From: bhv@areaplg2.corp.mot.com (Bronis Vidugiris)
Subject: Men vs Women's earnings
Organization: Motorola, CCR&D, CORP, Schaumburg, IL
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 16:12:02 GMT

In article <1992Jul30.235059.21466@fid.morgan.com> sethb@fid.morgan.com (Seth Breidbart) writes:

)The most recent comparisons I've read about indicate that the
)differential is quite small, when people with similar educational and
)training backgrounds, and similar amounts of time in the workforce,
)are compared.  Single women earn (on average) 95% as much as single
)men.  Married men earn more than single men, and married women earn
)less than single women.  So blame the differential on marriage.

---

I think the actuality is more complex than that.  My impression is that
a lot of the explantion for the low wage gap between single men and single
women is probably the low age of single men & single women.  The wage gap
tends to grow with time.  

Here is some data from a 1984 Census Bureau study.  (Based on a survey
program called SIPP).  They also did a regression analysis - and it would
appear that marriage increases men's earnings per hour  by about 3% and
decreases women's earnings per hour by about the same amount from this
analysis.  So marriage is a factor in earnings, but I think the demographics
are what shifts the .68 figure for earnings per hour up into the .90 range
more than the actual fact of the marriage itself.

Also note from the second table the relatively less experience women have
in the workplace than men do.

I've used the table that shows both education and total work experience
(lifetime) here, but ignores the 'tenure on current job' - which is
important, but not as important as the other two factors.  Not that this
data is still *not* for the same job - it's comparable education and
experience only.

I should also mention that the use of earnings per hour is significant - men
and women tend to work different hours (men working more hours).  I'd like to
see a graph of total pay vs hours worked for both men and women, but 
unfortunately I don't have that data.

I'm not entirely sure that the .95 figure for single men vs single women is
exactly comparable to these figures - there may be some other differences
in definition & methodology between them.

----

note: R is ratio of female to male earnings.  These are average earnings
per hour of men and women.

                                    years of education

                          <= 12yrs       12-15years        16yrs+
          all workers     not hs grad    hs grad          college grad
work                                                      
exp.      M    F     R    M    F     R   M     F     R    M     F    R

<=5       6.83 5.48 .80   5.21 4.49 .86  6.36  5.13 .81   9.15  7.42 .81
5-9       8.15 6.62 .81   8.15 6.62 .81  6.54  5.01 .77  10.71  8.88 .83
10-19    10.77 7.78 .72   7.84 5.86 .75  9.93  7.25 .73  14.03 10.32 .74
20+      12.22 7.80 .64   8.89 5.69 .64  11.59 7.55 .65  17.19 11.44 .67

Percent of (all) workers having specified work experience vs gender

work                   
exp.      M    F     R 

<-5     8.8  14.3  1.63
5-9    18.5  27.9  1.51
10-19  32.3  35.1  1.08
20+    40.4  22.8   .56

---

In addition, to give some idea of what relative earnings are like for the
same job, I present the IEEE data for engineers.  I don't have any more
general data than for this one occupation, unfortunately.  Also, this is
total earnings data (median earnings per year in $1000's)  not earnings per
hour, and is median rather than average.

1990 IEEE salary survey.

Experience   Number        Median   
             M    F        M     F     Ratio - F/M median earnings per year
<= 3       318   41       33.7  35.0   1.04
3-4        292   30       40    34.4    .86
5-6        342   44       44    42.3    .96
7-9        458   45       50    49.5    .99
10-14      769   37       58    52      .90
15-19      597   21       64    58      .91
Newsgroups: alt.discrimination