Equal pay day arrived for women this week. According to gender
rights advocates, a woman must add to her 2017 income almost three and a half
months of work in 2018 to make as much as a white man made in 2017. In other
words, a woman in Connecticut only makes 79% of what a white man makes in
income. Black and Latina women are even more disadvantaged. Black women make
only 58%, and Latina women come in last at 47%. For some inexplicable reason
black men don’t seem to be counted.
These familiar statistics were recently re-iterated in an opinion
article that appeared in the Connecticut Mirror written by Ashika Brinkley, a
board member of the Connecticut Women’s Educational and Legal Fund (CWEALF).
Ms. Brinkley claimed that her statistics came from the National Women’s Law
Center (NWLC) and provided a link to the report. I checked it out and found
this disclaimer:
Source Note: What a woman makes for every dollar a man makes is the ratio of women’s and men’s annual median earnings for full time, year round workers. The “wage gap” is the additional money a woman would have to make for every dollar made by a man in order to have equal annual earnings. Overall figures calculated by NWLC are based on 2016 American Community Survey Data.
The term “annual median income” is very significant. It
means that half the people in the group made more than that figure and that
half made less. Statistically, median income only represents an average and not
anyone’s actual earnings. Annual median income can therefore be skewed by high
earners on one end, and low earners on the other.
Moreover, gender gap ratios do not actually compare salaries
of full time employees working the same job. Such reports just use averages
based on the salaries of men and women across companies, industries and job
titles. How this information is gathered is a mystery to me? I suspect Census
data or IRS compilations are used but these figures often show great variation.
Interestingly, Ms. Brinkley’s opinion piece did not list
even one incident of wage discrimination in Connecticut even though she is
calling for legislative action. A few years ago a spokesperson for the
Connecticut Commission on Human Rights and Opportunities reported, “the number
of women who complain about not getting as much as their male counterparts is
small.”
I would venture to guess that there is little wage
discrimination in Connecticut and that the disparities in income are largely
based on choices that people choose to make. All government employees, for
example, work on gender-neutral pay scales. Teachers, police officers,
firefighters, mail carriers, all get the same pay for the same work. Even high
income occupations are no longer the exclusive male bastions of the past. The
medical and financial professions have become increasingly open to women and
will become more so since the majority of college graduates today are women. No
modern corporation would dare to have differing wage scales for men and women.
Of course, most engineering students are still men and over 90% of art history
students are women.
If there is no wage discrimination, why is there an income
gap between women and white men, and why is the gap for Black and Latina women
even greater? As mentioned above average median income figures can be skewed by
very high earners on one end, and very low earners on the other. I was
surprised to discover a while ago that the majority of women in well-to-do
Westport are stay at home moms. I imagine that many of them do some kind of
part time work where their incomes will be only a fraction of their husbands.
On the other hand, it is a sad fact that the low income of
single, unwed mothers will statistically drag down average median income for
women. A recent op-ed in the Wall St.
Journal by Wendy Wang cited statistics indicating that poverty is
practically an inevitable result when women have children before they have jobs
or marry. She claimed that the obvious success of Asian immigrants in this
country is basically due to a traditional “success sequence” of education,
work, marriage, and children in that order. In China, where she grew up,
illegitimacy was unthinkable. Even in modern China, the out of wedlock birth
rate is only 4%.
A few years ago a statistical survey came to the comical
conclusion that it was better for a woman to live in depressed Bridgeport where the
gender gap was narrow, than in posh Darien or New Canaan where it was the widest. It
used to be said that if you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the
problem. But if you don’t understand the problem, you can’t be part of the
solution.
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