From: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Newsgroups: talk.politics.misc
Subject: Re: WELFARE:  AN IDEA
Date: 4 Sep 92 01:53:09 GMT
Reply-To: egl1@cunixf.cc.columbia.edu (Elizabeth G. Levy)
Organization: Columbia University

In article <Bu09qw.3v7@apollo.hp.com> nelson_p@apollo.hp.com (Peter Nelson) writes:
>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?
>
>

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.

In regard to legal action, how sympathetic have the conservative
courts and regulatory agencies been?  Gains in employment equity by
women have been evaporating for the past decade.  For instance,
Reagan's FCC "cut back on information it compiled on women and
minority employees, making it virtually impossible to document
discriminiation in class-action suits." (p.372)

>>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.
>
>

Yes, there is a concentration of women in service jobs.  Faludi notes
that the proportion of women in white-collar jobs has been shrinking,
while the proportion of women in traditionally-female jobs has
increased.  This does not account for the all of the inequity: "as
much as 45 percent of the pay gap is caused by sex segreation in the
work force." (p.365; her sources are _American Woman 1988-89_, which I
suppose is a statistical book; "Is Sex Discriminiation The Root Wage
Differences?" from _Women at Work_, April 1989)  As noted, the entire
pay gap cannot be accounted for by gender segregation.  I
unfortunately don't have the basic sources handy, and won't be back on
campus until next week.  If you wish, I can hunt them up in the
future.

>>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. 

In Michael Lewis's _Liar's Poker_, he noted that the women recruits at
Salomon Brothers were relegated to backroom equity department
positions.  The men consistently landed the more glamorous, fixed
income department positions.  Hint: investment banks made their money
off the bond traders, and rewarded them quite well.  These were all
recruits, so you can't say that one was more experienced, had more
seniority, etc., than the other.  This is anecdotal, but perhaps
instructive.

Why would women prefer to relegate themselves to low-paying, dead-end
clerical jobs?  Doesn't this go against notions of rationality? Faludi
details Sears, for instance.  "The average female salesworker earns
$226 a week; her male counterpart earned $431.  In retail, that's
largely because the average department store is still set up like the
traditional family household, with the women dusting the cosmetics
counters and straightening the dress racks in the minimum- wage
'ladies' departments, while the men adjusted television sets and
maneuver hot-water heaters in the 'big ticket' departments -- and rack
up big commissions on these sales."  She notes that Sears was
investigated for sex discriminiation in 1973.  "At least 40% of the
applicants who met the requirements for commission sales were women.
Yet, in the five years before the EEOC launched its investigation,
less than 10 percent of the high-paying commission sales jobs had gone
to women each year."  This was despite the fact that large numbers of
women were applying to commission sales jobs.  The suit was filed by
the EEOC in 1979, as the political climate was shifting, and "in 1986,
the company won -- with help from a judge who had trouble believing
that any working woman had ever faced discrimination."





--
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