Today's Reading
The statistics that shocked us most—and that persuaded us to write this book—involved the gap between male and female wages.
When we started our research more than six years ago, the overall figures showed that women were, ever so slowly, gaining on men and the wage gap was narrowing. This seemed like promising news, except that after the mid-1990s the only reason women appeared to be gaining ground on men had nothing to do with women's progress; it was almost entirely due to the fact that wages for blue-collar men were falling dramatically during that same period. Then when we looked at the numbers for college graduates, we found that the gender gap in wages was increasing. At first, we struggled to believe our own findings. We were so used to hearing that women had become the better-educated sex and that education was the key to advancement. And that used to be true; in the 1970s and '80s, women's wages were gaining on men's, and those gains were associated with more education. By 2000, women had become the better-educated sex, earning more bachelor's and master's degrees than men, and since 2006, more doctorate degrees. Yet, it was in these groups—the ranks of college graduates as a group and the highest earners among college graduates, in particular—where gender disparities had grown at the fastest rate. In 2019, a Goldman Sachs study received a lot of press for its claim that if present trends continued, women would not catch up with men in terms of wages for another hundred or so years. By the time we finished the book, we realized that if present trends continue, women would never catch up; indeed, the most recent reports bear out those predictions: they show the gender wage gap, as a whole between men and women, increased between 2019 and 2022.
We considered the conventional explanations for women's lack of progress—explanations we have written about for our entire careers. The time-honored answer to why gender inequality exists is women's family responsibilities. That the reason for women's dropout rates during the COVID-19 pandemic or women's failure to achieve pay parity with men is that women succumb to their "natural" instincts to stay home with their babies. This conventional answer explains today's disparities in the same terms as those of yore: women, by nature, simply make different choices than men. They care more about being home with their children than men do. They turn down opportunities for overtime because childcare costs more than any gains in pay. And when couples realize that fathers and mothers cannot both work sixty-hour weeks, women are still the more likely parent to call it quits on the partnership track.
The role of family responsibilities has always explained a significant part of the wage gap, and it continues to do so today. The gender pay gap for women ages 25 to 34 is smaller than for women from 35 to 54—the peak childrearing years, when mothers make different career choices than fathers to accommodate their family responsibilities. Women make up 87 percent of registered nurses, but while they earn the same base pay as male nurses, they still earn less overall than the men, particularly the male nurses who are willing to work shifts with irregular hours that pay more or who take advantage of tighter job markets by switching jobs or bargaining for higher pay. The only hope for progress, in accordance with this analysis, would involve persuading women to be greedier. Women's futures would depend on their ability to "lean in" and to find the right househusbands to care for their children—or (as many successful professional women are doing) choose not to have children at all.
The problem with this line of thinking—of focusing on women's choices to assume family responsibilities and not to lean in—is that these factors have always held women back; they don't explain why the gendered pay gap for college graduates—the group with the greatest access to quality childcare—increased after the early nineties or why Black women, who have long managed to a greater degree than white women to juggle work and family obligations, remain among one of the most disadvantaged groups in society. The United States has lagged behind much of the rest of the developed world in its provision for childcare, paid family leave, and universal pre-K education ever since President Richard Nixon vetoed a comprehensive early childhood bill in 1971. The lack of childcare did not get distinctively worse after the nineties, particularly for the upper-middle-class women whose incomes have most lagged behind those of comparably educated men. Indeed, the gender wage gap, which did not change during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many women left the job market as schools closed and childcare became harder to find, increased with the recovery. And it increased despite the facts that college graduate women led the movement back into the post-pandemic labor market and that many low-income jobs disproportionately staffed by women were back up to pre-pandemic levels. Yes, childcare explains a large part of the wage gap, but it explains very little of what changed after 1990. And it cannot explain what happened to Vandermeyden, a woman without children, who was known for her willingness to put in long hours.
The second conventional explanation for women's lack of progress is women's occupational choices. This account states that women are drawn to careers that simply don't pay well: creative fields like publishing, "passion" jobs like teaching, and those in the nonprofit sector or care work like nursing. Here, the answers are closer to the mark. For most people, men and women alike, wages had been stagnating since the 1970s. But for the top 1 percent, they had been increasing steadily, and during the 1990s, annual wages for the top 1 percent grew nine times more than for the bottom 90 percent. Wage growth in selected parts of the economy occurred along with the increases at the top; tech, finance, the C-suite, and the top ranks of many professions enjoyed staggering wage gains while the mid-level ranks of most occupations, even well-paying ones, did not.
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