I was visiting my friend Ike again, which always offers a chance to be surprised. We talked about the upcoming election, and I wondered whether he had an "anybody but McCain" attitude. He said he'd rather not vote than vote for Hillary Clinton.
"Why?"
"Face it," he said. "With one or two outstanding exceptions, like Florida in 2000, voting is mostly a symbolic act. Well, the symbol that I want to register is that the system isn't working. I'd vote for Obama, but if Hillary gets the nomination, I'd rather send the symbolic message 'none of the above' than give her any kind of support."
And so I had to find out why. It turns out that Ike feels strongly about pay equity, he makes large judgments on narrow grounds, and he's got a memory.
"Hillary repeats that crap about pay equity that NOW pumps out. That women make only such-and-such on the dollar, compared to men."
"That's crap?" I asked him.
"Complete crap," he said. And he told me how he came to that conclusion.
About ten years ago, Ike had had a conservative student in one of his classes, a guy who raised his hand to challenge him when he made some remark about pay discrimination against women. "And he made this argument that I thought was totally bogus. 'Where'd you get that?' I asked him. And he named some book by some conservative whack job--Phyllis Schafly, Midge Dector, one of those poster-girl neocons, I forget who. I went and found the book and checked it out. I wanted to prove to this little conservative twerp that he was wrong. So there was this argument, dishing out all kinds of data and facts from the Census Bureau, and I decided to check the actual data myself. And you know what? She was basically right. The data convinced me. I had to change my mind. In fact, on average, women are so far from being victims of pay discrimination, I'd say that if anything, men are underpaid today."
I couldn't believe this, so I asked him to walk me through it. Here's a digest of what he said:
That "x cents on the dollar" figure that is publicized by NOW every year in April or whenever grabs your attention, but it's dishonest. It's derived by comparing the money taken home by male and female full time workers--take what women earned, divide by the number of full time women workers; take what men earn, divide by the number of full-time male workers, and then compare. Set the male value to 100, and voila, you've got cents on the dollar for women. All the data come from the census bureau. The questionaire they use to generate this data has several categories for workers--part time up to this many hours, part time between that number of hours and another, three or maybe four categories. (Ike said he forgets the details; it has been a while since he looked into this.) And then, there's the final category: full time workers, workers who work "40 or more hours per week." "So this is the first problem," he said. "Every study done on the subject finds that men in this category work longer hours -- 5 to 8 hours more per week--than women. Five hours in a 40 hour week is one-eighth, or about 12 percent. Eight hours is 20 percent. So, that accounts for a lot of the difference--maybe 20 cents, if the higher figure is right. But even it it's five hours a week, the problem that NOW is talking about is a lot smaller than they say."
"So if they say '79 cents on the dollar,' we're really talking 91 cents on the dollar," I said, doing the math.
"So far," he said. "But there's more. Another problem is that if you sum across the whole economy, all the different age groups of workers, you aren't measuring current wage discrimination. A lot of the difference between what men take home and what women take home comes from past job discrimination."
This was pretty clear to me. My mother, who worked full time until she retired back in the late 1970s, was an executive secretary in an office for most of her working life. If she had graduated from college in 1980 instead of 1936, she'd have been an executive, not an executive secretary. And she would have made a lot more money. Her cohort is long gone from the workforce, but women who are within a decade or two of retiring were certainly affected by job discrimination. "Exactly," said Ike. "You can track the effects of equal opportunity legislation through the data. In the younger brackets of workers, there is way less of a discrepancy between male and female average earnings. The biggest discrepancy is in the highest age bracket."
"Makes sense," I admitted. "It's measuring past job discrimination, not current wage discrimination."
"Well, it could be measuring both," Ike said. "But there's no direct way to separate it out. And by the way, NOW points to this and, I don't know, maybe they had some intern do the analysis, but they point to this and say, based on this data, that a woman can expect to experience more wage discrimination as she gets older. That's just stupid. Someone at NOW just doesn't get it. Women move through these brackets in time, and in any given year the data represent a snapshot of what's out there right now. To say that it shows what's going to happen to a woman as she gets older is just ignorant. Sophomore intern crap."
"Okay," I said. "So what's that worth? In terms of our 91 cents on the dollar?"
"Hard to say," Ike said. "We can't say, not precisely, not based on Census data. But we can do this: we can factor out the influence of past job discrimination by looking at the youngest category of workers, those who are 18 to 24 or 25--whatever the hell that boundary is in the data. And when you look at that cohort, the youngest cohort, you see that there's no wage discrimination. None. They're equal--within a percentage point, a point and a half. In some categories, men are ahead of women a little. In others, women come out ahead. Women with education. With Ph.D.s. Black women with Ph.D.s are way ahead of almost all the other categories, especially white men with Ph.D.s." He gave a snort, sort of a laugh. "You can say that affirmative action works. Black women with PhDs are in demand, so their salaries get bid up."
"So if it's mostly even in this cohort," I said, "how can you say that men are being discriminated against? You mean they're victims of reverse discrimination because of affirmative action?"
"No, no, I'm not talking about that. I think affirmative action is great, and it's the reason I think any talk about reparations for slavery is way off base. I already paid reparations by being underemployed half my working life." Ike spent most of his career as an itinerant visiting professor, a few years here, a few years there, while the higher-paying, steady jobs went to women and minority candidates. "Here's the deal," he said. "If pay equity is largely achieved for this entry cohort, then what about this discrepancy in work hours? Men are getting screwed."
I saw a problem in his line of reasoning. "Maybe in this younger cohort, male and female full-time workers both put in longer hours. Maybe they're about the same, and that's why the pay is the same."
"Huh. Could be." I could see that this set him back a bit. "Could be. Maybe younger couples are less likely to do that trade-off that a lot of couples do, where they choose one partner and maximize the couple's commitment to that career, while the other partner does all the support staff work. But for a lot of couples, specialization is a rational decision. Easier for a couple to focus on one career. They get more joint income, have a higher standard of living, with less actual work. But maybe these young types aren't into it."
"Or maybe," I said, "they haven't hit that place yet. No kids. A couple has kids, and somebody's going to stay home for a while. And as they grow up somebody's going to be driving them to the doctor, the dentist, soccer practice, the whole nine yards."
"Right," Ike said. "And usually it's the woman. Not always, but hey. We're talking national patterns, whether you like them or not. You might want it to be 50-50, but it isn't. Facts are facts. In most couples, it's the woman. And this is another reason, maybe, that a pay discrepancy might open up in the next cohort, the late twenties-early thirties cohort."
I spotted a flaw in his reasoning. I love to spot mistakes when Ike makes them. "So you're looking at this snapshot in the data, and you're saying that as we move through the age brackets, ten years from now we'll experience what is being experienced by the bracket ten years ahead of us?"
I thought I had him. He'd just said that NOW shouldn't be doing that.
"That's not what I'm saying. I'm saying that over time--in other data series, from other years, after the ones I looked at and into the future--I wouldn't be surprised to see a persistant wage 'gap'" (he sneered a bit, to show he was using quotes) "in that age range, as heterosexual couples do this specialization thing. He goes off the office and works hard, trying to get a promotion, putting in long hours or getting overtime to make more money, and she takes time off to breast feed and be the domiciliary worker."
"Isn't that part of the point? What NOW is on about? That women do this uncompensated work at home?"
"Sure. Maybe. Probably. I don't know. And you know what? I don't care." Did I mention Ike is single? "This is what I care about: I do all my own damn housework, and I don't want some woman to get paid more than me for doing the same job I'm doing, just because on average other women in this country do more housework than men do on average. If you want to change the way married couples divide household chores, then go out and do that. Attack it head on. Don't do this sneaky bullshit thing, don't come at it in this back-door way of claiming that women are underpaid at work. What that 79 cents on the dollar crap measures isn't wage discrimination, but gender role differences in work. You want to change it, fine, good luck. But don't go claiming that women are victims of pay inequity."
"Okay," I said. "But you were saying. Men are the victims of wage discrimination."
"Right. So, we've got this situation where there's this discrepancy in national average take-home pay, because men work longer hours and there's some residual past job discrimnination that's reflected in these figures. You factor all that stuff out by looking at hourly workers in the yougest cohort, and you see that the hourly rates are on average the same. So it looks like problem solved, men and women have pay equity. But there's one other thing. Let me ask you a question: of all the job-related injuries and deaths in this country, what do you think the gender breakdown is?"
"I don't know," I said, because I didn't, but I could see where he was headed.
"Take a guess."
I was figuring, sure, more men than women. "60-40? Against men?" He shook his head and smiled, a smile that said he was happy and I was pathetic in my ignorance. "65 - 35?" I offered.
"Not even close," he said. "The year I was looking at this--1995 or so--the data were for a few years earlier. So it was like 1993 or something. Nationwide, the ratio of male to female job-related fatalities was ninety-one percent to nine percent. 91 to 9."
He let that sink in, then underlined the point: "There's a gender division in jobs in this country. You can think it's a horrible thing, you can say that there ought to be more male kindergarten teachers and more female lumberjacks, until everything everwhere is 50-50, but that's not the reality out there. I happen to think that the whole idea that 'if it's not 50-50 there must be discrimination' is bogus. Of course most NASCAR drivers are male. Of course most kindergarten teachers are female. It's not gender discrimination that's keeping the numbers like that, it's innate stuff. Hormones. But even if you think that it's not innate, even if you think that we would have 50-50 everywhere if we raised little boys and little girls differently, that's not the issue here. As long as there is this distribution, as long as the jobs men do are on average way more dangerous than the jobs women do, you have to allow for it when you compare what men and women take home on average. The jobs in which men are overrepresented are on average more dangerous. The jobs in which women are overrepresented are on average less dangerous. People are rational--they pay money to avoid risk. That's what insurance is all about. Well, women give up salary to avoid dangerous work. Sorry, Gloria and Betty and all you dames who think women should be just as ballsy as men. It just isn't happening. When you factor this in, and look at that entry level cohort with its basically even-steven ratio, you have to think: men are underpaid."
Ike took a deep breath and then went into a little rant about NOW. "If they were agitating to make traditionally male jobs safer, I'd wouldn't be so pissed off at them. If they were saying, 'hey! We want equal rights, and we won't have them until just as many women are killed on the job as men are. Job deaths should be 50-50,' then I would think 'nice! You've got some integrity!' But what they're doing is just horseshit. Bad analysis. Leaving out inconvenient truths. Lying. No, I take that back. They could be just stupid."
He still hadn't told me how this related to the presidential campaign. "And this relates to Hillary how?"
"Oh, she's come out strong with that '77 cents on the dollar' crap in some of her speeches. She ought to know better. Maybe she does and it's just grandstanding. What I said about NOW applies to her. There's only three possibilities. Either she hasn't looked at the data herself and has been duped into believing what NOW says, or she has seen the data and is too ignorant to understand it, or she understands it and is using it anyway. Three choices: dupe, ignorant, lying manipulator. Whichever it is, that's not the President I want."
For the life of me, I couldn't see a flaw in Ike's analysis, though I'm not sure I would make it the cornerstone of my decision about what candidate to support. He's always been immoderate that way.
I was thinking about it while he went to the fridge to get a couple of beers. When he came back he handed me one and said, "Just so you don't think I'm a total neanderthal, let me tell you this. I think it's also horseshit this decision that the Supreme Court made, that you have just 180 days from date of hire to file a wage discrimination claim. That's bogus. Totally bogus. There are women who are still being discriminated against out there--not as many as the NOW analysis implies, but even one is too many--and it takes way more than 180 days in a job to begin to get an idea of what others are being paid. So basically the court decision shuts them out of any means of redress. Basically it undoes decades of pay equity legislation."
He was referring to Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire and Rubber, in which the Supreme Court held that a woman couldn't sue for pay inequity because she brought suit only when she found out that men were being paid more than she was, and that date happened to be more than 180 days after her date of hire. (The court reversed previous rulings that held that each new discriminatory paycheck reset the 180 day clock.) "So you're in favor of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Restoration Act?" I asked. I had to explain it to him. (You can read natalie902's diary about it here.)
"Damn right," Ike said. "I'm all about fairness," hoisting his beer bottle in a little salute before putting it to his lips again.
So here's what I'm left wondering after my visit to Ike. Has anybody out there looked at the numbers since then? Is Ike's analysis on target--still? Is NOW blowing a lot of smoke, pointing to a number that doesn't measure pay inequity so much as it measures the the fact that despite years of feminist arguments against it, couples still tend to specialize, with one partner taking on the role of primary breadwinner, the one who does overtime and puts in long hours?
And has Obama ever used that "77 cents on the dollar" bogus number?