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Debunking The Myth of a Mythical Gender Pay Gap




Many years ago, when I started my speaking business I had a standard fee for a one hour program. I had been working as a speaker and trainer for several years traveling around the country and teaching part time at Florida State and working on my Doctorate. My programs were consistently given the highest ratings possible and when I was on a program with other speakers,  I was consistently rated as the best speaker. I mentored a few men who wanted to become speakers and began to realize the disparity of pay between men and women. The men I mentored shared  with me that when they were hired to give speeches to clients that I had referred them to the clients immediately offered them more money than they paid me. The men did not ask for or negotiate an increase my clients simply offered them more money. In all these cases the men were younger than me, did not have as much education as I did, and did not have the expertise or ANY experience as a speaker or trainer. They were quite simply male. That was years ago, so things are different now right? 

 Recently, some people are arguing that there is not a true disparity in pay that the pay disparity between men and women is a myth. Here is an article that will hopefully make you see that gender bias is unfortunately alive and kicking. 
Here is the quote I want to start with
"Bryce Covert pointed out in The Nation, men performing what have traditionally been seen as “women’s jobs” make more than women do, just as women make less than men for doing traditional “men’s work.” 
This article was published in  Moyers and Company 
April 8, 2014
by 
While me Americans lament the fact that in 2014 women still earn around 20 percent less than men, others perform intellectual gymnastics to deny that a gender pay gap exists, or to blame women themselves — and the “choices” they make — for its persistence.
Today, Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs, two scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, got the assignment for The Wall Street Journal. After acknowledging that, yes, women working full-time earn about one-fifth less than what men take home, they write, “but every ‘full-time’ worker… is not the same.”
Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings.
Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS (US Bureau of Labor) reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men’s earnings in 2012.
The supposed pay gap appears when marriage and children enter the picture. Child care takes mothers out of the labor market, so when they return they have less work experience than similarly-aged males.
Let us first note that explaining why a phenomenon exists is not the same as demonstrating that it doesn’t exist. It’s not a “supposed pay gap” just because women pay an economic price for having kids.
Its here that the AEI fellows readily acknowledge a huge factor in the gender-gap: the biological reality is that women give birth, and the social reality is that women still bear a disproportionate share of the burden of caring for sick kids or elderly parents. When they take time off to do those things, they lose seniority and often end up looking for a new job after a period of time outside the labor force — neither of which is good for your paycheck.
In 2001, Karen Kornbluh estimated that women’s earnings drop by 7.5 percent with a first child and 8 percent with a second. It also explains why the wage-gap starts out small when men and women first hit the labor market and then grows significantly when they start having families.
So our economy punishes women for the biological reality that they bear children. The AEI guys are apparently fine with that — and want you to believe that it somehow renders the pay gap a “myth” — but it’s important to understand that it doesn’t need to be this way. The US is one of only three countries — along with Liberia and Papua New Guinea — that doesn’t require employers to offer maternity (or paternity) leave. When American women have a baby, their jobs often aren’t waiting for them to return; in most other developed countries, they are. This is a big reason why only four high-income countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have larger gender pay gaps than the US.
Perry and Biggs go on to argue that women are paid less because they choose to pursue degrees that result in lower earnings and work in fields that pay less than those dominated by men.
There are two problems with that. First, as Bryce Covert pointed out in The Nation, men performing what have traditionally been seen as “women’s jobs” make more than women do, just as women make less than men for doing traditional “men’s work.”
Among the BLS’s thirteen industry categories, women make less than men in every single one. What this means is that even in “women’s fields,” men are going to rake in more. In fact, men have been entering traditionally female-dominated sectors during the recovery period, and as The New York Times noted, they’re meeting with great success—“men earn more than women even in female-dominated jobs.” Women can enter engineering all they want, but their pay still won’t catch up to men’s.
There’s also a chicken-and-egg issue here: do jobs seen as “women’s work” pay less because they’re inherently less valuable to society, or do they pay less because they’re dominated by women?
The gender pay gap is very real, and there are complex reasons for its stubborn persistence. But even accounting for all the differences in childrearing, career choices and education doesn’t explain away the entire difference in earnings. While it’s no longer socially acceptable, old-fashioned, Mad Men-style sexism is still around, and it still hits women in the wallet. Perry and Biggs use a paper — one often cited by conservatives — by two of their AEI colleagues to dismiss this reality, writing that when all other factors are accounted for, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% [of the gap] but may not be present at all.”
That finding, however, is an outlier. As Pamela Coukos, a senior program advisor at the Department of Labor, wrote in 2012, “studies consistently conclude that discrimination is the best explanation of the remaining difference in pay.”
Economists generally attribute about 40% of the pay gap to discrimination – making about 60% explained by differences between workers or their jobs. However, even the “explained” differences between men and women might be more complicated. For example: If high school girls are discouraged from taking the math and science classes that lead to high-paying STEM jobs, shouldn’t we in some way count that as a lost equal earnings opportunity? As one commentator put it recently, “I don’t think that simply saying we have 9 cents of discrimination and then 14 cents of life choices is very satisfying.” In other words, no matter how you slice the data, pay discrimination is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families.
Unfortunately, the “fact-checking” organizations, as they so often do, are seizing on statements that women earn less “for the same work” to conclude that the gender pay-gap is an “exaggeration.” Of the claim, made by Obama in a campaign ad, FactCheck.org states flatly that it’s “not true.” (They also say that he “implied” that “discrimination by employers is responsible for the difference,” but there’s nothing in the ad implying anything of the sort — they just inferred it.)
Their fact-check is “mostly false” — women working the exact same jobs are paid less than their male counterparts every day, for various and often complicated reasons, and those claiming it’s all a myth offer nothing to dispute that reality.

Joshua Holland was a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com and now writes for The Nation. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right 
Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter.









Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
Posted by Patti Wood at

Why Women Are Paid Less, The Value of the Job Drops Once a Women Takes the Job


Why Women Are Paid Less, The Value of the Job Drops Once a Women Takes the Job

I was talking to a friend the other night about gender based pay disparity. He mentioned the research that the disparity is due to women taking on jobs that allow them to take care of their families and that those jobs are paid less. But, I feel the disparity is due to a much more complex set of variables. One contributing factor that is not surprising is that, "Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” and the women in that job are paid less. Here is the article that explains that: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html?_r=0

Followed by another article that debunks the debunking of the pay gap between women and men.
illmoyers.com/2014/04/08/debunking-the-myth-of-a-mythical-gender-pay-gap/

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html?_r=0

Women’s median annual earnings stubbornly remain about 20 percent below men’s. Why is progress stalling?
It may come down to this troubling reality, new research suggests: Work done by women simply isn’t valued as highly.
That sounds like a truism, but the academic work behind it helps explain the pay gap’s persistence even as the factors long thought to cause it have disappeared. Women, for example, are now better educated than men, have nearly as much work experience and are equally likely to pursue many high-paying careers. No longer can the gap be dismissed with pat observations that women outnumber men in lower-paying jobs like teaching and social work.
A new study from researchers at Cornell University found that the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.
Consider the discrepancies in jobs requiring similar education and responsibility, or similar skills, but divided by gender. The median earnings of information technology managers (mostly men) are 27 percent higher than human resources managers (mostly women),according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data. At the other end of the wage spectrum, janitors (usually men) earn 22 percent more than maids and housecleaners (usually women).
Once women start doing a job, “It just doesn’t look like it’s as important to the bottom line or requires as much skill,” said Paula England, a sociology professor at New York University. “Gender bias sneaks into those decisions.”
She is a co-author of one of the most comprehensive studies of the phenomenon, using United States census data from 1950 to 2000, when the share of women increased in many jobs. The study, which she conducted with Asaf Levanon, of the University of Haifa in Israel, and Paul Allison of the University of Pennsylvania, found that when women moved into occupations in large numbers, those jobs began paying less even after controlling for education, work experience, skills, race and geography.
And there was substantial evidence that employers placed a lower value on work done by women. “It’s not that women are always picking lesser things in terms of skill and importance,” Ms. England said. “It’s just that the employers are deciding to pay it less.”
A striking example is to be found in the field of recreation — working in parks or leading camps — which went from predominantly male to female from 1950 to 2000. Median hourly wages in this field declined 57 percentage points, accounting for the change in the value of the dollar, according to a complex formula used by Professor Levanon. The job of ticket agent also went from mainly male to female during this period, and wages dropped 43 percentage points.
The same thing happened when women in large numbers became designers (wages fell 34 percentage points), housekeepers (wages fell 21 percentage points) and biologists (wages fell 18 percentage points). The reverse was true when a job attracted more men. Computer programming, for instance, used to be a relatively menial role done by women. But when male programmers began to outnumber female ones, the job began paying more and gained prestige.
While the pay gap has been closing, it remains wide. Over all, in fields where men are the majority, the median pay is $962 a week — 21 percent higher than in occupations with a majority of women, according to another new study, published Friday by Third Way, a research group that aims to advance centrist policy ideas.
Today, differences in the type of work men and women do account for 51 percent of the pay gap, a larger portion than in 1980, according to definitive new research by Francine D. Blau and Lawrence M. Kahn, economists at Cornell.
Women have moved into historically male jobs much more in white-collar fields than in blue-collar ones. Yet the gender pay gap is largest in higher-paying white-collar jobs, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn found. One reason for this may be that these jobs demand longer and less flexible hours, and research has shown that workers are disproportionately penalized for wanting flexibility.
Of the 30 highest-paying jobs, including chief executive, architect and computer engineer, 26 are male-dominated, according to Labor Department data analyzed by Emily Liner, the author of the Third Way report. Of the 30 lowest-paying ones, including food server, housekeeper and child-care worker, 23 are female dominated.
Many differences that contributed to the pay gap have diminished or disappeared since the 1980s, of course. Women over all now obtain more education than men and have almost as much work experience. Women moved from clerical to managerial jobs and became slightly more likely than men to be union members. Both of these changes helped improve wage parity, Ms. Blau’s and Mr. Kahn’s research said.
Yes, women sometimes voluntarily choose lower-paying occupations because they are drawn to work that happens to pay less, like caregiving or nonprofit jobs, or because they want less demanding jobs because they have more family responsibilities outside of work. But many social scientists say there are other factors that are often hard to quantify, like gender bias and social pressure, that bring down wages for women’s work.
Ms. England, in other research, has found that any occupation that involves caregiving, like nursing or preschool teaching, pays less, even after controlling for the disproportionate share of female workers.
After sifting through the data, Ms. Blau and Mr. Kahn concluded that pure discrimination may account for 38 percent of the gender pay gap. Discrimination could also indirectly cause an even larger portion of the pay gap, they said, for instance, by discouraging women from pursuing high-paying, male-dominated careers in the first place.
“Some of it undoubtedly does represent the preferences of women, either for particular job types or some flexibility, but there could be barriers to entry for women and these could be very subtle,” Ms. Blau said. “It could be because the very culture and male dominance of the occupation acts as a deterrent.”
For example, social factors may be inducing more women than men to choose lower-paying but geographically flexible jobs, she and Mr. Kahn found. Even though dual-career marriages are now the norm, couples are more likely to choose their location based on the man’s job, since men earn more. This factor is both a response to and a cause of the gender pay gap.
Some explanations for the pay gap cut both ways. One intriguing issue is the gender difference in noncognitive skills. Men are often said to be more competitive and self-confident than women, and according to this logic, they might be more inclined to pursue highly competitive jobs.
But Ms. Blau warned that it is impossible to separate nature from nurture. And there is evidence that noncognitive skills, like collaboration and openness to compromise, are benefiting women in today’s labor market. Occupations that require such skills have expanded much more than others since 1980, according to research by David J. Deming at Harvard University. And women seem to have taken more advantage of these job opportunities than men.
Still, even when women join men in the same fields, the pay gap remains. Men and women are paid differently not just when they do different jobs but also when they do the same work. Research by Claudia Goldin, a Harvard economist, has found that a pay gap persists within occupations. Female physicians, for instance, earn 71 percent of what male physicians earn, and lawyers earn 82 percent.
It happens across professions: This month, the union that represents Dow Jones journalists announced that its female members working full time at Dow Jones publications made 87 cents for every dollar earned by their full-time male colleagues.
Colleen Schwartz, a Dow Jones spokeswoman said, “We remain absolutely committed to fostering an inclusive work environment.”
Certain policies have been found to help close the remaining occupational pay gap, including raising the minimum wage, since more women work at the lowest end of the pay scale. Paid family leave helps, too.
Another idea, Ms. Liner of Third Way said, is to give priority to people’s talents and interests when choosing careers, even if it means going outside gender norms, for instance encouraging girls to be engineers and boys to be teachers. “There’s nothing stopping men and women from switching roles and being a maid versus a janitor except for social constructs,” she said.
Correction: March 25, 2016 
An earlier version of this article misstated the percentage of the gender pay gap that two Cornell economists said could be attributed to pure discrimination. They determined it was 38 percent, not 9 percent.

The Upshot provides news, analysis and graphics about politics, policy and everyday life. Follow us on Facebook and Twitter. Sign up for our newsletter.
A version of this article appears in print on March 20, 2016, on page BU1 of the New York edition with the headline: Why Women Still Get the Short End of the Dollar. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe

 http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/20/upshot/as-women-take-over-a-male-dominated-field-the-pay-drops.html?_r=0


Every year on Equal Pay Day, while some Americans lament the fact that in 2014 women still earn around 20 percent less than men, others perform intellectual gymnastics to deny that a gender pay gap exists, or to blame women themselves — and the “choices” they make — for its persistence.
Today, Mark Perry and Andrew Biggs, two scholars at the American Enterprise Institute, got the assignment for The Wall Street Journal. After acknowledging that, yes, women working full-time earn about one-fifth less than what men take home, they write, “but every ‘full-time’ worker… is not the same.”
Men were almost twice as likely as women to work more than 40 hours a week, and women almost twice as likely to work only 35 to 39 hours per week. Once that is taken into consideration, the pay gap begins to shrink. Women who worked a 40-hour week earned 88% of male earnings.
Then there is the issue of marriage and children. The BLS (US Bureau of Labor) reports that single women who have never married earned 96% of men’s earnings in 2012.
The supposed pay gap appears when marriage and children enter the picture. Child care takes mothers out of the labor market, so when they return they have less work experience than similarly-aged males.
Let us first note that explaining why a phenomenon exists is not the same as demonstrating that it doesn’t exist. It’s not a “supposed pay gap” just because women pay an economic price for having kids.
Its here that the AEI fellows readily acknowledge a huge factor in the gender-gap: the biological reality is that women give birth, and the social reality is that women still bear a disproportionate share of the burden of caring for sick kids or elderly parents. When they take time off to do those things, they lose seniority and often end up looking for a new job after a period of time outside the labor force — neither of which is good for your paycheck.
In 2001, Karen Kornbluh estimated that women’s earnings drop by 7.5 percent with a first child and 8 percent with a second. It also explains why the wage-gap starts out small when men and women first hit the labor market and then grows significantly when they start having families.
So our economy punishes women for the biological reality that they bear children. The AEI guys are apparently fine with that — and want you to believe that it somehow renders the pay gap a “myth” — but it’s important to understand that it doesn’t need to be this way. The US is one of only three countries — along with Liberia and Papua New Guinea — that doesn’t require employers to offer maternity (or paternity) leave. When American women have a baby, their jobs often aren’t waiting for them to return; in most other developed countries, they are. This is a big reason why only four high-income countries in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development have larger gender pay gaps than the US.
Perry and Biggs go on to argue that women are paid less because they choose to pursue degrees that result in lower earnings and work in fields that pay less than those dominated by men.
There are two problems with that. First, as Bryce Covert pointed out in The Nation, men performing what have traditionally been seen as “women’s jobs” make more than women do, just as women make less than men for doing traditional “men’s work.”
Among the BLS’s thirteen industry categories, women make less than men in every single one. What this means is that even in “women’s fields,” men are going to rake in more. In fact, men have been entering traditionally female-dominated sectors during the recovery period, and as The New York Times noted, they’re meeting with great success—“men earn more than women even in female-dominated jobs.” Women can enter engineering all they want, but their pay still won’t catch up to men’s.
There’s also a chicken-and-egg issue here: do jobs seen as “women’s work” pay less because they’re inherently less valuable to society, or do they pay less because they’re dominated by women?
The gender pay gap is very real, and there are complex reasons for its stubborn persistence. But even accounting for all the differences in childrearing, career choices and education doesn’t explain away the entire difference in earnings. While it’s no longer socially acceptable, old-fashioned, Mad Men-style sexism is still around, and it still hits women in the wallet. Perry and Biggs use a paper — one often cited by conservatives — by two of their AEI colleagues to dismiss this reality, writing that when all other factors are accounted for, “labor market discrimination is unlikely to account for more than 5% [of the gap] but may not be present at all.”
That finding, however, is an outlier. As Pamela Coukos, a senior program advisor at the Department of Labor, wrote in 2012, “studies consistently conclude that discrimination is the best explanation of the remaining difference in pay.”
Economists generally attribute about 40% of the pay gap to discrimination – making about 60% explained by differences between workers or their jobs. However, even the “explained” differences between men and women might be more complicated. For example: If high school girls are discouraged from taking the math and science classes that lead to high-paying STEM jobs, shouldn’t we in some way count that as a lost equal earnings opportunity? As one commentator put it recently, “I don’t think that simply saying we have 9 cents of discrimination and then 14 cents of life choices is very satisfying.” In other words, no matter how you slice the data, pay discrimination is a real and persistent problem that continues to shortchange American women and their families.
Unfortunately, the “fact-checking” organizations, as they so often do, are seizing on statements that women earn less “for the same work” to conclude that the gender pay-gap is an “exaggeration.” Of the claim, made by Obama in a campaign ad, FactCheck.org states flatly that it’s “not true.” (They also say that he “implied” that “discrimination by employers is responsible for the difference,” but there’s nothing in the ad implying anything of the sort — they just inferred it.)
Their fact-check is “mostly false” — women working the exact same jobs are paid less than their male counterparts every day, for various and often complicated reasons, and those claiming it’s all a myth offer nothing to dispute that reality.

Joshua Holland was a senior digital producer for BillMoyers.com and now writes for The Nation. He’s the author of The Fifteen Biggest Lies About the Economy (and Everything Else the Right Doesn’t Want You to Know about Taxes, Jobs and Corporate America) (Wiley: 2010), and host of Politics and Reality Radio. Follow him on Twitter.



Patti Wood, MA, Certified Speaking Professional - The Body Language Expert. For more body language insights go to her website at www.PattiWood.net. Check out Patti's website for her new book "SNAP, Making the Most of First Impressions, Body Language and Charisma" at www.snapfirstimpressions.com. Also check out Patti's YouTube channel at http://youtube.com/user/bodylanguageexpert.
Posted by Patti Wood at
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