Gender Pay Gap 2019

Equal Pay Day arrived for women on April 2 this year. According to gender rights advocates, the average woman must add to her 2018 income three months of work in 2018 to make as much as the average white man made in 2018. In other words, a woman in Connecticut only makes 83% of what a man makes in income. Black and Latina women are even more disadvantaged compared to white men. Oddly, the wages of black and Hispanic men seem to be excluded from the calculations for black and Hispanic women. 

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, it is difficult for those calling for new laws to deal with wage discrimination to find instances of wage discrimination. After all, both Federal and Connecticut law forbids wage discrimination. 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.” 

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. Nevertheless, most engineering students are still men and over 90% of art history students are women, a factor that obviously contributes to disparity in income.

I would venture to guess that the disparity in gender income is largely based on decisions that people choose to make. A few years ago a statistical survey came to the comical conclusion that it was better for a woman to live in Bridgeport, CT where the gender gap was narrow, than in Darien or New Canaan where it was the widest despite the fact that the average income of women in those towns is twice the income of women living in Bridgeport.

 Obviously, talented well-educated women choose to live in towns like New Canaan and Darien because of the beautiful homes, excellent school systems, and crime free streets. 

One of the statistics noted that in both New Canaan and Darien the number of married women in the work force is only about 40% compared to a national average of about 60%. While one of the “experts” quoted in the article referred to the “nostalgic idea of what the family is supposed to look like,” and called it a “romantic notion,” it still seems to be working very well in New Canaan and Darien. Compare that romantic notion with the one espoused years ago by Murphy Brown and see the devastation that single motherhood has brought to the lives of so many single mothers and their children in cities like Bridgeport.

It is a sad fact that the low income of single, unwed mothers does statistically drag down average median income for women. Poverty is practically an inevitable result when women have children before they have jobs or marry. The obvious success of Asian immigrants in this country is basically due to what one researcher called 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%. 

The same figures used by gender rights advocates show that women of Asian descent make substantially more that black or Hispanic women. Politicians in New York City are trying to change the admission standards for the City’s elite public high schools. Candidates for admission must take a competitive entrance exam to get into one of these schools. Currently, students of Asian immigrants gain 50% of the places even though Asian-Americans make up only 16% of the city’s population. I suspect that Asian women do as well if not better than white men on these tests.

Politicians and commentators who think that legal measures like minimum wage laws and paid family leave will close the gender gap are sadly mistaken. Using their own figures, it appears as if the gender-equity gap has disappeared in cities like Bridgeport. What has been the result? Has Bridgeport become utopia? It used to be said that if you were not part of the solution, you were part of the problem. But if you don’t understand the problem, you can’t be part of the solution. It would be appropriate next year if Equal Pay Day were to fall on April 1.

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Power Corrupts

                                       

 “Power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts, absolutely,” is an old saying that I’m sure is taken as gospel by most people whether conservative, liberal, progressive, or socialist. Nevertheless, why are so many politicians throwing their hats in the ring for next year’s Presidential election? Do they want to become corrupted, or are they already corrupt?

The latest to enter the list of Democratic candidates would appear to be former Vice-President Joe Biden. Headlines in yesterday’s papers indicated that he has told friends that he will enter the race and start raising money. Apparently, Biden has no respect for either the ability or electability of any of the previously announced candidates.  

Despite the qualifications and experience of Senator Elizabeth Warren, perhaps Biden thinks the country is not yet ready for its first Native American president. Perhaps he thinks that Senator Kamala Harris of California is too young and inexperienced despite the fact that she got her start under Willie Brown, the legendary former mayor of San Francisco. Perhaps in one of the debates Biden will turn to Cory Booker, the young Black Senator, and say, “Senator, I know Barack Obama, and you are no Barack Obama.”

Could it be that Biden believes that the Democratic party will need a white male to win in 2020?  It is true that upstart Robert Francis O’Rourke from Texas by way of New York is a white male but O’Rourke, who calls himself Beto, has publicly apologized for being a white male. I doubt that Biden will ever apologize for being a white male. He has never apologized for anything during his long and checkered career. 

Perhaps a better saying to apply to Biden would be the famous one from antiquity. “Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad.” Biden will be 77 in 2020. He appears to be in good health but what is good health for a man in his late seventies? Moreover, Biden will not be running to head his local Senior center’s volunteer corps. He will be running for President of the USA, one of the world’s most difficult jobs. 

Ronald Reagan was 69 when he was first elected President and 73 when he was overwhelmingly re-elected in 1984. During his second term he was obviously failing. It was sad to watch. Donald Trump, whom most Democrats think is mentally incapable right now, was 70 when he was elected in 2016. He will be 74 in 2020. If he seeks re-election in 2020, he will still be younger than Biden and Senator Bernie Sanders, the oldest of the three.

Personally, I will turn 80 this year and it is hard for me to understand what these aging baby-boomers are thinking. I retired a dozen years ago because I thought that I no longer had the physical and mental ability to handle the many needs of my financial planning clients. Moreover, I no longer had the drive to continue to keep up with the many changes coming into the industry. By fortunate coincidence, I got out in 2008 right before the financial crisis added a huge amount of stress to the lives of financial planners and their clients.  Fortunately, I was able to leave my practice in the hands of competent, younger advisors.

I know that readers of the above post might accuse me of ageism. But, at my age it is common to read the obituaries every day and find that someone who was lively and healthy a couple of years ago has just passed away. I play chess and run film programs at my local senior center, but still am saddened to see people who were active and alert, now stuttering or using canes and walkers. 

Polls indicate that Biden and Sanders, two old white men, have taken the early lead for the Democratic nomination in 2020. They remind me of mad Captain Ahab in pursuit of the great white whale who currently occupies the White House. I am not saying that seniors don’t have much to contribute but it is good to remember the saying from contemporary philosopher Clint Eastwood (Dirty Harry): “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

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Titian: The Woman in White*

Titian: The Woman in White

In February on our annual winter visit to California, we visited the Norton-Simon Museum in Pasadena to view its current exhibition of Titian’s magnificent portrait, The Woman in White, on loan from its home in Dresden. The painting was given pride of place in a large room filled with other Old Masters from the Norton Simon’s permanent collection

The Museum’s notes indicated that in a 1561 letter Titian claimed that the young woman depicted was “the mistress of his soul.” Later, commentators took these words to mean that the young woman was Titian’s mistress even though the artist would have been in his seventies at the time. Others speculate that the woman could be one of Titian’s daughters, Emilia or Lavinia.

Whoever is depicted, the painting remains a striking portrait of a young woman in a beautiful white gown with elegant jewelry that includes a ring that could be a wedding band. She also holds a fan that is attached to a kind of chain around her waist. More than the clothing and accessories, it was the eyes and face of the woman that held my attention as I stood in front of the painting.

The young woman was looking directly at me. When I moved to the left, her eyes continued to look at me. The look on her face even seemed to change. The same thing happened when I moved to the right. She continued to look at me. If you’re reading this on a desktop, just move your chair and look at the image from left and right. If you’re using a handheld device, just hold it away from you first with your left hand, and then with your right to observe the effect.

Actually, I even walked a semi-circle from one side of the large room to the other, and the woman’s eyes followed me all the way. In traditional paintings, the viewer observes the subject but in this painting the woman observes the viewer. The tables have been turned.

I am not a student of female portraiture and I can’t imagine that I am the only one to observe this phenomenon. I do recall that while on a tour of the Renaissance collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum a few years ago, a docent pointed out that it was considered indecent in the early days of the Renaissance to portray a living woman in a painting. The earliest portraits only dared to portray them in profile. Eventually, the face might be turned in a 45- degree angle with the woman still looking off to the side. Even when the full face would be exposed the eyes would still be averted from the viewer. She would not make eye contact with the viewer. 

Lorenzo Lotto: Portrait of a Woman

The aversion of the eyes might just represent female modesty but I suspect that male sensitivity might have been at work. Could it be that back then men did not want other men looking at their women? Could that be the reason why a woman’s eyes are averted? I am sure that scholars have studied female portraits of the era extensively, and I could be wrong. But by the middle of the sixteenth century Titian’s woman in white certainly seems to reflect a departure from the typical female portrait. **

Titian employed this technique many years earlier in his famous Pesaro altarpiece in the Frari. In that painting the young boy in the painting looks directly out at the viewer, and while you walk around that painting, the eyes of the boy follow wherever you go. The boy acts as an “interlocutor” inviting the viewer to not only pay attention to what is going on in the painting, but also to participate. 

The Woman in white could also be an interlocutor but she only draws the viewer’s attention to herself, not as a shy object of desire but as a female in charge of all she surveys. The Norton Simon Museum suggests that rather than any individual woman, Titian's painting could represent the "beauty and spirit" of Venetian women." Modern feminists should love this painting.

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* This post originally appeared on Giorgione et al..., my art history blog.

** I am a big fan of the American film genre knows as film noir, those black and white films of the forties and fifties that are enjoying a revival right now. Titian’s painting brought to mind one of the earliest, I Wake Up Screaming, a film starring pin-up queen Betty Grable in a rare dramatic role. Grable played the sister of a famous model who had been murdered. The sister’s press agent, who had made her famous, was the prime suspect. Inevitably, Grable and the press agent, played by Victor Mature, begin to fall in love. At one point Grable asks Mature if he had been in love with her sister. He replies that he had been her press agent and that it was his business to place her image all over town in magazines and posters. “If I had loved her, I would never have done that, I would have wanted her only for myself.”

Connecticut Political Patronage 2019

Connecticut Political Patronage

Terry Gerratana, former State Senator

Ned Lamont, the new Governor of Connecticut, has continued the patronage or political welfare system practiced by his Democratic predecessor, Dannell Malloy. In his first month in office Lamont has taken at least five members of the State Legislature into high paying jobs in his administration. He is still a piker compared to Malloy who elevated about a dozen Democratic legislators to such jobs. 

Serving in the Connecticut legislature is still a part-time job with a salary of about $35000 per year. It makes you wonder why anyone would want such a position but there is a pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. A position in the Governor’s administration is a full time job usually with a six figure salary. Moreover, legislators also get generous benefits including participation in the Connecticut State Employee pension system. What impact will their new position have on their pension benefits?

One of the new appointees is Terry Gerratana, a former State Senator from New Britain. She has served 17 years in the legislature during which she has contributed six or seven percent of her $35000 salary to the pension plan. If she had served three more years in the Legislature, she would have been eligible for a pension of $14000 per year (2% of pay for each year of service). It would require the State to come up with about $350000 to fund her pension.

However, if she makes $135000 in her new position, and works in the Lamont administration for only three years, her average pay for pension purposes will jump to $135000 per year. Instead of a pension of $14000 per year, she will be able to retire on $54000 per year, a $40000 increase. Instead of the State needing $350000 to fund her pension, it will need to come up with $1,350,000. With this one appointment alone, State actuaries will have to add about a million dollars to the State’s pension liability.

I am not saying that Ms. Gerratana is unqualified for her new position, and I am not saying that she is the only Democrat politician to profit from such patronage. I am just using her as an example. She and the other Democratic legislators raised to high paying administrative jobs and judgeships by Malloy and Lamont have added multi-million liabilities to the State’s pension system. 

A relatively small but significant first step in reforming the pension system and reducing future liabilities would be to remove State legislators from participation in the pension plan. Their existing vested benefits could be frozen and all future retirement contributions could be put into a defined contribution or 401k type plan. There is no sacrosanct union contract that would prevent Governor Lamont and his fellow Democrats who control the legislature from implementing this change.

 Just consider that instead of having to come up with a million dollars over the next three years to fund Ms. Gerratana’s pension, the State would at the most only have to match her contribution to the new 401k type plan. Alternatively, State legislators could just be put into the Social Security system like the rest of us. How could newly elected “progressive” legislators possibly object to being in Social Security?

Removing legislators from future participation in the State Employee defined benefit pension plan could be followed by a freeze on pension benefits for all existing State employees not covered by union contractual obligations. These employees would include non-union members and employees of the State’s executive, and judicial branches. It should also include all administrators in the University of Connecticut system. 

 In the future these employees could also participate in a defined contribution or 401k-type plan. This reform would still provide them with a retirement income, consisting of the vested value of the current plan as well as the accumulated value of the new defined contribution plan. This combination would still be superior to what is available to ordinary citizens in the private sector. 

People often fail to realize that the millions going to fund the increased pension benefits for legislators like Ms. Gerratana are dollars that could be used elsewhere. These dollars could be used to fund better salaries for teachers and police officers. They could be used to prevent layoffs of newly hired state employees. They could be used to provide much needed programs and supplies in schools. They could also be used to shore up the social safety net so dear to the hearts of Democrats.

The enormous unfunded pension liability of the State of Connecticut was not even an issue in last November’s gubernatorial election. Unless Governor Lamont and the Legislature get serious about pension reform, the State will face further huge tax increases, cuts in services, and possibly an eventual bankruptcy. 

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