From: nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson)
Subject: Re: WELFARE:  AN IDEA
Date: Thu, 3 Sep 1992 14:04:08 GMT
Organization: Hewlett-Packard Corporation, Chelmsford, MA

In article <1992Sep3.050223.29627@news.columbia.edu> egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy) writes:
>In article <Btyxz8.JAB@apollo.hp.com> nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
>>
>>  Could you please document this income disparity?   All of the
>>  reports I hear about "women making $0.68 for every $1 men" make
>>  do not account for the differences in work, experience, etc.  
>>  How big an income disparity exists between men and women when
>>  you're comparing the same jobs, years of experience, and education?
>
>There are a fair number of details in Susan Faludi's _Backlash_.  She
>notes that women with a college diploma earn 59 cents for every dollar
>a man earns.

  Again by itself this is meaningless since it doesn't address the
  question of jobs, experience, etc.  That's why I said "same jobs,
  years of experience, and education".  Maybe women tend to major
  in Art History, English, and Education ("soft" subjects typically 
  leading to low-paying jobs, or jobs out of the field) and maybe
  men major in Engineering, the "hard" sciences, and Business Admin-
  istration (which may lead to higher-paying positions).  Also men 
  may tend to stay on the job longer, whereas women may be more
  likely to take time off to have families, thus giving men the 
  experience edge.  Or men may simply be more likely to work 
  longer hours: in the computer field all the the people I know
  who have a real passion for computers -- the nerdly ones (like me) 
  who do the same stuff at home as a hobby as we do for work are 
  men -- the women I know are more "it's a job, 9-5".  But nerdly
  passion definitely gives you an edge. 
  

  If you can show me that men and women doing the same work with the 
  same experience and education, have big income disparities I would
  be quite interested -- I'm not saying these don't exist, just that
  I haven't seen them documented and if they were I think they would
  be easily actionable, legally.   Do male and female software
  engineers writing similar types of software and having similar 
  degrees and years of experience suffer income disparities?


>work to screenwriting to real estate management, as US Labor Dept data
>detail.  By 1989, the pay gap for women in all full-time managerial
>jobs was growing worse again; that year, while the average male
>manager enjoyed a four-percent income boost, his average female
>counterpart received none.
        
  Again, meaningless without details.  In the US real wages for
  white collar workers rose 13% 1979-1989 while manufacturing
  workers and service workers suffered a drop in real wages 
  (despite a 42% increase in manufacturing productivity during 
  that time, but this is orthogonal to this topic) (source:
  Business Week)   Anyway the main thing is that service jobs are
  an ever-larger % of the job market so if women are concentrated
  in such areas (and they are) this alone might account for your
  numbers.


>The majority of the pay gap can still be accounted for by the fact
>that women tend to be relegated to the secretarial pool instead of
>high-pay, high-skill type jobs, but there is still a dispartiy withing
>various fields.

  This is what you haven't documented.  And I would also question
  whether "women are relegated" to these fileds or whether they
  "relegate themselves".  After gains in the early 70's female admissions
  to university engineering programs were *down* in more recent years. 
  

---peter




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