Hartford Courant, November 15, 2010, Monday

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Hartford Courant (Connecticut)

November 15, 2010, Monday

Pay Equity Stays Elusive; Who We Are

Men's salaries outpace women's salaries by a wider margin in Connecticut than in the nation as a whole, with a gender gap that's 5 percent deeper than the 78-cents-on-the-dollar that U.S. women make compared to men.

Why do Connecticut women make 74 cents for every dollar that a man earns? And what does that say about wage equity?

Women's pay is lower than men's for a variety of reasons, so there's no single answer and no simple explanation about what it means.

But data from the U.S. Census Bureau shows that the gap in Connecticut is wider than elsewhere for the same rea-son that Connecticut has a huge gap between rich and poor: Famously, the state has more than its share of super-earners - and they tend to be men.
Nationally, the biggest reason that women make less is because they are concentrated in professions that have more modest salaries. Nearly all secretaries are women, 2.7 million nationwide; a majority of managers are men. Less than one-third of attorneys are women, but 88 percent of paralegals are women. Women are much more likely to be a poorly paid cashier than a well-paid construction worker.

The gap has been shrinking, but more slowly in recent years than in the '80s. Although new data aren't available yet, the 2008-'09 recession and slow recovery could be narrowing the gap more quickly. That's because unemployment hit typically male professions especially hard.
But pay differences between professions is just one piece of the gap. Even within the same profession, women al-most always have lower salaries than men. For attorneys, it's 74 cents for every dollar. For doctors, it's 61 cents. For pharmacists, it's 92 cents. For insurance underwriters, it's 70 cents.

Jennifer Cheeseman Day, a statistician with the U.S. Census, detailed the gaps within jobs. The lingering effects of employment discrimination 35 and 40 years ago isn't the answer - the proportion of women among the older workers in a job did not determine the relative pay, she found.

She said the fields where the gap is smaller are those where there aren't many outliers, or what she called "su-per-earners."

In almost every case, women and men at the bottom of the scale in each job are close to each other, if not at nearly identical wages - even if that floor is well above minimum wage.
But in fields where there are more super-earners, men are far, far more likely to be the big winners.

Take lawyers. The 90th percentile of women earn on average $200,000 a year, meaning that's the pay level where 10 percent earn more and 90 percent earn less, for that profession. The 90th percentile of men earn on average a little more than $300,000. Chief executives have the same pattern by gender.

Day said what's harder to understand is why men still earn more than women in low-paid professions.

In her study, based on national data, the median wage for a woman working full time as a cashier was less than $20,000; for a man, it was $25,000.

"When you look at cashiers, why do men get paid more than women? It doesn't make sense," Day said. "Maybe they're in an area that's more unionized?"

One of the areas where Connecticut women lag more than U.S. women is in production fields, primarily manufac-turing. Women are more likely to be in lower-paying, non-durable goods factory jobs; men are more likely to be in more skilled machinist jobs. In Connecticut, women who work in production make about 60 cents for every $1 earned by a man. Nationwide, it's 66 cents.

A state with a deeper pay gap than Connecticut's, Michigan, at 72 cents, is also the one with the highest concentra-tion of manufacturing workers. In Wyoming and West Virginia, coal mining is a prominent employer, and those male-dominated jobs pay better than fields where women are concentrated.

The number of women going into blue-collar, male-dominated fields is not changing as rapidly as, say, the number of women going for MBAs, now at 40 percent.

Francine Blau, a Cornell economist who studies the reasons for the pay gap, said it narrowed fastest from 1980 to the mid-'90s.

"One of the things that has improved women's occupations relative to men is bad news to men," she said. "The loss of relatively high-paying blue-collar jobs in manufacturing ... was especially pronounced in the '80s."

This economic downturn is shrinking the pay gap in some places, such as states where a housing bubble swelled the ranks of construction workers.

Florida and Nevada had pay gaps of 17 cents or 18 cents in 2009; two years earlier, before the recession hit, those gaps were 20 cents. In Florida, men who worked full time, all year in 2009 made $1,100 less than they did two years ago.

Still, among the majority of Americans who haven't gone to college, women's earning power is hurt by their decisions to go into low-paid child care, say, rather than moderately paid welding.
Feminism had a bigger effect on college-educated women than on the majority of workers who don't have a degree.

"If you look at the extent of women's entry into traditionally male jobs, we have a lot of successes in the formerly male professional jobs," Blau said. "But there's been much less change in the blue-collar arena."

After occupational segregation, the biggest reason for the pay gap is women taking time off to raise children.

Even though these data compare a year when both the women and men worked full time, and didn't take any leave, women who return to the workforce after a period of part-time work or homemaking usually take a hit that lasts for years.

But researchers, even after they've controlled for this effect, still see a gap of 12 percent for married women with children, according to Catherine Hill, who has studied the gap for the American Association of University Women.

The gap for childless, early-career women is 5 percent.

Some of the difference might be because women often don't feel empowered to negotiate for a higher salary offer when they're hired.

That was the experience of Lee Miller, who wrote "A Woman's Guide to Successful Negotiating" with one of his daughters. He worked as the head of human resources at three Fortune 1000 companies before writing the book 10 years ago.

"It's rare that your first offer is your best and final offer," Miller said, speaking from the company's perspective. Men understand this, he said, and he can't remember any time he hired a man who didn't ask for more money, or more vacation, or more perks. "Very, very significant numbers of women accepted the offer" with no negotiation, he said. That means they frequently left money on the table.

Miller believes that younger women are finally shaking free of the idea that they might anger an employer by ask-ing for more. "Younger women, once they learn how to negotiate, are not afraid to negotiate," he said, and he thinks their wider participation in sports since Title IX changed scholastic sports is a factor.

Talking about salary needs to wait, he cautioned.

"Early on in the process, before they decide on you, it can't help you to talk about money. Either you'll ask for too little, and you'll get it," or you can price yourself out of the running, he said. But once the company has offered you a job, and has named a salary, you have leverage, even in today's terrible economy. The best way to negotiate well is to research what people in that firm make at that job. If you can find out what your predecessor made, even better.
"No one that I know, in all my years of negotiating, lost a job offer because they asked for something," Miller said.

But it's not just timidity holding women back. Subtle discrimination - even subconscious bias - does explain some of the gap, researchers agree. For instance, when orchestras started auditioning musicians from behind a screen, more women were hired.

"To what extent are we seeing discrimination, and to what extent is it choices of men and women?" Blau asked. "It seems discrimination still exists."

Sen. Christopher Dodd, D-Conn., responded to an early version of this story posted online Friday by sending out a press release lamenting the lack of action on a bill that would make it easier for women to file class-action lawsuits against employers over unequal wages, limit the defenses of employers and empower the government's monitoring ef-forts on wage
discrimination.

"It greatly disappoints me that Connecticut, a state with so many successful women, has a higher incidence of gender wage inequity than the national average," he said in the release. "We must pass the Paycheck Fairness Act to stand up for women and American families and ensure that women are paid what they deserve. Now is the time to level the playing field once and for all and finally guarantee equal pay for equal work."

For Connecticut women who are feeling discouraged, perhaps they should consider that although their median pay - the midpoint of all women's earnings - is more unequal than the typical woman's in the United States, it's also substantially higher. Nationwide, the typical woman made $35,549 last year; the typical Connecticut woman made $43,900. Median pay for women in Connecticut was higher than the median men's wages in 24 states.

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