Lesson 7: Work and the Economy Robert Wonser. Lesson 7: Work and the Economy 2.

Lesson 7: Work and the Economy

Robert Wonser

Lesson 7: Work and the Economy 2


The Ideal Worker

Who is the ideal worker? Unencumbered by familial duties, never

leaves work early for the sick child, driven and committed to the job, unlikely to leave work to bear and raise children

In short, he is not a mother.


Gender Gap in Wages

The pay gap has barely budged in a decade. In 2013, among full-time, year-round workers,

women were paid 78 percent of what men were paid.

Women in every state experience the pay gap, but some states are worse than others. The best place in the United States for pay equity

is Washington, D.C., where women were paid 91 percent of what men were paid in 2013. At the other end of the spectrum is Louisiana, the worst state in the country for pay equity, where women were paid just 66 percent of what men were paid.5

The pay gap is worse for women of color. The gender pay gap affects all women, but for women of

color the pay shortfall is worse. Asian American women’s salaries show the smallest

gender pay gap, at 90 percent of white men’s earnings. Hispanic women’s salaries show the largest gap, at 54

percent of white men’s earnings. White men are used as a benchmark because they make

up the largest demographic group in the labor force. Women face a pay gap in nearly every occupation.

From elementary and middle school teachers to computer programmers, women are paid less than men in female-dominated, gender-balanced, and male-dominated occupations.

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The pay gap grows with age.Women typically earn about 90 percent

of what men are paid until they hit 35. After that median earnings for women

are typically 75–80 percent of what men are paid.

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While more education is an effective tool for increasing earnings, it is not an effective tool against the gender pay gap. At every level of academic achievement, women’s median

earnings are less than men’s earnings, and in some cases, the gender pay gap is larger at higher levels of education. While education helps everyone, black and Hispanic women earn less than their white and Asian peers do, even when they have the same educational credentials.

The pay gap also exists among women without children. AAUW’s Graduating to a Pay Gap found that among full-time

workers one year after college graduation — nearly all of whom were childless — women were paid just 82 percent of what their male counterparts were paid.

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Women earn less when they get the same education. The first year out of college is the prime time for women

and men to make comparable earnings: they are young, childless, and have just as much inexperience as their male counterparts.

But women make less than men in their first year after graduating, even when factors such as schools, grades, majors, and others are taken into account.

That educational gap will follow them no matter how much more higher learning they invest in: at any educational level, a man with the same degree earns more, on average.

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Discrimination is a Major Contributor to the Gender Pay Gap

Women earn less thanks to discrimination. It’s fair to say that not all of the gap is due to

discrimination. Certainly women are clustered in low-wage work

— they are about two-thirds of the country’s minimum wage workers — and often have to interrupt their careers to care for family members, all of which impacts their earnings.

But even when various factors like these are taken into account, the entire gap doesn’t disappear.

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When the Government Accountability Office last looked at the gap, it couldn’t explain 20 percent of the disparity in pay between men and women, something that could be at least in part caused by discrimination.

A more recent study by economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn found that while experience, occupation, and industry explain much of the gap, there is still more than 40 percent of it that remains unexplained, the part that could be chalked up to discrimination.

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Gender Expectations in the Economy

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Women are about twice as likely as men to say they had been discriminated against at work because of their gender (18% vs. 10%)


Male and Female Median Earnings, 1959–2008


Median Lifetime Earnings by Educational Attainment, 2009 dollars

All people, not broken down by gender or race


Educational Pay Gap by Gender, Median Lifetime Earnings


Gender Gap with Typical Timeout

How to Close the Gender Wage Gap For companies: While some CEOs have been vocal in their

commitment to paying workers fairly, American women can’t wait for trickle-down change. AAUW urges companies to conduct salary audits to proactively monitor and address gender-based pay differences. It’s just good business.


Closing the Gender Wage Gap

For individuals: Women can learn strategies to better

negotiate for fair pay. Improved negotiation skills can help close

the pay gap. Real reform must be institutional though,

not individual.



The Glass Ceiling

Besides having different pay, women and men have different ranks in corporate and government jobs.

The higher you go, the fewer women and minorities you will see.

This “glass ceiling” confronting women and racial ethnic workers is a global phenomenon.

On the other hand, men in women-dominated professions often “ride the glass escalator” (get preferential treatment) as tokens

There are more men on corporate boards named John, Robert, William or James than there are women on boards altogether

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Sex, Gender, and Life Chances This has led to a situation called the

feminization of poverty, which is the economic trend showing that women are more likely than men to live in poverty, due in part to: the gendered gap in wages, the higher proportion of single mothers compared

to single fathers, and the increasing cost of childcare.


Emotional Labor

Women’s and men’s work differs in the emotional labor involved in their jobs.

In this largely invisible aspect of many jobs (flight attendant, wait-staff, secretary, teacher, sales clerk, and health care worker), employees must show such feelings as attentiveness and caring and suppress feelings such as boredom or irritation.

Approximately one-third of U.S. workers, most of them women, work in jobs that require them to smile, nod, greet, pay attention to, and thank customers.


Motherhood Penalty Generally, motherhood has a negative

effect on women’s wages two recent studies find that employed

mothers in the United States suffer a per-child wage penalty of approximately 5%, on average after controlling for the usual human capital and occupational factors that affect wages (Budig and England 2001; Anderson, Binder, and Krause 2003)

According to Correll et. al, mothers are penalized on: perceived competence recommended starting salary.

Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited from, being a parent.

The study showed that actual employers discriminate against mothers, but not against fathers.

The researchers sent out fake resumes for a childless woman and a mom, both equally qualified. The parent-resumes listed “Parent-Teacher Association

coordinator” under the heading “other relevant activities,” as a way to flag that the candidates were parents.



They found that the moms were viewed less favorably than the non-moms and were substantially less likely to be hired.

What’s more, mothers were offered $11,000 a year less in compensation, on average, than a childless job candidate with the same qualifications.

The study’s authors also sent fake resumes to more than 600 jobs over an 18-month span.

The women with no kids received more than twice as many interview requests than moms with equal skills. Fathers and childless men, meanwhile, received

the same amount of callbacks.


Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s Earnings Distribution Budig and Hodges sought to understand “whether

motherhood penalizes all women equally, and whether the mechanisms generating the penalty operate in the same way for all women.”

Conclusion #1: “There is a penalty for motherhood across the earnings distribution that persists after inclusion of all variables.”

Conclusion #2: “Women with the least to lose are proportionately losing the most – the motherhood penalty is significantly larger among women in the lowest .05 and .10 quantiles of the earnings distribution.”


Conclusion #3: “Reduced hours and weeks of employment among the lowest earners account for a significant portion of this penalty.”

Conclusion #4: “Lost experience accounts for almost half or more of the penalty among women in the upper 50 percent of the wage distribution.”

Conclusion #5: “Job characteristics account for more than 30 percent of the motherhood penalties at the lowest two quantiles but do little to explain the penalty for the majority of earners.”


Breastfeeding

Experts (and some feminists) agree: Breast was ‘best’ for babies.

Poor, less educated and nonprofessional working women are less likely to breastfeed compared to non-poor, more educated, professional or non-employed women. Why might this be?

Literature shows consensus: working negatively related to breastfeeding duration, although working has less of an impact on whether a woman initiates breastfeeding.


More on Breastfeeding

Until passage of the “reasonable break time” provision of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act of 2010, there were no federal legal protections for mothers to breastfeed at work.

Even still, mothers who do often face: Unsupportive co-workers, lack of a private

place to express milk, or no place to store expressed milk


Breastfeeding Mothers Research indicates that:

Mothers find it difficult to breastfeed while engaging in paid work

Women feel pressure to breastfeed Many women who face work-family conflicts opt

out of work when they have the financial ability to do so

Short-term breast-feeders and formula-feeders face similar earning penalties

Long-term breast-feeders (those who comply with guidelines) experience a steeper income decline over the first 5 years of their children’s lives.

Breastfeeding, in short, is not free


Women CEOs in the Fortune 500

The 2012 ranking of the 500 largest corporations in the United States includes a record 18 firms helmed by female CEOs, up from 12 companies in 2011.

Fortune 500 in 2009: 15 firms run by female executives. Fortune 500 female CEOs in 2002 and 2003: 7.

More female bosses mean more profits Companies whose boards are made up of

at least a third women make 42 % more.



Occupational Sex Segregation


Gender Discrimination at Wal-Mart


Wal-Mart


Unpaid Work Through the Life Cycle Women do more housework than men even when

comparing employed women to non-employed men. In the household, men and women do different kinds of

tasks. Women are more likely to do cooking, washing dishes, indoor cleanup, laundry, shopping, and childcare.

Men are more likely to do repairs and maintenance, gardening, and pet care.

The unpaid work of women is estimated be worth about $138,095 a year for stay-at-home mothers and $85,876 annually for employed women.

Despite the obvious importance of this unpaid work, it is often invisible.


Children and Housework

Research projects on children’s time use find that boys do 43 to 46 minutes of housework for every hour that girls do.

When asked to list the chores they do, girls list 42 percent more chores than boys.

Girls are as likely as boys to participate in outside chores and more likely to clean their own rooms, help prepare meals, and care for sibling and pets; the only thing boys report doing more often than girls is basic housecleaning.


Another study by the children’s magazine Highlights confirmed the finding: 73 percent of their girl readers reported being assigned routine chores, compared to 65 percent of their boy readers.

Girls spend more time on chores than they do playing; the opposite is true for boys.

Gender Gap in Pay Starts Early

Not only are girls more likely to be asked to help out around the house, they are less likely to get paid.

The Michigan study found that boys are 15 percent more likely than girls to get an allowance for the chores they do.

And when they do get paid, they get a lower wage than their brothers. Male babysitters get paid $0.50 more an hour than females. Girls do 35 percent more work than boys, but bring home only $0.73 cents on boys’ dollar.



What’s Behind the Way People Divide up Housework? Three theories try to explain the division of

labor in housework:

(1) Socialization theorists say boys and girls learn lessons about what they should feel and do when faced with a dirty kitchen. From this point of view the solution is to teach

boys and girls the skills they will need to take care of households and the people in them.


What’s Behind the Way People Divide up Housework?

(2) Rational choice theorists argue that women and men rationally divide the housework based on which partner knows how to do the work and which partner brings home a larger paycheck.


What’s Behind the Way People Divide up Housework? (3) Feminists point out, however, that the way

housework is divided cannot represent two people of equal status negotiating rationally because women do not have as much power as men. Housework is a “gender factory”. When women do more housework and when women

and men do different kinds of housework, they are reproducing gender.

Feminists also assert that we need to pay attention to the connection between paid work and unpaid work.

Lesson 7: Work and the Economy Robert Wonser. Lesson 7: Work and the Economy 2.

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Transcript of Lesson 7: Work and the Economy Robert Wonser. Lesson 7: Work and the Economy 2.