The typical white American woman working full-time would need to work from January 1, 2023, until March 12, 2024, to make what the typical white American man working full-time made in 2023. What does gender pay gap mean? In a nutshell it describes the global phenomenon when all women must work more to earn the same amount of money as their male counterparts.
In the first “Mind the Gender Pay Gap” blogpost European data was introduced, in the following section we examine whether the Americans have something to be proud of. The US data is so intriguing because the gender pay gaps exist and differ in every single race as Figure 1 brilliantly shows. The typical white American woman working full-time would need to work from January 1, 2023, until March 12, 2024, to make what the typical white American man working full-time made in 2023.
An Asian woman earns 80% of an Asian man; a white woman earns 84% of a white man; a Hispanic woman earns 86% of a Hispanic male and surprisingly the smallest difference is among black men and women. A black woman earns 96% of a black man, but before we relax on our sofas, I suggest we take a look at the historical roots of this small a difference along with the Black family-models and the typical Black professions, then the picture is not that rosy – but this is the subject for another blogpost. One more interesting fact about the American labour market is that women need to have at least one additional educational degree to earn as much as men with a lesser degree. If a woman with a master’s degree earns as much as a man with a bachelor’s degree, then women with lesser degrees do not stand the chance at all.
The last hundred years brought about tremendous changes in the American and the worldwide labour market in staggering phases. In the US there were three evolutionary and one revolution phases as the Nobel laureate Ms Claudia Goldin states in her 2006 article.
Just a side note: Goldin won a Nobel prize in Economics for a comprehensive account of women’s wages and struggles in the labour market for centuries. And although she is an acclaimed scientist and a Nobel laureate for God’s sake, the second question that pops up if you Google her name is “who is the husband of Claudia Goldin”. It tells a lot about how the world treats and sees accomplished female scientists.
Back to our subject: Goldin realised during her research that women were employed three times more in the preindustrial ages than the previous research and census showed. In fact, her U-shape curve showed that women had better chances to work in the preindustrial – agricultural era than in the industrial times. The figures started to climb up again when the service-based societies emerged along with more access to education and contraceptive pills. Figure 2 shows this interesting change.
Why does the gender pay gap exist? Goldin showed that surprisingly the pay gap was not significant before our modern times: agricultural areas paid the same and in the industrial era women paid in areas where piecework was the norm, thus male and female were paid by their productivity. This significantly changed with the service-sectored modern era.
Is the only reason behind gender pay gap motherhood? Unfortunately, it is a myth, there are several reasons for it:
Unconscious and conscious bias when hiring a new employee. “Maybe baby”, “maternity wall bias”, “unpaid and unregulated emotional labour” are among the top reasons for this category, please refer to our previous blogposts here and here.
There are female dominated professions with lower wages: teaching jobs, healthcare sector or nursing homes, where employees earn less. These employees are still overwhelmingly females.
Women still take on more responsibilities when it comes to children and elderly relatives’ caretaking. This means they must choose part-time and/or more flexible working conditions that pay and enumerate less.
On a global scale females have less access to education: of all illiterate people of the world two-third are women. There is job segregation, lack of employment equality and protection, societal prejudice, poor health-care access – these are all factors that contribute to the gender pay gap all around the world.
Ágnes Holtzer
Sources:
1 https://blog.dol.gov/2024/03/12/what-you-need-to-know-about-the-gender-wage-gap
2 Goldin, Claudia (2006). The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/the_quiet_revolution_that_transformed_womens_employment_education_and_family.pdf
3 https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/economic-sciences/2023/popular-information/
4 https://www.humanrightscareers.com/issues/causes-gender-inequality/
