The upcoming issue of Fast Company has an interesting article on the gender gap in earnings:
"The wage gap is not about corporate discrimination but about the division of labor that happens when men and women have children," says Warren Farrell, author of Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap -- and What Women Can Do About It (AMACOM, January 2005). "The biggest misconception is that there's a wage gap for the same work."
I think Farrell is exaggerating here a bit - there are still, very definitely, instances of women being paid less for doing the same work as men. Women also continue to be passed-over for promotions by some employers. Consider Wal-Mart and Morgan Stanley for starters.
That said, all of the research I've read indicates that Farrell is correct: on average, women earn as much as men for the same work until they have children. While having kids seems to have negligible effects on men's careers, women take time off during pregnancy, perhaps take a few years off to stay home with their children, switch to a part-time or less-demanding position to be more available to their kids, and suddenly find themselves behind their cohort on the career track. It makes sense on the one hand but it's frustrating nonetheless. Other research I've seen points out that these events typically put women substantially behind their male counterparts in terms of retirement savings as well.
The most fascinating part of this issue to me is the $64,000 question: what to do? Farrell's research suggests that there are six tactics for bypassing this scenario:
1. Sign up for a job with bottom-line responsibility
2. Find a field that entails financial or emotional risk taking
3. Work more hours, more weeks, and more years
4. Be willing to relocate to unsexy places at the company's behest
5. Pick technology or hard sciences over the arts or social sciences
6. Choose a field where you can't "check out" at the end of the day
The author would "like to see corporations recognize what they're asking of workers and find ways -- from job sharing to flex-time and other solutions -- to make the burden of work less crushing."
Let's not let fathers off the hook so quickly here either. How many women end up staying home with their kids because they find it too overwhelming to try to keep their house running, nurture their kids, and handle a job at the same time? There's still a persistent gender gap in household chores as well, after all.
In time, I think corporations (and fathers) will come around and/or more career-focused women will elect not to have children. However, as Fast Company points out, Farrell's six strategies for avoiding career pitfalls may save your career but they're just as likely to drive you insane in the process. Even if the disproportionate demands on women are leveled out, there are still some underlying questions about priorities that still need sorting through. Is it really ideal to modify work and home life so women's lives can become more like the traditional working lives of men? Or should men's lives maybe become more like women's, with their emphasis on quality of life over career "success"? Interestingly, that may already be happening:
...if corporations don't embrace these changes on their own, they may find workplace reforms thrust upon them when they begin competing for young talent. In a Radcliffe-Harris poll, 70% of men in their twenties said they'd be willing to trade money for a chance to spend more time with their children. The gender wage gap may someday be solved not by legislation but by the best and brightest people simply saying, "Sorry, you can't pay me enough to take that job."
Posted by sarah at December 15, 2004 10:47 AM | TrackBack