The Gender Gap
Recently while listening to a local AM Talk Show, (Outlaw Radio Network, KITZ1400, Kitsap County, WA) the dialogue turned to the wage gap for women. The resulting conversation made me very frustrated. One conservative host very passionately denied the actual existence of a wage gap for women. “It is absolutely false, THERE IS NO WAGE GAP — It would be illegal” Ben Compton, KITZ400.
Yes, since 1963 the Equal Pay Act made it illegal in the United States to pay men and women working in the same place different salaries for similar work.
It is the responsibility of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) to investigate and adjudicate claims of unequal pay, but they are also tasked with investigating other employment concerns. In fact, the equal pay act claims only make up only 1.4% of the almost 90,000 claims resolved in 2018. And this is out of the over 750,000 inquiries [1]made to the agency that year. Like most agencies they are short staffed and focus their time on the larger systemic issues.
I really don’t like media personalities stating opinion as fact and shutting down others with dogmatic views. It happens far too often these days where people misquote or editorialize old data and opinions. Especially when making statements along the lines of “They just took at an overall average of all woman compared to all men” …
The power of these type of statements and thoughts is that they perpetuate the discontent of professional woman who feel they are underpaid, and they increase the divide perceived between the sexes.
As a senior HR leader, I am well versed in the EEOC process, catalog of business and employment matters. As an HR technology expert, I am very familiar with HR analytics and compensation data. And lastly, as a woman I have experienced unequal pay personally, but I don’t claim to be an expert in these matters. Thankfully I have Payscale.com to provide facts.
Who is PayScale? They are a software and data company providing compensation and job market expertise. While the US Bureau of Labor and Statistics data is continually scrutinized PayScale provides real-time salary data for over 7,000 positions, receiving 400,000 new records per month directly from employees and employers. So, before arguments can be made about broad sweeping averages, not comparing like jobs, or people similar college transcripts let me break this down a bit more.
They are largest ongoing online salary survey in the world, receiving over a quarter-of-a-million new records per month — they are not a low funded government analytical bureau. To ensure the data they provide is accurate, reliable, and unbiased they use statistical techniques to identify and remove outliers[2]. Additionally, and most importantly their validation requires data inputs are only based on individuals that have a current job or job offer. This means that at the point of an offer they were compared and selected over individuals with similar experience and expertise.
So, when comparing men and women in equally qualified similar jobs and based on a new job offer are woman paid equally?
NO, when men and women with the same employment characteristics do similar jobs, women earn $0.98 for every dollar earned by an equivalent man. Then when the broad unstructured data compares the median the gap shows 79 cents for every dollar earned by men.
So which number grabs the headlines?
It is unfair to dismiss a number based on two cents or twenty-one. There is still a statistically proven difference no matter how you calculate it. Even at the low end a man offered a job with a $100,000 salary with a female peer (same education and experience) making $2000 less will exponentially increase over time. For example, in just 5 years with the same performance/merit increases of 3.5% that $2k difference increases to $2295.05, which in many communities is a mortgage payment.
Gender Wage Gap by Industry
Beyond the pay gap the data shows “women are less likely to hold high-level, high-paying jobs than men. There are structural barriers which keep women from advancing in the workplace– this is what we call the opportunity gap”, (Payscale.com). For example, while dollar for dollar women in the TECH industry make the same as men of equal education there are almost 3 men to every single female.
At one point during last Sunday’s Outlaw Radio Network, KITZ1400.com broadcast Kevin Chambers stated that perhaps Republicans, like Compton could learn a thing or two from Democrats like “openly embracing social issues instead of at best embracing them and at worst apposing them.”
Opposition seems easy these days, but rather then arguing let’s embrace a conversation with facts and seek to educate others. For more information on the topic feel free to check out the following links:
https://www.payscale.com/data/gender-pay-gap
US Bureau of Labor Median Wage Table
https://www.payscale.com/content/whitepaper/Gender-Pay-Gap.pdf
[1] EEOC claim data: 519,000 calls to its toll-free number, 34,600 emails and more than 200,000 inquiries in field offices
[2] Validation includes annual studies with 3rd party surveys for comparative analysis: https://www.payscale.com/data/average-mean-median-mode
