The gender pay gap. It exists. It's a myth. The gender gap being a myth is a myth. Like most divisive topics, the gender pay gap's existential status seems to depend less on data and more on the publication you happen to be reading. And unfortunately, most people are too lazy to actually do some data crunching themselves, regardless of how passionate they proclaim to be about the topic.
I am very lazy myself. But I am also tired of both rah-rah men using a very personal definition of "pay gap" to claim that there is no such thing and hearing of stunts like bars charging women 77 cents for every $1 men spend*. Last week I had a fb debate with a guy who belonged in the former group, and that was the straw that broke the Aris's back. So, I've tried writing a post presenting a slightly more objective analysis than your average Guardian/Daily Mail article on the matter.
Unfortunately, the Office for National Statistics makes it very hard to gather the relevant raw data. For some inexplicable reason, there doesn't seem to be a single database with numbers on employment and wages by gender, occupation, tenure and family status. My analysis is based on the following ONS sources:
The pay gap is definitely a real thing
Anyone who denies that the pay gap exists is simply delusional. Now, it turns out most people who say the pay gap doesn't exist do not exactly mean that men and women are paid the same on average. What they mean is that while there is a difference in average wage, this disappears when adjusting for women's employment preferences. This is debatable, and I will discuss it later on, but for this section, I just want to say that if you are the kind of person who says "the pay gap is a myth" when you mean "the pay gap is real but it's not because of direct discrimination", you are really, really annoying**.
Look, I get that "the pay gap is a myth" is a catchier title than "the pay gap is quite complicated". But to change the definition of words in a hunt for more clicks is dishonest. How do you expect to have constructive conversation if you refuse to use the same language as the other side? A feminist who hears you say "there is no pay gap" will (rightly) dismiss you as crazy.
For the record, here are the 2016 numbers:
I am very lazy myself. But I am also tired of both rah-rah men using a very personal definition of "pay gap" to claim that there is no such thing and hearing of stunts like bars charging women 77 cents for every $1 men spend*. Last week I had a fb debate with a guy who belonged in the former group, and that was the straw that broke the Aris's back. So, I've tried writing a post presenting a slightly more objective analysis than your average Guardian/Daily Mail article on the matter.
Unfortunately, the Office for National Statistics makes it very hard to gather the relevant raw data. For some inexplicable reason, there doesn't seem to be a single database with numbers on employment and wages by gender, occupation, tenure and family status. My analysis is based on the following ONS sources:
- Pay Gap Overview
- Pay Gap by Job
- 2008 Economic and Labour Market Review
- 2009 Position on the Gender Pay Gap
The pay gap is definitely a real thing
Anyone who denies that the pay gap exists is simply delusional. Now, it turns out most people who say the pay gap doesn't exist do not exactly mean that men and women are paid the same on average. What they mean is that while there is a difference in average wage, this disappears when adjusting for women's employment preferences. This is debatable, and I will discuss it later on, but for this section, I just want to say that if you are the kind of person who says "the pay gap is a myth" when you mean "the pay gap is real but it's not because of direct discrimination", you are really, really annoying**.
Look, I get that "the pay gap is a myth" is a catchier title than "the pay gap is quite complicated". But to change the definition of words in a hunt for more clicks is dishonest. How do you expect to have constructive conversation if you refuse to use the same language as the other side? A feminist who hears you say "there is no pay gap" will (rightly) dismiss you as crazy.
For the record, here are the 2016 numbers:
Women are actually paid more in part-time jobs, but significantly less in full-time jobs, and as 41% of women work part-time vs 12% of men, on average women earn almost 20% less than men.
Note that "average" here means "median". The 2009 paper cited above shows that if the pay gap is calculated using the mean instead, the pay gap increases for both full time and part-time jobs (because there is a small number of high earners, mostly men, who skew the results).
So yes, there is an argument to be made that a significant portion of the pay gap is due to women choosing to work part-time. But even so...
The pay gap persists across almost all professions
Women seem to be paid less even when comparing full time roles in the same profession:
Up to this point, those who are upset over the pay gap have a very good case: women are paid less, and the difference is not fully explained by the type of jobs women go for, nor by their being more likely to work part time. But this is not the end of the story.
Family Status
The data here is shakier. But what little data I have seems to point to the conclusion that family status is more important than profession or full-time vs part-time status in driving difference in pay.
The first piece of evidence here comes from the 2008 labour market review I cited. The raw data comes from the Labour Force Survey, which is a quarterly sample of 52,000 households in the UK and is self-reported (vs, e.g., collected from employers' data as is the case in the Annual Survey of Hours and Earnings (and btw, not to blow my own horn here, but this is the level of detail you need to get down to if you want to objectively discuss such a loaded and complex topic)), so it's not like we can treat it like gospel (which is a funny saying, given that an increasing number of people treat (treats?) gospels as fiction). Still, what this data shows is that the pay gap not only disappears, but is actually negative (i.e. women earn more than men) when adjusting for marital status:
Furthermore, the pay gap increases the more children a woman has.
The second piece of evidence (and this one from the aforementioned ASHE) comes from the fact that the pay gap by age group shows negligible difference between the pay of men and women before the age of 30 (i.e. the age when most people start getting married/having children):
Of course, there are other reasons besides marital status that could be causing an increase in the pay gap later in life. For example, it could be that because hiring practices are more standardised for entry-level positions in large companies, or because competition for juniour positions drive starting salaries close to the minimum wage, discrimination doesn't really manifest at this stage, whereas it has a progressively larger impact in higher steps of the corporate ladder.
Nevertheless, this piece of evidence bolsters (but does not 100% confirm) the case that the pay gap is driven by women's preferences vs discrimination. By the way, a lot of news sources claim that discrimination accounts for 38% of the pay gap. As far as I can tell, this claim is taken from this study; however, the exact quote from the study is "38% is due to direct discrimination and differences in the labour market motivations and preferences of women" [emphasis mine]. Somehow, most liberals people seem to miss the italicised part of that conclusion.
Conclusions
So, to sum up: there is a pay gap no matter how you measure average earnings; it's consistent across industries; it's diminished when you separate full- vs part-time employees; and it disappears when you adjust for marital status or age.
So what does this tell us? I think it tells us that most people who discuss the issue, on both sides, are wrong. Those who quote the pay gap implying direct discrimination in the work place have a far weaker case than the headline 20% pay gap indicates: indeed, it certainly looks like the pay gap is to a significant extent driven by women's choices.
On the other hand, those who interpret this last statement to mean that there is no work to be done combating sexism are even more in the wrong. Instead of accepting that women choose to not pursue their careers as aggressively as men when they get married, or that women choose lower paying jobs, we ought to ask why this is.
My argument is that even if it's not direct, text-book sexism that is causing the pay gap, those choices women make that lead to the difference in pay are often themselves the result of discrimination and social pressure. I know some men people argue that women make such choices because they are innately less ambitious/more geared towards taking care of a family/poor negotiators &c; while I disagree with this, the fact is it doesn't matter: even if it were the case that most women are biologically less likely to pursue high-powered careers, the fact that society holds back those women who do so is reason enough to make policy changes.
So, in this final section I want to provide some evidence that there is social pressure on women to drop out of the work force, or be less ambitious than men.
First of all, this study tracks social attitudes towards gender roles, and while it finds that only (?) slightly over 10% of respondents agree with the statement that "a woman's job is to look after the home and family", only 5% of respondents agree that a woman should work full time when there is a child under school age:
(To be fair, the study only surveys a few thousand people; still, it's a pretty strong indication that while most people say that in principle it's no longer solely the man's role to earn money, when quizzed further they still think a woman should prioritise home care).
According to the same study, women tend to do a far larger share of household tasks (e.g. laundry is done always or usually by women in 70% of households, while preparing meals is done by women in 55% of homes and by both partners in 27% of homes). And I am sorry, but there is no way women are biologically hard-wired to enjoy folding sheets.
Then, there's the fact that when women are ambitious or driven, they are considered pushy/bossy/less likeable. For example, Sheryl Sandberg in Lean In refers to the Howard/Heidi experiment, where Harvard Business School students were assigned to study the case of an entrepreneur named Heidi. But the professors changed the name of the protagonist in the document they distributed to half the class to "Howard". Amazingly, though all students rated the protagonist as competent, "Howard" came across as a more appealing colleague, whereas Heidi was seen as selfish and "not the type of person you'd want to hire or work for". So women are told that to be as demanding as men is a bad thing; is it a surprise if fewer of them are willing to risk being seen as selfish?
Furthermore, while it's true that women are less eager than men to negotiate, it seems they have good reasons: women are penalised more than men for initiating negotiations. In one of the experiments in the study none of you will bother reading found at previous hyperlink, women were judged to be 25% less hireable if they asked for a higher salary, whereas men were deemed only 11% less hireable for doing the same. Another experiment similarly showed that there was a significant drop in willingness to work with a woman who attempted to negotiate; the drop for men was negligible.
(Interestingly though, women who did not negotiate were seen as more hireable than men who also didn't. And while subjects were less willing to work with women who tried to negotiate, they still perceived women as less demanding and nicer than men. a) This is very bizarre - so subjects thought that women who negotiate are nicer than men who do, but are less willing to work with them - the hell? and b) funny how liberal news sources that quote this study (looking at you, New Yorker) fail to report these findings.)
And finally the fact remains that many industries and companies still treat women pretty horribly. This is wrong regardless of its effect on pay, and should be addressed on principle.
All this points to the fact that, as I said earlier, there is still lots of work to be done. Recent policies such as requiring companies to disclose the difference in pay between their male and female staff cannot hurt, but they're not sufficient. I think the policy that would have the biggest impact in reducing the pay gap is increasing paternity leave and making it an acceptable career choice for men.
Note that just instituting a joint-parental leave policy, whereby parents would be free to choose how they want to split paid leave between them, would not do (although I personally would certainly welcome it and send my wife back to work while I'd stay at home, reading, watching films and playing video games with take care of our children): OECD data shows that the longer the parental leave, the higher the pay gap.
This is probably because when couples are given the choice of how to split parental leave, most will have the woman take most of it.
No, what we need is fixed, take-it-or-leave-it leave periods for both men and women (e.g. 1-2 months each, non-transferable, so that if the man doesn't take his, it's lost). This study (whose statistical methods fly way over my head) finds that both men's and women's future earnings decrease when they take paternity leave. So "forcing" couples to split the "burden" of raising children would go a long way towards eliminating the pay gap (and interestingly, women's future earnings actually increase (vs just staying flat) when their husbands take paternity leave, while the opposite effect does not occur (though again, my knowledge of statistics is not good enough to evaluate these statements)).
Also, companies should be more understanding of trailing male spouses - P&G is very good at this (they've accommodated two personal requests for me to follow my wife's career), but from what I've heard other companies are more likely to be understanding of women following their husbands than the other way around.
Finally, male and female staff should learn to track their gender bias (both the study I linked to above and the Heidi/Howard case show that women are just as likely as men to discriminate against other women) when recruiting or managing employees (I for one have built an Excel model tracking all the interviews I conduct to check whether I show any biases. Happy to report I don't seem to have one, at least when it comes to gender:
).
* the reason this kind of thing bothers me is that it's overly simplistic, passive-aggressive and likely to alienate lots of men people. Proponents of such antics claim they are good because they raise awareness. They do not. People will read such articles, have a chuckle to themselves and move on. Those who believe sexism exists will keep on believing it without looking into the details; those who don't will feel annoyed and become more entrenched in their views. If you want to affect change, you need to understand a problem's root cause - and crying out "sexism" without nuance won't achieve anything.
**
Pay-gap deniers' logic & linguistic manipulation applied in other domains:
"There is no such thing as obesity; just people who eat a lot."
"Lung cancer is a myth; it's just that some people smoke and therefore develop growths."
"I am not firing you; it's your own incompetence that means you can no longer work for this company." And so on.
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