The Gender Pay Gap Part 1: What Is The Gender Pay Gap
The gender pay gap is different from the gender opportunity gap.
A recent study published by McKinsey and LeanIn.org found that 1 in 4 women are considering leaving the workforce or downshifting their careers. In fact, whether your preferred news outlet is the Times, Reuters, or the Post, you can find articles all over the media highlighting how COVID 19 has disproportionately affected women in the workplace. In addition, we’ve often heard that women earn something like 68 cents or 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. But this statistic is easily misunderstood since most of us probably don’t really know what is being measured in each individual article. Over the next few videos, I hope to investigate this statistic, the gender pay gap, improve the discourse around this topic, and give you something to think about. I’m Kristine and this is the think report.
If you’ve been following the gender pay gap in Canada or the United States, you’ve probably heard that in 2020 women make 88 cents to every dollar earned by men. But what does this really mean? This represents the difference in hourly wage earnings, for part-time and full-time workers. Let’s break this down. First, you can measure the medians and find the difference there. So, you line up all the men, part-time and full-time, by how much they earn per hour and pluck the middleman out of the line. and then do the same with the women. This gives you a good idea of what the differences are between the typical woman and the typical man, perhaps. After doing this, we see that the median woman is paid 10-15% less per hour than her male counterpart. To put this into perspective, it would be like if a median woman makes $24 per hour, then the median man makes $27. You can also calculate the averages or the mean earnings per hour for the two genders. When doing this across part-time and full-time workers, we find something similar.
Average Hourly Wage Rate
OK, so does this mean that a male bus driver is making 15% more than his female counterpart? Does the male grocery store clerk make 15% more than his female counterpart? What about advertising executives or attorneys? NO. It turns out that when you compare a man and a woman with the same employment characteristics- that’s years of experience, same job title, same # hours worked, we see that women earn on average 98 cents to every dollar earned by men. So, that’s the equal pay for equal work that you hear about sometimes. Now, granted, a 2% difference is not zero, but it’s only a 2% difference- and that’s a heck of a lot smaller than the 10-20% in all the article headlines.
OK, so, the question isn’t whether the wage gap exists. It does, no matter how you measure it. But, now that we’ve defined the different ways studies measure the gap, the questions we should have now are why does the gap exist, and what, if anything, should we do about it?
In our next video, we’ll discuss the two big factors that account for the median gap, and touch upon possible explanations for the remaining 2% gap.
References
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/05/25/gender-pay-gap-facts/
https://www.catalyst.org/research/womens-earnings-the-pay-gap/
https://www.aauw.org/app/uploads/2020/02/AAUW-2018-SimpleTruth-nsa.pdf
https://www.epi.org/publication/what-is-the-gender-pay-gap-and-is-it-real/