work hard to make both roles for everyone acceptable. Feminists did a good job in opening up the provider role for women, it is time we do something for men/fathers.

What if women don’t need guys any more, and guys don’t care?

I do not usually like opinion pieces, stuff with no hard data in it. However this one had a nice feel to it:

Except after a while I started wondering if it really was a bad thing after all. It only makes you nervous if you believe men are losing a position they aspired to: breadwinner, provider, working stiff. What if feminism only recognized half the problem, i.e. the female half? What if it wasn’t only women who’d been shunted into a role they didn’t want, what if men had as well?

[...I]t could also be that a great number of men – perhaps the majority – filled the roles they did because they felt it was expected of them. And in defining new roles for women – releasing them to be professionals and careerists – feminism also released men from the expectation that they must spend their lives in jobs they didn’t aspire to, fulfilling roles they didn’t ask for.

I can understand that. I don’t mind working for a living, but, given a choice, I could think of better things to do. I have a career because it was expected. There was never an option: you went to school and then you got a job. And if you got married, you paid the bills. Maybe if you were lucky your wife worked too and helped with the expenses, but she had a choice about it and you didn’t.

I suspect a lot of men are like that. A few were dying to get out of school, get into the workforce and make a lot of money. But quite a few more did what was expected. Ideally you found a job you liked that paid well. More likely you got one that paid OK and you could stand. Some put up with jobs they hated or bosses they loathed because the pay was too good or it was the best they could find. The worst-case scenario was a job you hated at crummy pay.[...]

Men weren’t there to pursue their dreams or fantasies, they were there to earn. [...]

Men, on the other hand, have largely been ignored, on the apparent assumption that they had what they wanted and didn’t need any special care. As long as you taught them to read and write, and maybe do a little math, they were set. They’d reach working age and automatically set out to earn a living, because it was in their nature. It’s what they wanted.

Except maybe not. While the little girls have been getting lessons in striving, the little boys have been absorbing the message that they no longer have to. (They may look like they’re not paying attention in class, but, really, they do pick up on these things). If there’s no stigma to little Betty growing up to earn a fat paycheque, maybe there’s also no shame to little Billy refusing to do so.

It sounds like a good answer to all the "OMG, MEN ARE SUCH SLOBS NOW!!11!!" post one sees on a daily basis.

(Found via reddit)

The wage gap - simple math edition

Inspired by a redditor:

Men work 56% of hours.
That means that men work 56 out of 100 hours while females worked 44 out of 100 hours.
(44/56)*100 = 78.57%

So, women worked 78.57% of the hours men worked. Let's see the % of money of men's earnings that women earned
(36,278/47,127)* 100 = 76.979%
So, women worked 78.6% of the hours men worked, and earned 77% of the money. This is a proportional and expected amount, based on hours worked.

Reality is probably not that simple, but before that, the sources are this factsheet by the Department of Labour Statistics (Slide 10 - Source US Department of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, Current Population Survey, and Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2011) and men's and women's media income as cited here (Source: Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009 (2010)). The first one had another interesting statistic right next to the hours worked, namely fatal work injuries (Women: 7% Men: 93%) which also tells us there is more to the story. One think that fascinated me is the way we can look at the numbers. When you hear 56% of hours worked wear by men you would say that was fairly equal however men working about 22% more hours as compared to women has a total different ring. So what happens when we calculate the wage gap as percentage of total wages?

177 Dollars total earned (77 by women, 100 by men) -> 44% of Dollars earned are earned by women

That has a totally different ring to it right? Of course beside the simple math, there is also this CONSAD report:

An Analysis of Reasons for the Disparity in Wages Between Men and Women - CONSAD - 2009

There are observable differences in the attributes of men and women that account for most of the wage gap. Statistical analysis that includes those variables has produced results that collectively
account for between 65.1 and 76.4 percent of a raw gender wage gap of 20.4 percent, and thereby leave an adjusted gender wage gap that is between 4.8 and 7.1 percent.

This all came in light of the recent Times article and speculation that we might soon have a wage gap in women's favour, and you know what, I also posted about this as I like to highlight women's power on the job market, however than I came around the official statistic behind this. The articles read almost 40% of women earn more than their husband now look at this:

Labor Force Statistics from the Current Population Survey - BLS - Table 25. Wives who earn more than their husbands, 1987–2008

2008:
Families in which wives have earnings but husbands may not - Wives earning more: 34.5%
Families in which both wives and husbands have earnings - Wives earning more: 26.6%

Number of husbands where husbands do not have earnings: 4083 from 37988 or 11%

Anybody notice what is missing here? What about families where wives have no earnings? Might the numbers look a bit different there? I get the feeling we will still have a wage gap for a very long time. Attention, I am not saying this is a good thing, quite the contrary, I do believe it would be healthier for men to choose fatherhood above trying to reach the highest pay check. Maybe it is about time to empower fathers.

The Richer Sex?

There is a current trend in the links that I follow that centers around women's economic and educational access. Probably sparked by a new Times article (behind a paywall) which was based on a new book. As usual, I am listing facts that I could gather:

The tipping point is a generation away, assuming women's economic power keeps rising as expected. But already, the trend is stunning enough that TIME made it the subject of its current cover.

"Almost 40% of working wives out-earn their husbands," noted Liza Mundy, author of "The Richer Sex"--both the cover story and a new book that goes by the same title--at a breakfast in New York City, hosted by TIME and Fortune.

[...] Mundy's research shows that women are out-earning men all around. In most U.S. metro areas, for instance, single childless women in their 20s have higher median incomes than their male peers. In Dallas and Atlanta, the average young woman earns $1.18 and $1.14, respectively, for every dollar earned by a male.

Why such rapid advancement? The Pill, Mundy said, helped spark the trend 50 years ago: Newly able to delay marriage and childbearing, women began focusing on their careers. America's shift to a service economy also favors college grads, who increasingly tend to be female. Today, women make up 60% of U.S. college classes and earn more masters and doctorate degrees than men.

What can stop women from out-earning men in more than 50% of U.S. households? "Nothing that I can see," Mundy, who writes for the Washington Post (WPO), told TIME Executive Editor Nancy Gibbs at the breakfast. Some industries, such as veterinary medicine, are so populated with women that few men are now entering them, she said. She calls the phenomenon "gender pollution." In 25 years, law and medicine may well be female-dominated. - Source

This one was interesting as well, it reminded me about some articles I have seen before, thought the jobless rate of women was a bit higher:

The CHART OF THE DAY shows the unemployment rates for men and women at least 16 years old, according to data compiled by the Labor Department. Last month, the jobless rate for female workers was lower by 0.1 percentage point at 8.2 percent. In January, the rates for both sexes were the same, 8.3 percent.

This year’s figures erased a gap that peaked at 2.6 points in May 2009, when a greater proportion of men were out of work. The differential was the largest since the government started tracking the numbers in 1948. [...]

Even so, women are more likely to stay in school and get the college education needed for jobs in health care and other expanding industries, according to Dutta. He highlighted this trend in a report published on March 6, during International Women’s Week.

“The problems for men are mounting,” he said. “They just don’t have the skills for today’s labor force.” - Source

A look at the future:

Women in the workforce are set to earn more than men for the first time in history, according to new research.

The next generation of female employees in the U.S. will take home more money than their male peers across all sectors of employment.

The phenomenon marks such a cultural shift in the American way of life that author and journalist Liza Mundy used it as the basis for her book, The Richer Sex.

The 2011 study, titled Women in America: Indicators Of Social And Economic Well-Being, pieced together data from a half a dozen government agencies.

It found that the greatest changes for women had been their gains in education and in the workforce - which has resulted in people marrying later.

College-educated women get married on average around the age of 30, compared with 26 for women who don't go to college.

The proportion of women who are married has dropped from 72 per cent in 1970 to 62 per cent in 2009.

However Ms Mundy's research has found that marriage rates for women in high-income brackets were on the rise as opposed to low-earners. - Source

Note to self, read that 2011 study. And finally:

From a BLS report released earlier this month, “America’s Young Adults at Age 24“:

“At age 24, a clear gender gap in educational attainment persists. While nearly 28 percent of women had received a bachelor’s degree by the October when they were age 24, only 19 percent of men had done so (see chart). Additionally, nearly the same percentage of men and women (12 and 13 percent, respectively) were enrolled in college at age 24, so it is unlikely the gap in educational attainment will close.”

In other words, for young adults at age 24 there are 148 women who have earned a bachelor’s degree (or more) for every 100 men. At age 23, there are 164 women holding a college degree for every 100 men, and at age 22 the F:M ratio for college degrees is 187:100.

[...]In 2010, a multi-partisan group of thirty-four scholars made a proposal that President Obama create a White House Council on Boys and Men, as a parallel program to the White House Council on Women and Girls. Warren Farrell, the leader of the effort, identified five different areas in which boys are in crisis—education; jobs; emotional health; physical health; and fatherlessness. In an interview with Forbes, Farrell said that “The White House Council would signal to the world that boys and men are facing problems, alert schools and parents as to the nature of these problems, and alert all the nation’s institutions to explore how attending to these problems might help our sons, daughters, families and nation.” One educational issue to be addressed by the Council would be the huge gender gaps in educational attainment for young adults illustrated by the BLS report. - Source

There is no Council yet and I doubt that that will happen anytime soon.

Do Women Shy Away From Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?

That is the question by the study with the same name: Competitive high ranking positions are largely occupied by men, and women remain scarce in engineering and sciences. Explanations for these occupational differences focus on discrimination and preferences for work hours and field of study. We examine if absent these factors gender differences in occupations may still occur. Specifically we explore whether women and men, on a leveled playing field, differ in their selection into competitive environments. Men and women in a laboratory experiment perform a real task under a non-competitive piece rate and a competitive tournament scheme. Although there are no gender differences in performance under either compensation, there is a substantial gender difference when participants subsequently choose the scheme they want to apply to their next performance. Twice as many men as women choose the tournament over the piece rate. This gender gap in tournament entry is not explained by performance either before or after the entry decision. Furthermore, while men are more optimistic about their relative performance, differences in beliefs only explain a small share of the gap in tournament entry. In a final task we assess the impact of non-tournament-specific factors, such as risk and feedback aversion, on the gender difference in compensation choice. We conclude that even controlling for these general factors, there is a large residual gender gap in tournament entry. - Muriel Niederle & Lise Vesterlund, 2007. "Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?," The Quarterly Journal of Economics, MIT Press, vol. 122(3), pages 1067-1101, 08.

And while we are at it, more of women work and educational status...

Found via the many SAHD resources:

For the first time, American women have passed men in gaining advanced college degrees as well as bachelor's degrees, part of a trend that is helping redefine who goes off to work and who stays home with the kids.

Census figures released Tuesday highlight the latest education milestone for women, who began to exceed men in college enrollment in the early 1980s. The findings come amid record shares of women in the workplace and a steady decline in stay-at-home mothers.

[...]

Among adults 25 and older, 10.6 million U.S. women have master's degrees or higher, compared with 10.5 million men. Measured by shares, about 10.2 percent of women have advanced degrees compared with 10.9 percent of men — a gap steadily narrowing in recent years. Women still trail men in professional subcategories such as business, science and engineering.

When it comes to finishing college, roughly 20.1 million women have bachelor's degrees, compared with nearly 18.7 million men — a gap of more than 1.4 million that has remained steady in recent years. Women first passed men in bachelor's degrees in 1996.

Some researchers, including Perry, have dubbed the current economic slump a "man-cession" because of the huge job losses in the male-dominated construction and manufacturing industries, which require less schooling. Measured by pay, women with full-time jobs now make 78.2 percent of what men earn, up from about 64 percent in 2000.

Unemployment for men currently stands at 9.3 percent compared with 8.3 percent for women, who now make up half of the U.S. work force. The number of stay-at-home moms, meanwhile, dropped last year for a fourth year in a row to 5 million, or roughly one in four married-couple households. That's down from nearly half of such households in 1969.

The census numbers come from the government's Current Population Survey as of March 2010. Among other findings [...] Among adults 25 and older, women are more likely than men to have finished high school, 87.6 percent to 86.6 percent. - Source

Women now fill a majority of jobs in the U.S., including 51.4 percent of managerial and professional positions, according to U.S. Census Bureau data. Some 23 percent of wives now out-earn their husbands, according to a 2010 study by the Pew Research Center. And this earnings trend is more dramatic among younger people. Women 30 and under make more money, on average, than their male counterparts in all but three of the largest cities in the U.S. - Source

Workplace discrimination - 2 sides of the coin....

Some stereotypes hurt both sexes, heck, probably all stereotypes do. I have often heard how men feared being alone with children in fear of having a false accusation being made against them. Be it in kindergarten or in school or whatever place you could think of where a false accusation could ruin your career. The same seems to be true in the workplace:

The CWLP research shows that sponsorship is the critical promotional lever for women stuck just below the top layer of management. However, fear of being even suspected of an illicit sexual liaison causes 64 percent of senior men to pull back from one-on-one contact with junior women; conversely, for the same reason, 50 percent of junior women are hesitant to have one-on-one contact with senior men.

These fears are often well founded. As mentioned in my previous post, illicit relationships (between a boss and a subordinate) wreak havoc in teams.

Income and Income

I made this argument here several times as you will see when you look at my articles about the wage gap, and the spending power of women. Here is the economic connection:

Why do we care about the wage gap? B/c its a proxy of wealth? Any economist will tell you that income can be measured as good and serviced produced OR as goods and services consumed. Maybe we chose to examine the gender wealth gap in production terms b/c its simply convenient and objectively measured (ie payroll), but I can’t help but think that we don’t discuss wealth in consumption terms b/c feminists would really rather not explore a dimension of the gender binary that would very probably find a female privilege.

Attention, I am not an economist, and certainly do not wish to become one. But did do some digging around:

National income is the amount of goods and services produced in a country over a year, measrued in terms of money. It is the sum total of wages, rents, interests and profits received annually by the citizens of a country. It can also mean the rewards paid to the four factors of production -- land, labour, capital and organization -- over a year for their cooperation in producing goods and services consumed by the people of the country. - Business Environment - A.C. Fernando

He does not seem to be far off. I am not sure if that is only about the national level, but the points still stands. I believe if we look at a gap in terms of spending power, there will be a gap in the other direction.

More on the ugliness penalty for men

I already blogged about this, apparently there is more:

A team at the Leuphana University of Lüneburg in northern Germany questioned more than 3,000 people about their career, and compared this with rankings of how attractive they were.

The results suggest that being one point more attractive was worth a three percent wage hike, while being five points more attractive boosted a career by the same amount as having a university degree.

Professor Christian Pfeifer said his study, published this week in the Applied Economics Letters journal, also showed that the importance of looks in the workplace was even more important for men than it was for women.

Act surprised people. Found via Typhonblue on Reddit. Thanks.

The ugliness penalty - worse for men

Hattip to reddit. Looks affect your earning potential. I have certainly heard that one before, apparently it affects men even more so. Consider me surprised. An article about Daniel S. Hamermesh book Beauty Pays:

[Beauty Pays] attempts to explain why attractive people make more money than unattractive people. A lot more money, in fact: $230,000 over the course of a lifetime, which holds true even in professions where looks wouldn’t seem to matter. Hamermesh found that fetching professors, for example, earn 6 percent more than their average-looking peers, while unattractive quarterbacks earn 12 percent less than their hunkier counterparts. Men, in fact, suffer the greater repulsiveness penalty in general: Unattractive women earn 3 percent less than average-looking women, while unattractive men’s take-home is reduced a whopping 22 percent.

But wait—how can something as subjective as beauty hold any value in an economic context? Therein lies the cold truth at the heart of these findings: A common standard of beauty does exist. Based on an attractiveness scale of one to five, most people surveyed will come to near agreement on a test subject’s looks, a finding that holds true across all cultures. And while extreme beauty and extreme ugliness are rare, 10 to 15 percent or so of the population falls into the “below-average attractiveness” category, where they will endure their pronounced asymmetries as long as they live. Beauty is not only scarce, it turns out, but unobtainable to those born without it: Studies show that homeliness is approximately as easy to change as race, which is to say, it’s not.

Interesting. Also an older study by Hamermesh google dug out.

Gender equality myth: Women 'want rich husbands, not careers'

Headline via Mail online. So what do we have here. A new report by Catherine Hakim of the London School of Economics published by the Centre for Policy Studies:

[...]Despite years of equality campaigning, more women are choosing to marry wealthy men than in the 1940s

[...]Women’s aspiration to marry up, if they can, to a man who is better-educated and higher-earning persists in most European countries,’ she said. ‘Women thereby continue to use marriage as an alternative or supplement to their employment careers.’
The research, which drew on existing data drawn from Britain and Spain, showed that 20 per cent of British women married husbands with a significantly better education than their own in 1949.
By the 1990s, the percentage of women deciding to ‘marry up’ had climbed to 38 per cent – with a similar pattern repeated in the rest of Europe, the US and Australia.

[...]Dr Hakim added: ‘It is thus not surprising that wives generally earn less than their husbands, and that most couples rationally decide that it makes sense for her to take on the larger share of child care, and to use most or all the parental leave allowance.’ Her report also suggests that many women do not want to admit they want to be a housewife – even to their partners.
‘It has become impossible to say, “I wouldn’t mind being a housewife,” she said.
‘It is so politically incorrect that a lot of women don’t want to admit it.’

[...]‘Women today have more choices than men, including real choices between a focus on family work and/or paid employment.
‘Despite this, many politicians and feminists appear disappointed with the slow pace of change in women’s attainment of top jobs.
Sex differences are treated as self-evident proof of widespread sex discrimination and sex-role stereotyping rather than the result of personal choices and preferences.
‘Demands for further change rest on faulty assumptions and dated evidence. The latest research shows that most of the theories and ideas built up around gender equality in the last few decades are wrong.
‘Despite feminist claims, the truth is that many men and women have different career aspirations, priorities, and life goals.
‘Policy makers should therefore not expect the same job outcomes.’

The full report can be read here.