On average women make 77 cents to the dollar of men. There is currently nothing in place to protect persons from being discriminated based on gender. Today, the Senate could have changed that, the Paycheck Fairness Act had already passed the House and debate could have ended for a vote in the Senate. Here’s the beginning paragraph from the Paycheck Fairness Act summary:
Paycheck Fairness Act – Amends the portion of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (FLSA) known as the Equal Pay Act to revise remedies for, enforcement of, and exceptions to prohibitions against sex discrimination in the payment of wages. Revises the exception to the prohibition for a wage rate differential based on any other factor other than sex.
Reasonable, right? Equal pay for equal work.
Well, not so for Scott Brown. Together with our junior senator, Republicans unanimously voted to block the Paycheck Fairness Act.
It seems like Scott Brown is not too high on women’s rights to fight sex discrimination in wages.
I wonder what his response will be, discrimination is good for business?
I sent him an email asking him why and will call his office tomorrow and ask him again. Then I will be sure to forward this information to my email list.
His reasoning is probably that they are going to be reducing the pay of working men by that amount soon so they are hoping to level the playing field that way.
It’s only natural he voted against it. You see he doesn’t want all men to get in on his scam for lazy. Here is why:
1, Becomes a lawyer, hard studying, lazy career
2, National Guard Jag suited him well. High status lighter workload.
3, Marries a below average looking news reporter. High status light workload as an arm piece.
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p>Conclusion:
He’s got wants to corner the “High Status Light Workload
Market.
in general, and particularly when the remark is superficial and unrelated.
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p>Leave his wife out of this.
Congressman McGovern celebrated the anniversary of women being able to vote as full citizens in the United States of America during his successful re-election campaign with his wife, Vicki Kennedy and hundreds of women at his side during the “Women for McGovern” evening in Worcester. Meanwhile, Senator Brown who opposes Affirmative Action, Equal Pay and Equal Marriage was collecting a paycheck as our US Senator.
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p>There shouldn’t even be a question let alone a choice. We need to get busy now to get a US Senator elected in 2012 whose head is in this century.
But McGovern is not and will not be that man. For better or for worse.
A kid can (and should) dream, eh?
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p>Is there an outstanding woman candidate Massachusetts voters will elect?
Quite frankly the whole 77 cents on the dollar argument doesn’t get my dander up. Don’t get me wrong – all else being equal I’d be the first to cry foul if a woman were paid less for the same job as a man. All else being equal is a pretty tough standard though. Obviously women and men are not equal in terms of what jobs they fill. For example there are relatively few women executives compared to men. There is also experience and education to take into account, which may or may not be equal. If this stat really is taking the average of all working women in the country and the average of all working men in the country and women come out at 77% of men that doesn’t surprise me at all.
ABC News story.
…is that there is still discrimination in hiring and assigning men and women to different positions, which is also wrong of course. I thought the legislation was to prevent pay differential in the same position, but I’m not sure it addresses the initial hiring discrimination issue.
but many here won’t like that you have the audacity to dissent.
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p>Put an ad in the paper for a laborer job shoveling snow paying $20/hour and just above it have another ad for a receptionist paying $16/hour. Watch how many men apply for the outdoor, cold laborer position and how many men apply for the “traditional” receptionists job? Neither job has any “skill” or education requirements. My “guess” is you would have a largely disproportionate skew in who replies and who gets hired, which would result in men making $20/hour vs. women making $16/hour. The pay difference may be justified since the shoveler will be out in the cold, rain, snow all day while the receptionist is sitting at a warm desk.
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p>I know this is a tiny example but it happens every day.
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p>The true “discrimination” bias of paying men higher wages for the same job women do is outrageous and should not be tolerated. I am sure it happens at places and it should be rooted out. In my line of business I think men and women are paid the same, based on education and experience and results.
same job, different pay. That’s the act and that is what is happening. Do you think that is fair? Do you think we should have discrimination? I put up the survey story upthread. What is it John? Make your position clear, do you support discrimination based on gender? If you are, fine. That’s your position, just make it clear.
They were DIFFERENT jobs (receptionist vs. laborer) paid at different rates. It sounds like both he and I would object if a woman got hired for the laborer’s position and all of a sudden it was, “Sorry, for you it’s only $18 an hour.”
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p>I should make it clear that I would vote for the legislation in question here for what it does do, and that I’m not so much questioning the accuracy of the 77/100 stat (though I don’t know where it comes from) as the context and relevance of the stat.
but John is lumping them together on purpose. So back to John, are you for it or against it.
I’ll say it again, paying a woman less the a man is wrong if the only difference is their gender.
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p>I feel like you are trying to trick me with “same job, different pay.” I would say people who have the same “value” should get paid the same regardless of gender, it’s immaterial. However, people will get paid differently based on experience, education, track record…
That all of that complicated nuance is a smokescreen to conceal discrimination, which may in some instances be true.
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p>Sounds to me like this bill would make any difference prima facie evidence of discrimination, and put the burden on the employer to show the nuance by preponderance of the evidence.
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p>A trial lawyer’s full employment act.
I just wanted to clarify.
And these are coming from a recent college grad who applied to the receptionist positions more often than the labor ones. Why? Good paying labor positions are drying up leaving just the receptionist positions left for technically unskilled by educated graduates like myself. The other irony is women are better at the new service based jobs and in about ten years we will finally see the results start skewing dramatically in the other direction. More women are finishing school and the new economy caters to skills they are naturally better at. Typing, memorizing, organizing, people skills, conflict solving, task delegating, focusing, etc. Most of the guys at my office are struggling to keep up with their women counterparts, and its not just when we are too busy focusing on fantasy football, its also when we are actually working too, we are still way behind.
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p>I have seen the future and it will be quite good for women and quite bleak for many men. The executive disparity will also start to drop off soon, and naturally, and this is because I am convinced women are better at business than men are as well since they are much better at convincing and persuading which the new global economy requires a lot more than wheeling, dealing, and overpowering. Women are also going to overtake men in terms of the top consumer profile as well. The future is a market by, for, and governed by women for the large part, at least in the West.
In no way am I saying discrimination is not happening or that this legislation is unnecessary, simply making a point that a lot of the disparity was caused by simple economics and it will start skewing in the other direction if trends continue, since women with degrees will outnumber men with degrees, manual labor will continue to shrink, and the nature of business has changed drastically. Forty years ago men had the natural advantage since the industrial economy required manual labor and service economy required education many women lacked (and in most cases were denied). Forty years from now the reverse will be true.
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p>You’re joking, right? Is this your own sexism, or do you have even a shred of credible evidence for this claim?
How is this sexism? I am saying they are better at my job than I am and that they have more economically viable skills than men do. There have been recent Time and Newsweek articles on it. Statistics and neurology back this up. I am saying they make better CEOs, better office managers, better office workers, etc. That is not sexism in the slightest. The truth is women in this century will be entering the workforce better educated, better prepared, and better adapted to the 21st century economy than men. And this is a good thing in many respects, and there is an extent that men will have to be retrained and retooled for the service economy.
from October 24, single childless women between 22 and 30 make an average of 8% more than comparable men. So there’s perhaps some evidence for your idea. This is probably related to another recent phenomenon, the gender gap in universities- I think I remember reading that more women than men are going to college these days.
This was congressional kabuki. 58 votes for, really? You could have 100 senate elections and this thing would never pass, because even the Dems don’t want it.
What makes you so confident in asserting that “even the Dems don’t want it”? After all, all but one Senate Dem (Nelson) voted for it, and the Democratically-controlled House already passed it. Democrats want it, but it’s Republicans like Brown who have been blocking it.
Vote for it with the supermajority.
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p>This thing is a dog plain and simple. 77 cents on the dollar is a fabrication. Where men and women work equal time in the same profession women make 98 cents to the mens 100.
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p>The 77 cent figure is arrived at by comparing different professions. The result of the bill would be federal oversight of all professions and federal wage-setting so that secretaries make as much as truck drivers. So men don’t have a tough enough time as it is, now the feds are going to be cutting their pay.
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p>Way to go, friends of the working man!
… example of a comment begging for a cite.
look it up yourself
You’re not just making a statistical assertion – you’re making a statistical assertion and then denying another. But you don’t feel like you should have to explain? Lame.
Engineers women make 97% of men:
http://www.nsf.gov/statistics/…
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p>An article with a number of outside references:
http://www.swifteconomics.com/…
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p>And from: http://www.ncpa.org/pub/ba392 we get
“When women behave in the workplace as men do, the wage gap between them is small. June O’Neill, former director of the Congressional Budget Office, found that among people ages 27 to 33 who have never had a child, women’s earnings approach 98 percent of men’s. Women who hold positions and have skills and experience similar to those of men face wage disparities of less than 10 percent, and many are within a couple of points. Claims of unequal pay almost always involve comparing apples and oranges.”
This without a doubt would pass. But if Republicans thought it would fail then why not put it for a vote? Seascraper, your argument is laughable.
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p>This is what I hope, woman voters who voted for Brown take a second look of what he thinks of them and his values. This vote means he couldn’t care less about their discrimination.
The senators get together and make sure the thing doesn’t pass but they want to throw some red meat (or red granola) out to dupes like you. Why didn’t they bring it up when they had a supermajority? Why didn’t they bring it up before the election when it would have been an issue?
Have the vote and see the results. It’s pretty simple.
They would still get Kent Conrad or somebody to vote against it. Happens all the time.
Beyond your rhetoric, what is the REASON fot this bill which seems to be covered in these other laws?
…compared to Equal Pay it enhances enforcement and tweeks exceptions. My understanding was that Ledbetter specifically remedies a SCOTUS decision relative to timing of bringing suit compared to when the pay disparity began.
Why isn’t it an amendment of the Equal Pay Law?
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p>It always bothers me when these things are done in this way. Half the time, there are FUTURE court cases and uncertainty about the differences BETWEEN the bills, etc. Are these ‘untweaked’ provisions left standing in the older law? Why? Are the court cases decided incorporated into statute?
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p>I’m sorry, but this reads like a feel-good red herring from a lame duck congress – a sort of legislative press release.
It very specifically says that the Paycheck Fairness Act “AMENDS a portion of the Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938 (Equal Pay Act)…”
I was told that the reason he voted no to this bill was because it would result in excessive and costly litigation costs for small businesses. Apparently he is going to introduce a bill that will protect smaller businesses from being ruined by excessive litigation. Perhaps the way to avoid litigation is to pay the right wage in the first place. Protection for small businesses means there will still be a block of women left behind. A lawyer is not going to take up a case where there is not a clear discrepancy in pay, so they should not even have to worry about it if they are practicing wage equality.
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p>Sounds like a stall tactic to me. Senator Brown is the happy “NO” guy. NO NO NO.
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p>pretty much sums up his position.
Oooooh – “excessive and costly litigation.” Guess what folks, if a business breaks the law by discriminating against women, or minorities, or anyone else, it should be sued. That’s why we have anti-discrimination laws in the first place. Cry me a river, Brownie.
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p>And no, I’m not in favor of frivolous lawsuits. But that’s not what’s at issue here.
In fairness, the Boston Globe editorialized against the bill as well.
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p>Not sure if that is the corporate suits at the company dictating that stance or not (as opposed to the editorial board), but thought it was noteworthy when I read it, and relevant to the discussion.
Please correct me if I’m wrong here. I’m new. But yet illegal aliens get a free pass? Now that’s discrimination.
I am always amazed that blacks got the right to vote 60 years before women did.
the Republicans would have tried to put language in that would undermine their strength. That could have been more dangerous than the way it played out in this case.
and now Senator Brown is going to propose his own. I am really curious to see what that is. I honestly hope that the Democrats won’t let it go to debate because this has compromise written all over it and that does not seem to be working out well for us lately.
That two people, one man and one woman, both doing the exact same job equally well, that the woman is pad 77% or the man?
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p>If that was the case, why would all companies just hire women and get a big deduction in salaries?
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p>I agree that the median salary for woman may be lower that the median salary of men, but you will have a hard time convincing me that women are paid 77% of what a man does for the same job.
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p>This 77% number represents all full time workers. There are many reasons that the average male salary is higher than the average female salary, none of which have to do with the sex of the worker.
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p>I believe that there should be equal pay for equal work.
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p>Should all people with engineering degrees be paid the same as people with fine arts degrees? No.
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p>Should all people doing unskilled labor in an office be paid the same as unskilled labor digging ditches? No.
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p>Should art restoration professionals be paid the same as a house painter? No.
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p>Should a receptionist be paid the same as a garbage collector? No.
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p>Should all people doing the same job be paid the same? Of course.
Call Scott Brown, he doesn’t agree with you.
And Scott Brown wants rape victims to pay for their own rape kits at hospitals.
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p>President Obama has not repealed DADT so he must hate Gay people.
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p>Any other leaps you want to include here?
Brown’s position:
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p>Financial burden on businesses
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p>Not sure what that has to do with Kayne, well, of course that you want to change the subject.
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p>John, call Scott Brown and tell him he’s wrong.
My point was people take some issue and a “vote” and they construe all sorts of conclusions from something 5 steps away. Republicans vote NO on a unemployment Bill and people say Republicans hate working class, GW does a rotten job responding to Katrina and Kayne says GW hates black people, and Senator Brown votes NO on a bill which he believes would cause too many frivolous lawsuits and you say he wants woman to make less. Let’s stop this type of hyperbole. Politicians often have bills which may have wonderful motives but are filled with pus which they dislike. When they vote NO (or YES) the other side turns the vote into a de-facto vote for or against something, which it isn’t.
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p>I would put my house on a bet that Scott Brown wants equal pay for men and women, just like Republicans will vote for extending unemployment if it gets funded from the existing Stimulus funds.
… if Brown wants to assert that this law will bring frivolous law suits, it’s on him to explain why in detail because otherwise it’d be reasonable to assume that such a position means he things lawsuits about equal pay will be frivolous. Until he shows how his understanding of the law is that it will result in frivolous lawsuits outside of meritorious conflicts about equal pay, it is perfectly reasonable to check this one in the ‘against working people getting equal pay’, since that’s what the bill on it’s face is about.
that are trying to blur things. The bill is clear. sex discrimination in the payment of wages. What kids of frivolous law suits?
It is possible to look at virtually any problem so closely that the nature of the problem is obscured. From two inches away, you will see the tree and miss the forest. Focus an electron microscope closely enough on your mirror, and it will show a rough, jagged landscape filled with mountains and canyons.
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p>How many of our male participants here have been told (always informally, of course) “If you take this job, you’ll be taking money away from a struggling family”. How many of our female participants have heard this?
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p>It doesn’t matter what the excuse is; the point is that there is always an excuse. The bias is very real and very pervasive. Think I’m distorting things? Take a look at the gender distribution of custody awards in divorces with children — how many mothers get custody compared to fathers? Take a look at the gender distribution of the companion child support awards — how many mothers pay child support, compared to how many fathers. What is the net flux of child support payment flow in our economy — the total sum of court-ordered child support received by women minus the total sum of court-ordered child support received by men. If our culture did not have a gender bias, that net flux would be zero. It is not, not by very very long shot.
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p>Go walk around the web, visiting web sites of medium and large companies. For each site, go look at the “About” page and take a look at who the company claims as its executives. Pay attention to the male/female mix.
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p>I think you’ll find that the mix is overwhelmingly male.
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p>That’s what all this is about.
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p>Of course, none of us should be shocked that Scott Brown is a disgustingly sexist pig — the man offered to sell his daughters in his first national prime-time press conference.
I’m not sure how alimony/child support issues would be addressed by this new legislation, as it is a creature of the state courts, and doesn’t correspond to the spouse’s actual income.
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p>This is an issue in Massachusetts, where the law simply assumes what direction the support payments should flow. I have seen an ex-husband/divorced father paying rather burdensome child support/alimony for years on end, even when the former spouse receiving those payments vastly outearns the ex-husband/father.
My point is that our on-going discussion of the 23% (77 vs 100) income gap is a small part of a much larger problem. It is like arguing about the “proper” percentage of a poll tax, rather than recognizing the fundamental racism it embodies.
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p>By the way, child support most certainly does correspond to each spouse’s actual income, and that’s just the beginning of the story. But, as JohnD observes, the specifics are more suitable in their own thread.
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p>Let me connect some dots, though. When the first child is born, many families ask themselves whether the family can somehow get by on one income — at least for a few years. That discussion is, in turn, informed more by economics than biology; once the new baby is weaned, the dad is just as capable of being the full-time care provider as the mom (biologically speaking). In all too many cases, dad is paid a lot more than mom, and so dad’s salary is correspondingly more difficult to give up. So the first step happens when the family decides that mom will stay home, because her smaller income is a more bearable loss than dad’s.
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p>Now, fast forward a few years. Mom goes back to work around the time that baby goes to school. Since, by now, the rhythms of the household have coalesced around her as the care provider, she probably goes back with “mother’s hours”. How’s that for a gender-biased term? So she books a few more years of low-income (with respect to dad) work, and she’s not likely to be on anybody’s fast track into the executive suite.
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p>Meanwhile, since mom is home with the kids, it’s mom who knows all the neighbor kids, all the other care providers, who little Suzie is currently happiest with, all that stuff.
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p>Suppose, now, that mom and dad decide to divorce. Dad has no experience being the full time care provider. Dad has been the financial mainstay of the family for years. Dad knows next to nothing about the day-to-day social life of little Suzie. Those are all the things that the Court looks at in a custody question.
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p>Unless mom has gotten into the habit of selling crack in the presence of little Suzie, mom is going to get physical custody whether or not dad fights it.
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p>Dad is going pay mom 50% of his net and 33% of his take-home for the next fifteen years. In just a few years, when little Suzie is old enough to stay by herself, mom is going to go back to work full time, and her income is going to skyrocket. If dad wants to change the support, he’s going to have pay an attorney thousands of dollars to argue a case that can be dragged out for years and which might net dad a few thousand dollars a year in reduced support if he’s lucky.
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p>If men want to change the inequity of all this, the starting point is all the way back at the top of this too-long comment — if mom and dad earned about the same, dad would have far more freedom to stay home.
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p>Trying to take the gender income gap out of context of the “rest of the story” drastically minimizes the true impact and pervasiveness of this problem.
In your example above Mom gives up her income because it is less, but if she stays home until the child is school age she’s lost years of experience so if she goes back to the same job her employer will pay her based on her years of service. What we don’t know in your story is why she was paid less before the child was born. I would just assume if I knew nothing else that she was in an inherently lower-paying job than Dad. Of course she is still expected to do the bulk of the domestic work. I’ve said for awhile that women are probably in practical terms as equal as they are going to get until such time as men decide to step up and take on their equal share of domestic work. I’d be interested in the difference between couples with kids and couples without; my suspicion is that the gap is on average narrower between husbands and wives without children, both working basically all their adult lives.
You wrote:
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p>I don’t have time to chase the statistics right now, but my impression is that the reality is just the opposite. The gender-based income gap is pervasive, specifically in the scenario you cite here.
…no kids means that both spouses would be able to devote full time to work. Neither would have to take parental leave at birth (and make a decision about the next few years), worry about parents’ hours or take a sick day to stay home with a sick child. Obviously there’s still any difference in what their respective jobs are that needs to be taken into account.
Here is the first report I found, “Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2005“, from the U.S. Department of Labor/U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, dated September 2006.
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p>I call your attention to Table 8, on page 20. Sadly, there is no way to excerpt the table itself. Here are the highlights, though:
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p>
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p>Those two gaps, as a percentage of the man’s income, are:
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p>
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p>That first number comes strikingly close (76.4%) to the 77% number discussed upthread.
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p>We are unlikely to solve the gender bias against women in our society if we deny the data that show its presence.
I noticed the switch in terminology from average to median, which are definitely not the same.
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p>This still doesn’t take into account the jobs the husbands and wives have. You need to control for all variables.
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p>Unless or until every profession, career, occupation etc. is divided exactly in half in terms of which gender occupies those positions, an overall stat is pretty meaningless.
I used what I could find. More complete data will be a welcome addition.
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p>You wrote:
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p>I strongly disagree, especially with your characterization of these results as “meaningless”. Try replacing “gender” with “race” and see if you would apply the same standard to test whether or not income distribution reflects a racial bias.
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p>More specifically, the null hypothesis that I think we seek is “No gender bias exists in income distributions.” I do not agree that the standards you suggest are necessary to falsify that null hypothesis.
In fact I strongly suspect that while there has been progress white people in aggregate have higher paying jobs than black people in aggregate, and therefore you could probably calculate a similar stat that says that on average black people make only a certain percentage of what white people make. In both race and gender cases it is any hiring and other opportunity discrimination that is the real issue to be addressed. Equality of opportunity is the real issue here, whereas it sounds like you’re insisting on equality of result or outcome, which I reject as the appropriate standard.
Consider a conference table with thirty seats, populated with two green-hats sitting next to each other and twenty-eight yellow-hats. Suppose the room contains three hundred green-hats and three hundred yellow-hats.
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p>The first question is “Does the seating at the table reflect a bias against green-hats?”
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p>If you examine the two seats containing the green-hats and their two immediate neighbors, you will count two green-hats and two yellow-hats. You’ll conclude that the green-hat representation is fifty percent, and you’ll answer “No, there is no bias against green-hats at this table.”
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p>Did your process arrive at an accurate answer?
Yes there are fewer green hats at the table in question, but my question is how did they get there. If someone were policing the seating arrangement and only allowed two green hats to sit down at a yellow hat table, that would constitute discrimination and would be wrong. However if the hats chose to sit there of their own accord, or their seats were chosen by lot I’d have no problem.
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p>OK here’s my simple thought experiement:
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p>Out of 200 people in the medical field 100 of them are men who are doctors each making 100k; the other 100 are women who are nurses each making 50k. By your statistical analysis you would say that’s not fair – women are making only half of what men make, whereas I would say no, the relevant point is that nurses are making half of what doctors make.
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p>Now say 25 of each gender switched fields so 75 doctors are men and 25 are women while 75 nurses are women and 25 are men. Now you have 75 men making 100k and 25 men making 50k so the average male salary is $87,500. With 75 women making 50k and 25 making 100k, the average female salary is $62,500 or about 2/3 the average man, better than the 50% rate of the first example because the ratio in each job is coming closer to equal.
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p>Finally if 25 more of each gender switched professions there would now be 50 each of men and women as doctors and nurses. The average salary for both genders would be at 75K. Notice I never changed the salaries of doctors and nurses, just the number of each gender in each profession. It is only if the numbers of men and women in each profession were equal that an overall stat regarding a pay gap could have any real meaning.