“No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman’s ear”
People always try to claim that the pay gap between men and women stems from voluntary factors. Women choose not to work as hard as men. Women don’t want to prioritize careers over family. And so on. But it turns out that even if you control for those factors, men still end up earning more:
Analyzing U.S. Department of Education data on 19,000 men and women, Hill’s team found that one year out of college, women in 1994 earned 80% of what their male counterparts made. By 2003, a decade after graduation, they had fallen further behind, to 69% of men’s incomes.
Controlling for the number of hours worked, parenthood and other factors, college-educated women still earned 12% less than their male peers, according to the report.
The trick is for more women to get into science and technology. For that to happen, role models need to convey the “joy and creativity” in dry-appearing fields, says one expert. Also, women need to get more hard-nosed about bargaining, and ask for raises more often:
No employer has an obligation to whisper in the woman’s ear, “Hey, you know, you just lost out on more money because you didn’t speak up.” If she accepts the salary offered, so be it. But the consequences of failing to negotiate a first salary can lead women to lose more than $500,000 by age 60.
NOW also argues that the government should pass legislation requiring equivalent jobs to pay the same amount, which I’m pretty sure isn’t going to happen in our lifetimes.
April 25th, 2007 at 4:56 pm
Hmmm. I think we need to be a little more specific when we say “science and technology” here, because some fields, such as physics, are not good on so many levels. (Gals, I did a Ph.D. in physics so you don’t have to: yes, women can do physics, and no, the lifestyle is not a good one unless you are completely consumed with a passion for it, or happen to be a genius. Funding has been shrinking, too, so skip graduate school and go directly to that consulting job you’d have wound up in anyway. Don’t tell me I didn’t warn you.) And I know there was that NY Times article last week about trying to attract more women to computer science, but how many of the “good” jobs are there like the ones the professors quoted in the article have? Nice work if you can get it–and there’s a lot of not-so-nice, potentially offshore-able work in IT.
One good tech field that I do know of is mechanical engineering, which can lead to work in medical devices. Can’t be offshored, and there’s definitely a demand for it, and so plenty of industry jobs. Tissue engineering is also good.
I hope other people can suggest fields that also have good prospects, because I just want people to have the information that “science and technology” too much of a blanket term–there are certainly better fields and worse fields, and I want prospective female geeks to have the information that I didn’t have way back when.
June 7th, 2007 at 10:15 am
Of course the employer isn’t going to tell the woman she lost out on money–he wants to pay his employees as little as possible!
I agree that science jobs frequently suck. I actually don’t think we should encourage women to go into CS because I don’t think we should encourage anybody to go into CS the way the industry is now. Mechanical engineering, as you say, is another story. Indeed, their generally better communication skills could give women a unique leg up. (Although I do feel bad for my male geek brothers who would have even more trouble finding a job. At least until we can use genetic screening to select for offspring who don’t have Asperger’s. There is just less and less tolerance for eccentricity these days.)
June 27th, 2007 at 10:44 am
The trick is for more women to get into science and technology. For that to happen, role models need to convey the “joy and creativity” in dry-appearing fields, says one expert.
I think this is very dangerous thinking. It is rely on that ancient enemy, essentialism. It implies that women are naturally more creative, they crave light and joyful things. They would not like the hardness of science and technology that naturally appeals to men. Women need to be encouraged and molded (by men) to the fields of S&T
This does two dangerous things: It keeps women in the role of domesticity and ‘femininity,’ letting her into the ‘masculine’ world of technology on a conditional basis. Also, it maintains that it is a woman’s fault that she does not make as much money as men. She should fix the problem herself; there is no such thing as a patriarchy that holds women & men to strict, unsatisfying gender roles.