Posted on 04/23/2007 6:58:28 AM PDT by presidio9
A dramatic pay gap emerges between women and men in America the year after they graduate from college and widens over the ensuing decade, according to research released on Monday.
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One year out of college, women working full time earn 80 percent of what men earn, according to the study by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, based in Washington D.C.
Ten years later, women earn 69 percent as much as men earn, it said.
Even as the study accounted for such factors as the number of hours worked, occupations or parenthood, the gap persisted, researchers said.
"If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay?" the study asked. "The answer is no.
"These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force," it said.
Specifically, about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender -- 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation, it said.
One year out of college, men and women should arguably be the least likely to show a gender pay gap, the study said, since neither tend to be parents yet and they enter the work force without significant experience.
"It surprised me that it was already apparent one year out of college, and that it widens over the first 10 years," Catherine Hill, AAUW director of research, told Reuters.
Among factors found to make a difference in pay, the choice of fields of concentration in college were significant, the study found. Female students tended to study areas with lower pay, such as education, health and psychology, while male students dominated higher-paying fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences, it said.
Even so, one year after graduation, a pay gap turned up between women and men who studied the same fields.
In education, women earn 95 percent as much as their male colleagues earn, while in math, women earn 76 percent as much as men earn, the study showed.
While in college, the study showed, women outperformed men academically, and their grade point averages were higher in every college major.
Parenthood affected men and women in vividly different ways. The study showed mothers more likely than fathers, or other women, to work part time or take leaves.
Among women who graduated from college in 1992-93, more than one-fifth of mothers were out of the work force a decade later, and another 17 percent were working part time, it said.
In the same class, less than 2 percent of fathers were out of the work force in 2003, and less than 2 percent were working part time, it said.
The study, entitled "Behind the Pay Gap," used data from the U.S. Department of Education. It analyzed some 9,000 college graduates from 1992-93 and more than 10,000 from 1999-2000.
“If you can in fact get away with paying women less, wouldn’t you as an employer choose to hire ONLY women? Think of the savings!”
I’ve found you can’t get away with paying good employees less. Gender has nothing to do with it.
You have to remember what the study is not saying. They are not saying it was for the same jobs. So they are comparing comparing apples and oranges and making a conclussion about them.
Good point.
It's been shown previously that there is strong self-segregation even within majors. In social sciences, men tend towards the mathematics-heavy portions, and women towards the more subjective...and so it goes in major after major. A major is still a rather wide area.
Good point. Perhaps it would have been more accurate just to say that I have not seen them pull the long hours, travel, etc.
Perhaps they were not asked to either...that's a possibility, too, I suppose. When I was a manager, I was non discriminating - if a problem happened in your area, it was your job to fix it. About the only allowance that I made for gender was "muscle power"...there was one girl on hy team who was fairly small and I always made sure that she didn't get stuck unloading pallets of PCs by herself. Of course, I generally made sure that no one had to do it by themselves, but I'll readily admit that I paid more attention when it happened on her watch.
These studies are absolute bunk. They lump ALL working men and ALL working women together and come up with their figures.
The fact that a woman working part-time at a day care center making $8 an hour compared with a male engineer making $50 an hour has a bit to do with the wage difference.
The folks who bring us these studies try to overcome that by saying that jobs are "comparable worth". In other words - the file clerk making $30,000 a year is "just as valuable" as the engineer making $90,000 a year.
If you look at SPECIFIC jobs - there is no discrepancy in wages.
Where I work - jobs are paid according to the job classification and level. A person's gender has absolutely nothing to do with it. There aren't separate pay scales for men and women.
If the women gravitate towards the lower paying jobs and the men tend to take the higher paying jobs - so be it. It has nothing to do with wage discrimination. It has everything to do with choices.
“It has everything to do with choices.”
Yep.
The only females that work with us that have seen a decrease in pay are those that left, and then came back, for a variety of reasons...most of which you detailed in your post to me.
No bias here....
“”If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay?” the study asked. “The answer is no.”
Is the woman’s “output” the same as a man?
Hmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm
“Among factors found to make a difference in pay, the choice of fields of concentration in college were significant...”
No $hit. What a Brainiac. Who woulda thunk it?
Hmmmmm.
“Female students tended to study areas with lower pay.”
Wow.... no wonder why they earn less...
Hmmmmmmmm.
“Parenthood affected men and women in vividly different ways. The study showed mothers more likely than fathers, or other women, to work part time or take leaves.”
A big honkin’ Mr Mom no kidding!!!
hmm.
“If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay?” the study asked. “The answer is no.”
Well, no where in this article do they provide actual facts that say so.
I sure hope my tax dollars were not used to fund this useless “study”.
In the late seventies, fairly early in the government EEO drive, I had the same experience in reverse. Each time due to "inadequate education" although I had an MSA and the (3) women were high school grads.
I'm pretty sure that, once regions and differing industries were averaged out over that generation, neither side would have an edge.
(I also noticed that nearly all EEO officers and administrators were both female and hyphenated American. Yes, I did work with the EEO office during those years because, despite the original Affirmative Action laws (and prime contracts) being written around veterans and the handicapped, neither had much voice in the system.)
My problem is that we let the government tell people who they can and cannot hire and then make it near impossible to fire or demote anyone short of finding contraband stuffed in their socks...and even that has failed quite recently.
They state this, blatantly, in the article, that women CHOOSE lower paying fields than men do.
However, in the TWISTED mind of a leftist, these fields are only paid lower because they are dominated by women, not because they are in lower demand and higher supply.
I swear, if “liberals” truly understood even the most basic economic principals, we’d be rid of them completely.
So we take the very, very talented women who want to be engineers and throw them in with a vast cross section of men some very bright others not so much. Whats the average going to be?
Specifically, about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender...among factors found to make a difference in pay, the choice of fields of concentration in college were significant, the study found. Female students tended to study areas with lower pay, such as education, health and psychology, while male students dominated higher-paying fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences, it said...
I remember during the early '70s when feminists were saying there was no difference in the performance between men and women, and no justification for what they termed discrimination. Pig that I was, I predicted that little time would pass before women started complaining about those jobs.
The difference between men and women in the workplace? This is a generalization, so not universally true...men expect to adjust their lives and expectations to the workplace. Feminists (and many women) expect the workplace to adjust to their expectations.
BINGO!!!
My experience is that about 90% who make this choice then complain about the lack of income and blame it on the "unfairness of the system".
If this is truly gender based bias, and I have seen ugly cases of it BTW, this should be present in the data as well.
This week (thursday).
ping to link to study for later.
as opposed to the endless male cry sessions with titles such as "The War against Boys"...talk about your fiction....
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