From: mpolen@suntory.mips.com (Michael Polen)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: WELFARE:  AN IDEA
Date: 4 Sep 92 21:55:41 GMT
Reply-To: mpolen@suntory.mips.com (Michael Polen)
Organization: MIPS Computer Systems, Inc.
NNTP-Posting-Host: suntory.mips.com

Elizabeth G. Levy) writes:
|> Peter Nelson) writes:
|> >Elizabeth G. Levy) writes:
|> >>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
|> >
|> >  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?
|> >
|> >
|> 
|> You deleted my citation on PR work (where a woman stands to lose $1
|> million on gender).  Surely men and women working in this one industry
|> would have comparable salaries.
|> 
|> 
|> >>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. 
|> 
There are two issues here.  Are women treated fairly in same job/same experience
etc, and are women given an opportunity to be in the same job with the same
experience.   The two are closely related. 

Every study I have seen reported documents a very solid glass ceiling which 
prevents women from rising in a companies management heirarchy.  This suggests
that they are obviously not treated equally, and that they are not given the
opportunity to have the "same job / same experience" as the men they work
with.

Yesterday, PBS reported a study that showed that the majority of applicants
for teaching jobs were men, but that the great majority hired were women.
Most of the hirers were men.  Women are channeled by society ( or ?) into
lower paying jobs.

Finally, research into the education process shows that young girls are
quickly channeled into jobs and careers which do not compete with boys.
Even the teachers who do it are unaware of it.  I have seen interviews
with teachers who were sure they were treating boys and girls equally,
and were shocked when they were shown videotapes of their activity so
they could see what they were really doing.  (AAUW studies).
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