The chart shows the 2009 pay gap for women
who graduated the year before with bachelor’s degree.
The column on the left shows the pay gap for those
working full-time one year after college graduation.
The column on the right shows the pay gap after
controlling for factors known to affect earnings.
A year after they have stepped out of their commencement robes, college-educated women are on average already making $7,600 less each year than their male counterparts, a new report
concludes. That amounts to 82 cents on the dollar.
The report, Graduating to a Pay Gap, was researched and written for the American Association of University Women by Christianne Corbett and Catherine Hill. They found that nearly half a century after passage of the Equal Pay Act of 1963, "women continue to earn less than men do in nearly every occupation."
Previous studies showing the gender pay gap have been met with arguments that women's choices of career, about having children and other matters are the reasons for the disparity. The authors agree that women are less likely than men to go into higher-paying fields such as engineering and computer sciences and choose lower-paying careers in social sciences and education. Even in cases where the major is the same, there are differences in what jobs are taken. Women who graduate with engineering degrees, for example, are less like to work as engineers than men with the same degrees. Women, on average, are also likely to work slightly fewer hours than men.
Yet, when we control for each of these factors, women still tended to earn less than their male peers did. Within a number of occupations, women already earned less than men earned just one year out of college. Among teachers, for example, women earned 89 percent of what men earned. In business and management occupations, women earned 86 percent of what men earned; similarly, in sales occupations, women earned just 77 percent of what their male peers earned.
When we compare the earnings of men and women who reported working the same number of hours, men earned more than women did. For example, among those who reported working 40 hours per week, women earned 84 percent of what men earned. Among those who reported working 45 hours per week, women’s earnings were 82 percent of men’s.
Finally, when we control for economic sector, again men typically earned more than women did. In the two largest economic sectors—the for-profit and government sectors—men earned significantly more than women did one year after college graduation. Occupation, hours worked, and economic sector help us understand the pay
gap, but these differences do not fully explain it.
The authors say that 6.6 percent of the overall 18 percent pay gap they found isn't explained by these factors relating to choice—of career, of hours, et cetera.
So what's the reason for the gap after taking all these pay-limiting factors into account? Discrimination, the authors say. The impact, coming as soon as women get into their first job, is long term. “Lower earnings have an immediate effect after college, setting into motion a chain of disparities that will follow women throughout their careers,” Hill and Corbett write.
One of those disparities: If women earn less, they will have a harder time repaying their student loans, a “significant and growing problem,” the researchers wrote. For the Class of 2008, the average amount of student loan debt was about $20,000, an amount that didn’t vary much between the genders, although women were more likely than men to have taken out loans.
The authors recommend a wide array of means to close the gap, starting with individual choices by students and their parents, including choices about a college major. They recommend women learn how to negotiate for higher pay and look into union jobs where the pay gap is smaller. (Forty percent of today's union members are college-educated.) They urge employers to maintain transparency in pay scales, deal with inherent biases in the workplace, particularly in fields which still have far more men than women, and that they conduct internal pay-equity analyses.
But Hill and Corbett note that public policy needs revamping, too, particularly passage of the Paycheck Fairness Act. That bill first introduced three years ago would require companies to show good reason for any disparities between women and men doing the same work and bar retaliation against any employee sharing salary information with another. The bill lost (for the second time) in June this year because it failed to get even near the needed 60 votes in the U.S. Senate. Every Republican voted against it.