This is cool stuff. A new study says that the wage gap can be narrowed by having more women in high-ranking positions.
The study, which was announced at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association, reports that U.S. women earn more money if other women in their company are in senior-level positions.
The study answers for the first time what happens to workers when women break through the glass ceiling, and is based on 1.3 million American workers in nearly 30,000 jobs and 79 metropolitan areas."The glass ceiling is about all women, not just women who become managers," said Philip N. Cohen, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill who announced the study here Friday at the 101st meeting of the American Sociological Association. "If women break through the glass ceiling, it helps other women."
...Cohen and University of California at Irvine sociologist Matt L. Huffman found that women earn about 81 percent of what men make, and that figure remains unchanged when the number of junior-level women managers rises from 2 percent to more than 50 percent. But when women become senior managers, female workers earn 91 percent of men's salaries.
The whole article on this study is a good read, so check it out.
The piece also has a (somewhat) unrelated quote from Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in there that made me all sad. Ginsburg was speaking at the meeting about getting more women in the judiciary and said that since Sandra Day O'Connor's retirement, “I have been all alone in my corner on the bench.�
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Although I'm inclined to believe that the conclusion of the study is correct, I'm feeling a little disturbed about the way that conclusion is being drawn.
There's no reference to the study itself, so I can't go inspect it personally, but I'm seeing a jump from correlation of places with female senior officers and more equitable pay to a claim of causation that having female senior officers generates equitable pay. With nothing in between.
Okay, the conclusion may be correct (it's certainly plausible), but you can't go from the former to the latter. Correlation is not causation. Another perfectly viable hypothesis is that businesses with a less sexist culture, which in general pays women more equitably than men, are more likely to end up with a woman in the top spot.
*sigh* Missed cleaning this up on a last minute wording change. It should read, of course, "... which in general pay women more equitably..."
I entirely agree with Zed's criticism. At the same time, there is one piece of evidence supplied in the article that this correlation is really the result of causation, namely the LA/NY differences. Were New York just generally less sexist than Los Angeles, we'd see more female junior managers in New York rather than just senior manager.
"Senior manager" should of course read "senior managers."