In the past 20 years, how often have you heard that women are paid less than men? How about the most recent figures that women are paid 77 cents on the dollar for men in comparable positions? How about the statement posed with wiggle room, i.e., "Women are paid 77 9or 79) cents on the dollar for men performing identical work."
Well, before I tell you the reasoning why these statement may be only partially true, let me tell you that I have two daughters and a wife who still works as a teacher (and CFO of this company). I would love to say that they are pid equally to men, but the truth is that any stay at home mom is paid 12 cents on the dollar for men who go off to some work sanctuary. Add cook, sometimes cleaner (depends on the age of the kids), constant organizer, chief budget director, and food procurer, plus companion, and "Let me read you this from the paper!" responsibilities, and women are grossly underpaid.
But that begs the question and also is only brought up by members of NOW when they want the membership to take up arms and write their Congress persons, at least a third of whom are now women (what were they before?). Am I being "catty" in my own way? Of course, but I've been warning those who used to read papers and now read blogs - neither of which have changed their wording and "logic:" for 20 years - that anyone, and I mean anyone, can use statistics to mislead or more appropriately, lead the reader down some predetermined primrose path. (Poor primroses. They should get more respect.)
The reason that these are faulty statements are threefold, and two of the folds are easy to reiterate. They have been iterated in Labor Pains - all editions - and several articles in the subscriber's section, and I will just briefly describe them here. First, when Bella Abzug fought for equality in pay and perhaps even coined the term "wage discrimination," she and NOW used the phrase "equal pay for equal work." The courts that took up the question found something which anyone who could displace emotion with logic could see the problem: there was no equal work.
In part, the argument further disintegrated because, other factors had to be taken into consideration. You can simply take a title and say that two jobs are equal if the titles are the same. Going back to the 80s, if you had two tellers in a bank - a man (that was a new concept, male tellers) and a woman - you might well have had an argument because the man would have had less experience than the women, but what if they both had five years experience? Well, in numerous studies, men and women were indeed paid the same amount for the same work, probably because financial institutions were audited by the federal government. You remember auditing and regulations, don't you? If you wanted to keep your FSLIC or FDIC insurance, you'd better not be discriminating or you'd better be discriminating in favor of the woman, and then it better not have been the prettiest one.
Too cute again? Well, no, I used that for a reason. Men in those days did hold more managerial positions, and just to make darn sure that there wasn't discrimination between women in promotions and raises, there were antifraternization (no dating) rules in most banks between managers and tellers. This, too, is fully discussed in several articles on this site and in Labor Pains, but the stories I could tell you...
Okay, so the courts ruled that "equal work" was almost impossible to define. Along came a Washington state ruling when some attorneys thought they had the clue, and along came "comparable pay for comparable worth." One particular case that I've discussed many times had one court saying that garbage collectors and secretaries are "comparable." How they came to this conclusion is a marvelous piece of not knowing the three rules of logic.
One of the illogical bases was that all secretaries were created equal. Looking at any organization chart along with the the wage/grade charts and compensation systems (yes, we had compensation principles as well, and some companies to this day still use the basics outlined by Becker for 40 years), one could see that there were Secretaries I, II, and III and perhaps then an "Executive Secretary." The court began "reasoning" that an executive secretary was equivalent to a garbage collector who had been on the job for 10 years, while a plain ol' secretary was equal to a beginning collector. Well, that didn't quite work out because some garbage collectors (then beginning to be called "Sanitary Engineers") hauled ash from school furnaces while others hauled "garbage." And then to throw another monkey wrench in, many garbage collectors were unionized.
To complicate the complicated, someone brought up the length of service in the company and the industry and how someone with 10 years in one industry (with outstanding performance appraisals) could be compared to someone working for civil service for three years whose work had never been appraised because, (1) unionization, and (2) automatic increases.
So, the whole ideas of comparable or equal worth was tossed out, and hasn't to my knowledge come into courts again. So what we have is a talking point, and one which becomes more faulty as the years pass. My own professional association with smaller companies is that a woman and a man performing approximately the same responsibilities are paid approximately comparable salaries. This is especially true in HR where the majority of managers are women. For my generation, the world is fast being turned on its ear. There may be more repercussions from this long after I'm gone, but I can foresee men claiming in 2050 that they are being discriminated against in wages. The truth is, I already see that in a number of industries where women outnumber men. No gloating, people. One day everybody will be discriminated against, even if it's within their own minds. Then humankind will rise up and destroy all the robots making 77 cents on the dollar, but that won't bring steak down to 59 cents a pound as it was when I married, and $1,000 a month was enough to feed, clothe, and house a family of four. Oh, I forgot, you also got a vacation every year once the kids reached the ripe old age of 4 and you started getting 8 hours of sleep again.
In case you haven't gotten the point, yes, some women are paid less than men for similar work, and some men are paid less than women. And some professional men tennis players get $2 million for a tournament while women get $500,000, and yes, women's tennis is generally more enjoyable. That's life. Go complain to your agent.
All Rights Reserved. Copyright 2009. Ethan A. Winning