Last semester I read an interesting article for class about how even when the wage gap looks like its getting better for certain professions, you really should look at how the demographic for that profession has shifted overtime. In most cases, it was alarming to see how women aren't necessarily getting paid more, men are just simply leaving those particular professions.
For example, back in the day secretarial work was a man's job. when women started entering the workforce, they came in at that level and others similar to it and men simply went elsewhere, no longer competing.
I'm wondering how the numbers and shifts play out in this study. Any one have thoughts on this? I feel like we need to know a little more about how the data was collected, etc.

I've always found it interesting that one common gripe about the "wage gap myth" is that women should just get better educations. If you look across the board, higher education usually means a bigger wage gap, not a smaller one, as this chart illustrates.

This sort of graphic illustrates my problem with pop-statistics in general. The first point I notice is the jobs with the lowest weekly wage inequality have the smallest variance in hours worked per week. Doctors, lawyers, and most professionals can work anywhere from 100 hours to 30 or 40 whereas a highschool teacher would have a much smaller range in hours per week. So is it fair to imply that female doctors earn 40% less for the same work if you're not controlling for hours?

Secondly you're not controlling for age. If men are disproportionately older in the professional jobs it is unfair to compare them to largely younger females. And since these are the jobs that tend to pay a lot more for seniority (think partner at law firm) it needs to be controlled.

I guess my real problem is these types of disingenuous statistics (think 77 cents per dollar) obscure the true causes of wage discrimination. If you want an honest debate you need honest statistics and these aren't honest. Until then we'll keep blaming the employer when we should be blaming the husband.

Another aspect of the wage gap that's not covered is that in some professions--librarianship, for example--the front-line workers tend to be female, while men often rise steadily to the top to managerial or directorship positions. They therefore earn more, and have considerably greater power and status, but the standard wage comparisons don't reveal that because you're talking about different job positions.

Isn't there a term used by sociologists to describe that phenomenon? Where men entering a traditionally female profession rise to the top, often without the requisite skills or experience that a female candidate would have to have for the same position? Apparently it's quite common.

Okay, I can't understand this graphic at all. How do you make sense of it?

The graphic is overly simplified and because of this it is obscuring the actual causes of the largest segment of the wage-gap; that cause being social conditioning that has 39% of women leaving the full-time workforce within ten years of entering it.

As another poster noted the obfuscation of factual data in favor of rhetoric by proxy does not one thing to fix or even draw attention to the real inequities, which are more likely to be in the home than in the workplace.

The economist June O'Neill has written some good articles on this subject.

I think one of the greatest failures of our education system is not teaching statistics or data analysis correctly. Every time I see wage gap statistics I am appalled, not by the fact that a wage gap exists, but because the fast majority of people have no idea what the statistics mean that they are using.

Let me draw your attention to a bunch of different things that are wrong with most if not all of the wage gap statistics. First, they calculate the gap using the median wage (in this case weekly earnings). This means that if there are 101 workers where worker 1 makes the least and worker 101 makes the most, and the wage of worker 51 is the median wage. This method normally works very well if you have steady state conditions, but in the modern work force it is a terrible approximation. If you assume the number of men in a occupation is constant, but you have an increasing number of women (ie more women entering the workforce), that means that the median salary for men will not change, but since there are more women who are just entering women’s median salary will decrease. So, what this means, is statistically, even if there is no discrimination whatsoever, if more women are entering the workforce, there will be the appearance of a wage gap. Right now we know that there has been constant growth in the number of women in the work force, this means that there will be a constant false degree of wage gap. This doesn’t mean that there isn’t discrimination, but it does mean that some of the wage gap we see is actually due to more women entering the work force, not really a bad thing if you ask me. The next paragraph is an example of this.

There are 5 women workers and 5 male workers, one from each sex enters the labor market every year and one leaves. Their salary starts as one dollar and goes up by one dollar every year and they will all work for 5 years. So male salaries: $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 Female Salaries: $1 $2 $3 $4 $5. Now, we apply the wage gap equation and get $3/$3=1 and therefore there is no wage gap. But, now, three more females decide to work this coming year and only one leaves, so there are now seven. Female Salaries: $1 $1 $1 $2 $3 $4 $5 Male Salaries: $1 $2 $3 $4 $5. So now if we apply the wage gap equation we get $2/$3=.66 Are women really getting paid 44 cents less then men are for the same work in this example? According to the wage gap they are, but it is kind of paradoxical that the fact that conditions are getting better for women (ie that they can enter the workforce) is actually increasing the appearance of discrimination? Is there a problem with the wage gap statistic as a measure of discrimination, you bet.

This example shows that if the number of women participating in the work force increases, it will increase the wage gap. Now, no discrimination happened, but rather women on their first year were paid the first year salary and thus the median for women changed. So, in my opinion, in this example there is a wage gap, but that does not mean any discrimination is happening. Since the female participation rate in the labor force has been steadily increasing for a long time now, the wage gap is going to be larger, not because of discrimination, but because of more women earning starting salaries. It will also take five years (in my example) for the wage gap to go back to 1 assuming that three women enter every year form now on. Or, if starting next year it reverts to having only one women enter each year, then in four years the men will be the ones suffering a wage gap because the median women’s salary will be higher than the men’s.

What we really want to see is not a comparison of median salaries, but rather a comparison of average salaries as a function of employment length. This will not give us the difference between a mans and women’s median salary, but rather it will give us the average difference in salary between two people who have been employed for equal amounts of time in a particular occupation. The median salary method falls apart because you may be comparing the salaries of someone with 15 years of experience with that of someone with only 13 years if there was a large influx of women.

Gordon Gecko (someone who’s name implies he knows how to really read numbers) also brings up a great point below. Full time is working 40+ hours a week. There are countless studies that have shown time and time again that men and women on average have different working preferences and different attitudes on average towards working ridiculous amounts of hours. Statistically this must be accounted for. We aren’t really interested in how much a person earns, what we want to know is how much is someone willing to pay them for an hour of their work. Reporting median salaries is useless unless one normalizes the data to a give number of hours.

Socialization was also cited as a reason for the wage gap in terms of women leaving the work force, having kids… Agreed, socialization is probably the real reason behind the wage gap, not employers. There is a great economic reason for this. Let me put it this way. Let’s assume I am an employer. I pay my five male employees $100000 a year, I have no female employees. I now find out that I can pay a women $80000 a year for the same work. That means if I fire all the men and hire only women I will save $100,000 a year which I can pocket as personal profit. Now, am I really so sexist as to give up $100000 a year for free?

So, let us look at socialization. It works two ways. The first way is obvious, women are taught that if possible they should stay home and take care of the kids and that that is their role in life. I could expand more, but I hope we are all agreed that this is the general trend in women’s socialization. I do have two post that disturbed me though when reading this thread: “Until then we'll keep blaming the employer when we should be blaming the husband.” And “You mean as in a husband not helping out enough so that the woman can work outside the home or just being so possessive as to not let her get her own job?” Do you really think that there are so many husbands like this that they account for the wage gap? We don’t blame women for being socialized not to stay in the work force, so I don’t think it is fair to blame husbands for being socialized to believe that their role in life and the thing that gives their lives meaning is to be the bread winner. I agree that this socialization leads to problems, but if we start blaming the wage gap on men who think this way, then it is only fair to also blame the wage gap on women who think that their only responsibility is to keep the house clean and the family happy. Rethinking gender rolls and how we are socialized doesn’t mean blaming men. Believe it or not, I as a man, feel that women have taught me more about my role as a male then men have. Women play a huge role in enforcing traditional gender rolls, just like men do, and to say that it is the fault of the husbands and to completely overlook all the women who are helping to maintain the roles is bit of a problem.

The only way to really solve the whole gender gap thing is to allow men to know that they don’t have to be the sole bread winners, in the same way that women are now allowed to be such. Breaking down the gender roles for women is great, but so long as the roles are still strong for men, women will not be able to become equals in the work force because what they want is still defined as a man’s role. Both genders need to be freed from their roles for any sort of equality.

The wage gap is such a complex topic because so many of the 'why's are immeasurable. There is the fact that after doing the "second shift" at home after work that adds stress and decreases free time which may dissuade women from pursuing more strenuous career paths. It's a lot easier to deal with the pressure of an 8+ hour day of work when you come home to have dinner made for you, the laundry done, the dishes cleaned, etc. In two parent hetero households that choose to have a stay at home parent, the woman is almost always the one to stay home. I think having a parent at home is wonderful for those who choose it, but society tends to characterize men who stay home as lazy bums who let the women wear the pants (this should also tell you a thing or two about what people really think about the hard domestic work that women do). I don't think the fact that women often prioritize family over money or career success is a bad thing, but we should strive to make it socially acceptable for either gender to take on that role.

In the workplace, there are a whole host of issues. As is the case with most sexism, I think employers/upper management rarely have conscious thoughts so blatant as "she is a woman, therefore she can't do xyz." Instead, it's typically more like, "Judy just doesn't have leadership quality" or "Sarah wouldn't fit in with the other managers, but she sure is great at working with customers." The way women are socialized works against them in a lot of ways as well. Women are not encouraged to be assertive so they may miss opportunities to press for promotions or recognition. It can even come down to extremely nuanced socialization like the way we speak. Women tend to add qualifiers to the things they say, apologize excessively, and speak with an upward inflection, all of which give an impression that the speaker is not self-assured. And let's face it, assertive women are less socially acceptable. Women who stay in line and don't assert themselves aren't promoted because they appear unambitious and unable to lead while women who do assert themselves aren't promoted because they are considered "bitchy" and unlikeable. Men seem to be able to be assertive and likeable, or at the very least admirable.

There is a huge list of reasons for that wage gap that I think others will touch on. But the inequalities in the workplace are not isolated from the inequalities of greater society. Most career paths and work environments are set up to advantage men which reflects a society that gives advantage to men. We have a long way to go in changing the status and perception of women in general before we'll see true equality in the workplace.

What I'd like to know is why women are paid less, and what I can do to avoid getting ripped off.

Where's that article?

Socialisation has been brought up as a factor that could lead to a difference in earnings between men and women. Now if we accept that gender is a completely acquired concept, with no genetic component, which I'm not convinced about, we have to ask the question; what are the barriers which prevent more equal child care? One of these cuts to the heart of the problem I have with the modern feminist movement.
Lets say we have a married couple expecting their first child. The wife earns twice as much as her husband, they decide that they want one of them to become the full time stay at home parent. They follow economic logic, and the husband quits his job. He become the full time carer, and she becomes the breadwinner. Then their marriage gets into trouble, which is certainly not impossible, a new child can put that sort of strain on the relationship. A gender neutral divorce settlement would award custody to main carer, with the wife paying maintenance and having access rights (holidays, weekends, that sort of thing). In the UK at least (maybe America is different), in cases such as this, generally the wife will receive custody, and maintenance payments from her partner. The partner who is no longer employed. Now what does this have to do with the wage gap? It is an incentive for men to avoid becoming the main carer, and stay in their jobs. Even if it makes sense to do it the other way round. This should be a feminist issue, but it isn't. Instead this issue has been abandoned by the feminist movement, and taken up by the lunatic anti-women movement.
I am trying to say we live a situation where public space, the legal system, the work place, and the political system are becoming more and more gender neutral. The private space has lagged behind, until we as a society can accept the idea of a house husband, and full time father. Progress in the workplace is going to be stalled.

To summarrise though, you need to do some combination of working long hours in dangerous conditions in a job you don't like for a long period of time after moving far from your home to get the job in the first place.

Sex work comes to mind here for many women. And ain't that the only area where women consistently out earn men? Damn. That's sort of all we need to know.

The thing is there is a lot of sexism keeping women out of traditionally dangerous male dominated jobs such as firefighting, combat roles, and other jobs that require the holy grail of upper body strength. And just how woman friendly is an oil rig or deep sea fishing boat, I wonder?