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January 27, 2006
Gender Pay Gap, Yet Again.
Yet more from the EOC on the gender pay gap.
Last year the pay gap between men and women was 17% for full-time workers and 38% for part-time workers, compared with 20% and 41% respectively five years ago in 2000.
Much of this is explained by women choosing to take career breaks to have families or opting for lower paid jobs - so-called occupational segregation. But a proportion of the gap is still attributed to employers discriminating against women.
As we know from previous discussions, the pay gap between men and women is not as those figures in the first paragraph suggest. The pay gap between part time men and part time women in the private sector is 11%. The misreporting is because the EOC are lying bastards, deliberately skewing the figures to make themselves look important (did you know that the EOC is going to be merged with all of the other discrimination bodies, like the CRE, so there’s some bureaucratic infighting going on as to who has the biggest problem to tackle and thus should be the most important in the new bureaucracy?).
The second paragraph contains what I think to be much of the actual reality. Yes, there might be some direct discrimination against women and the important questions are why and how much. The EOC isn’t helping matters by this sort of analysis:
As discussed earlier at the ASI, there are at least three pay gaps. Between public and private workers. Between full time and part time. And between male and female. Lumping all of them together as "the gender gap" helps no one. Except the bureaucrats who get bigger budgets to address the situation, of course.
For example, in that first para. The gender pay gap for part timers is actually lower in the private sector than public.
One more small thought. If women are being paid less how does this mean that employers are losing out on women’s skills? Paying less for the same work (which is what is being claimed) is actually a benefit to the employer, not a failure or problem.
Me, I think that much or most of the actual gender pay gap is to do with either having or being thought to be having children at some point in the future. Whether you think that’s something that needs to be addressed by governmental action is entirely another thing. And it’s entirely possible that increasing maternity rights and the like will make it worse.
January 27, 2006 in Current Affairs | Permalink
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Comments
The EOC is going to be merged with all of the other discrimination bodies; all into one department? Won't that be a place to work.
Perhaps we could all aspire to it in our future careers.
Posted by: Chuckles | Jan 27, 2006 1:25:13 PM
Yet more from the EOC …
You mean from a Guardian reporter working from an EOC press release, not the EOC itself. There is a big difference (just as with the frequently confused reporting of the life sciences based on misunderstood press releases). The relevant EOC press release, by contrast, openly and accurately states:
Women working full-time are earning 17.1% less per hour than men working full-time. Women working part-time earn 38.4% less than men working full-time, a pay gap which has barely shifted over the last 30 years.
I see no clear reason to treat the massively disproportional shunting of women into part-time work, influenced as it is by our collective failure to maximise productivity by offering flexible working hours (one way in which women’s lesser pay is a measure of how far employers are losing out on women’s skills), as so vastly different from the many other forms of occupational segregation. And while you’re right that on the ASHE figures ‘The gender pay gap for part timers is actually lower in the private sector than public’, you ignore the crucial fact that the private sector has a greater proportion of women in part-time work than the public sector, so that the per hour difference between female part-timers and male full-timers is of even greater importance there.
As it happens, I would like to see the EOC adopt a measure that was blind to whether workers were part-time or full-time, so that those fewer men working part-time would get included in the overall gender gap figures. But it wouldn’t make quite as much difference as your rhetoric perhaps risks suggesting: those pay gap figures would be 21.5% per hour (mean gross pay excluding overtime) across all sectors, 18% in the public sector, and 27% in the private sector.
But I can certainly understand the EOC’s thinking about how they calculate the part-time pay gap. Women working part-time are in a rather different situation than men, because they tend to work part-time for a much longer extent of their working lives than men do (which of course is part of the process of cumulative discrimination). In any case, far from lying about it, the EOC are entirely open about how they calculate their figures, as press release after press release demonstrates.
being thought to be having children at some point in the future
And that has nothing to do with sexism, how?
Posted by: Contradictory Ben | Jan 27, 2006 2:51:19 PM
"And that has nothing to do with sexism, how?"
Because it is an entirely rational business decision. Businesses pay people to do a job. The more likely they are to not do that the higher the risk. The higher the risk of failure, the lower the reward offered.
Posted by: Rob Read | Jan 27, 2006 2:56:46 PM
"Me, I think that much or most of the actual gender pay gap is to do with either having or being thought to be having children at some point in the future." - Good God Tim, even you're at it, have been reading the guardian too much or spent too long in the portugese sun?
Women earn less than men because they make less than men. Indeed, if one were to base out rewards against production you may well find that women are paid more per unit they produce than men. Nobody makes women choose arts and humanities degrees, nobody makes men choose maths, science and engineering degrees, and its nobody's fault that the world is prepared to pay more for the technical skills. Its nobody's fault that the Chinese are likely to value a tunnel boring machine more highly than a dancing lesson.
Tim adds: Well, I’ve slightly gone beyond that. Even when you account for different jobs and sectors, there is still a gender pay gap. The interesting question to my mind is whether this is rational (ie, based on productivity, like you say, and caused by the career break for children) or irrational, simply prejudice.
Posted by: johnny bonk | Jan 28, 2006 2:31:13 AM
One of the most interesting things about occupational segregation is the way that relative wages seem to fall over time as occupations become feminised. Secretarial work and teaching spring to mind. Will we see the same effect in occupations such as general practice or the law in years to come?
Tim adds: Indeed, an interesting question. I posed it myself recently.
Posted by: Dave | Jan 28, 2006 5:42:16 PM
As regards the law, a very large proportion of lawyers are self-employed (all barristers, all sole solictiors, and all partners in law firms), and they bill clients by the hour. Given that law firms are not based on physical capital, if partners start taking too much of the pie, then the barriers to solicitors starting their own firms are low. So, wages ought not to fall, unless women are willing to accept lower pay in general. I do rather hope not.
Posted by: Marcin | Jan 29, 2006 9:24:20 AM
Rob Read:
But the gender gap in wages is not proportional to actual absences for family care, let alone the mere risk of childbirth: women are more penalized for their absences from work than men are. For example, research by Wendy Olsen and Sylvia Walby, Modelling Gender Pay Gaps (Equal Opportunities Commission, 2004) [PDF, 3.8 MB] suggested that only 14% of the British gender gap can be explained as a result of interruptions to work for family care.
Do you have any evidence that expectant and recent fathers are also paid less because of the potential for sleepless nights, absence from work, and distraction at work? Do you have any evidence that the gender difference in pay is proportional to the difference is risk? You yourself have provided confirmation that a sliding scale of pay to risk is not always operational, by stating your policy of radical discrimination on Tim’s blog:
Everyone who runs a business with their own money (like me) won’t employ women of impregnable age. Why? They can ignore their contract. Businesses pay people to do a job, not knock out children.
Of course, what I have said here leaves aside the issues about how a sexist society structures the roles of men and women in the first place, which have always been central to the debate over their different earnings.
Johnny Bonk:
Women earn less than men because they make less than men. Indeed, if one were to base out rewards against production you may well find that women are paid more per unit they produce than men.
Do you have any objective evidence of that, or are you just making it up? The only study I have seen which attempts to compare sex differences in manufacturing wages with sex differences in actual productivity is Judith K. Hellerstein, David Neumark, and Kenneth R. Troske, ‘Wages, Productivity, and Worker Characteristics: Evidence from Plant-Level Production Functions and Wage Equations’, Journal of Labor Economics, 17/3 (July 1999), 409–46. Their analysis of differences in the demographic makeup and productivity of manufacturing plants in the American Worker Establishment Characteristics Database suggests that while female manufacturing workers might be slightly less productive, their wages are lower than men’s to a much greater degree than that difference would lead one to expect.
Taking into account both spheres of life, women could easily be seen more productive than men, because so many of them hold down a job, do the housework, and look after their family, whereas their male partner just has to sit through a 9 to 5.
Nobody makes women choose arts and humanities degrees, nobody makes men choose maths, science and engineering degrees
Isn’t it funny how you left medicine out of your list? Actually, society hampers the progress of women in the maths, science, and engineering at all levels. At a very early age (as we know from children’s drawings), society inculcates the image of the scientist in a white coat as male. Maths tests often feature examples which appeal to boys more than girls (e.g. male-dominated sports). Even in academia, wives end up advancing their husbands’ careers by doing the majority of the housework and family care and even moving home to suit their husbands’ research not their own. And then there’s the glass ceiling in engineering wages. See, for example, Londa Schiebinger, Has Feminism Changed Science? and also her Sexual Science, for some of the achievements of eighteenth-century women in science in the face of united male opposition.
Its nobody’s fault that the Chinese are likely to value a tunnel boring machine more highly than a dancing lesson.
What are you talking about? The highest paid people in the real world are not the workers who manufacture things, nor the scientists who design them, but the executives who manage the companies but often don’t have science degrees.
Posted by: Contradictory Ben | Jan 29, 2006 11:19:04 PM
I think that women actually make more money than men if they have the same commitment to making money as men, but I have no way to prove this.
Posted by: Half Sigma | Jan 30, 2006 3:10:30 PM
You ignorant, SOB. Try some scholarly reasearch!! I am disgusted by your lack of any useful information.
Posted by: SpartanGirl | Feb 27, 2006 3:21:01 AM
