The wage gap has for a very long time been a hobby horse of women's activists but in reality these gaps appear between just about every identity group we can think of. I support the presidents proposal because I feel workers knowing the compensation of their peers would empower them to demand equal or fairer compensation. Unequal pay isn't bound to sex. Unequal pay for equal work crosses all identity lines.
The broadening of the issue is an opportunity progressives have failed to exploit for decades. Only recently have we seen the vastly larger gaps between women of different races emerge in the mainstream which also affect the men sharing those racial identity but what of the generic employee who's being underpaid relative to their peers? Where are their advocates in these debates?
Herein lies the problem with our current approach to wage gaps, it's overly reliant on myopic gender politics which ignore the larger disparities outside of sex along with the broader struggles of workers for fair compensation in the workplace.
Here is a ACLU summary of the Pay Check fairness Act:
According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2013, women who worked full time earned, on average, only 78 cents for every dollar men earned. The figures are even worse for women of color. African American women earned only approximately 64 cents and Latinas only 56 cents for each dollar earned by a white male.
The Paycheck Fairness Act will help secure equal pay for equal work for all Americans. The bill would update the Equal Pay Act of 1963, a law that has not been able to achieve its promise of closing the wage gap because of limited enforcement tools and inadequate remedies. The Paycheck Fairness Act would make critical changes to the law, including:
requiring employers to demonstrate that wage differentials are based on factors other than sex;
prohibiting retaliation against workers who inquire about their employers’ wage practices or disclose their own wages;
permitting reasonable comparisons between employees within clearly defined geographical areas to determine fair wages;
strengthening penalties for equal pay violations;
directing the Department of Labor to assist employers and collect wage-related data; and authorizing additional training for Equal Employment Opportunity Commission staff to better identify and handle wage disputes.
The time has come to make equal pay a reality. During this climate of unprecedented economic uncertainty, nothing could be more important than ensuring that all workers receive equal pay for equal work.
Let's look at the relationship between education, race and sex through this analysis by the
Harvard Business Review which like most resources pivots toward gender centering to bury the racial angle. I attribute this to white gender activist's hostility toward competing victim classes stealing the spotlight which is a reoccurring theme in the dynamics of today's social justice. It's time we recognize those lobbying for white identities in have a vested interest in defining struggles primarily along gender/sexuality lines.
This chart needs to be put in the context of gender disparities in education attainment where women lead by a wide margin:
The result of this is the
reversed gender wage gap that forms when you don't control for education among unmarried young childless women especially in major cities.
"according to a new analysis of 2,000 communities by a market research company, in 147 out of 150 of the biggest cities in the U.S., the median full-time salaries of young women are 8% higher than those of the guys in their peer group."
These claims have been fact checked by
PolitiFact (rated mostly true) and
ABC Australia(claimed cherry-picking). The stats are legit but can be disputed because equally educated men still out earned women but far more women had education.
The perils of gender framing become apparent when you compare these to exerts:
The white workforce is younger than the black workforce — 8.8% of their full time workforce is between 16 – 24 years of age compared with blacks at 8.0% — and yet whites earn considerably more. (In addition, it’s worth noting that the unemployment rate for black youth is 26.6% almost double the unemployment rate of white youth at 13.5%.).
So you have a identity group with double the youth unemployment but where is the concern:
The oft-used simple chart at the top of this post provides a misleading picture of the status of white women on the earnings pyramid. This second chart shows how men, regardless of race or ethnicity, earn more than women of any race when education level is held constant, with one exception – Asian women. Asian women with bachelor’s and advanced degrees are the only women who make more than one group of men–black men, who earn the least in comparison to their male counterparts at every level of education.
What you are seeing is a case by and for white women who seek common cause with poor minority women. The discussion of wage gaps by the author exist to make the case for gender centering on women which has becomes a problem for any ethnic minorities who can't compete with whites for the sympathy of the white majority. The fact black men and black women have the smallest wage gap isn't even acknowledged but it's clearly in the interest of Blacks to close the far larger racial wage gap with Whites and Asians which won't likely become a topic of conversation in the mainstream.
Black youth having double the unemployment isn't cause for panic but I'm sure it would be if white women demonstrated such a disparity. The framing revolves around the standing of white women relative to white men with a supporting cast of minority females who's vast intra-gender disparities are only considered relevant to highlight the earnings of white males with median salaries less than Asian males. The current gender framing of the wage gap issues is chuck full of contradictions and omissions like the failure to acknowledge men and women tend to share incomes through families unlike segregated races. This means White and Asian women stand to gain from their higher earning men while those partnered with poor minority men do not.
The focus on gender deflects away from the class oriented issues surrounding race which direct more attention to pathways of upward mobility for the underclasses. Life choice is the biggest factor in these wage gaps and a great many poor people lack the social infrastructure to guide them to higher wage jobs. We can see life choice dynamics along gender lines in this infographic created to challenges the current gender narrative.
More on how life choice complicates things can be found in this
recent Boston Globe piece on the gender wage gap.
Government data collection enables economists to refine the gender comparison by looking specifically at younger cohorts of workers. Younger women are achieving the same (or higher) levels of education as men, and they have much more freedom in their occupational choices than did earlier generations. According to Harvard economist Claudia Goldin, the gender pay gap narrows to upwards of 90 cents on the dollar for younger, white, college-educated workers at the beginning of their careers after controlling for education levels and hours worked.
This higher ratio suggests that the combination of occupation and explicit gender discrimination accounts for at most a 10-percent initial pay discrepancy between men and women, at least for some demographic groups. Historically, occupation has explained a significant portion of the overall pay disparity between men and women, which doesn’t leave much room in the data for explicit gender discrimination at the early stages of a career to be a main driver of the earnings differential.
Life choice variance is something we must come to terms with and it's resulting disparities rather than assuming discrimination underlies all or most of these broad wage gaps. Life satisfaction isn't wholly dependent on income alone nor can are women liberated by being forced into the roles of our choosing. A stay at home mother earns less but may find more fulfillment in that role as could a person who choosing people oriented social sciences over higher earning STEM fields.
The social policies in other OECD nations show us are limits to inducing men and women to take on identical roles even with generous government support. The best case scenario seems to be a gender wage gap of around 10%. Primary care givers still need more support in the United States to get there but that doesn't mean they won't want to spend more time caring for others or their partners won't invest more time earning money. We should be wary of coercing sameness beyond providing equal opportunity.
Wage disparities in tech incomes:
"High-tech pay gap: Minorities earn less in skilled jobs" - USA Today
Here we see our world views turned upside down with Asian men earning less than white and black men not to mention white women which directly contradicts assumptions we'd derive from the median income charts.
Puzzling to researcher Kreisberg is the pay gap for Asians, who are generally well represented in the rank and file — if not the leadership — of technology companies.
One of the causes may be rooted in gender and cultural differences: how comfortable people feel negotiating salary, says Klein.
White managers may also respond differently to people of color when they negotiate a starting salary or a pay raise, she said. -USA Today
I've heard anecdotal accounts from Asians suggesting they expect to get paid less as the cheaper labor replacing white tech workers.
Here's a great diary on the subject. The same groups who on average make more are also over represented and likely underpaid in a sector where there success is more disproportionate than any other identity group. Asians have 6 times the relative representation in tech relative to their populations which is even greater if we narrow focus to Asian men. Nonetheless they are said to suffer from a 'Bamboo Ceiling', with lower proportions of them moving into management.
Tech jobs: Minorities have degrees, but don't get hired -USA Today
Disparities in hiring have an impact on the median incomes. Wage gaps can represent a addressable opportunity gap driven by employer's hiring practices rather than employee choice. Those in white and Asian communities will be exposed to more people pursuing the high income paths than those in poorer communities. This isn't a problem along gender lines since those individuals share the same communities. On the gender front work preferences are a far larger factor which may also explain the degree attainment gender gap.
Pushing women into higher earning fields has been strategy along with combating hostile work environments but even within female dominated fields like teaching, social work, or health care, the income disparities remain so we ought be at least skeptical about 'male dominated' being a factor in other areas.
Race and class segregation has lasting impact on our youth but opportunity gaps aren't the kind Obama's pay equity legislation would address unlike his initiative to push free community college which might also help males with the nearly 50% degree attainment gender gap favoring women.
Examining wage gaps outside the gender frame is hard because that's where we've put the bulk of our resources and attention. Women are also the most populous and sympathetic identity group not to mention their a 54% voting bloc. We have plenty of gender gap studies saturating the discourse while an issues like two workers doing equal work and sharing the same group identity getting different pay are rarely examined.
Better legislation not centered on gender could give any underpaid worker the information they need to demand better compensation in workplaces with confidential pay and a general expectation that equal work demands equal pay (with needed exceptions for experience etc.). By demonstrating benefits for everyone rather than exploiting rivalries between identities I think the Democratic party can even turn wage equality into a issue for all. This should be an issue of basic worker protection rather than just a women's issue considering that framing leaves far too many identities out of the conversation if not making some hostile towards it.