What Wage Gap? The True Story of Why the Average Woman Earns Less than the Average Man
We all have heard the refrain. There is a wage gap between men and women. Yet starting salaries for the last two decades have shown no difference between men and women. Yet President Obama in his most recent State of the Union speech stated that women earn less than 77% of what a man earns.
Where is the gap? As it turns out a Harvard Professor of economics has researched the issue for decades and the gap is not simply men receiving more than women. It is a societal issue around care giving. In general women are twice as likely as men to care for loved ones and the result is that the flexibility to do so takes a toll on their wages. Claudia Goldin, a professor of economics at Harvard University, found that discrimination is not part of the equation.
She found that 6% of the 23% of the pay gap is related to females choosing occupations that pay less than men such as nurses vs. doctors (nurses traditionally having more women and males representing the majority of doctors. 17% is related to flexibility of hours in the workforce. Women give up most to care for parents, children, grandchildren and spouses. The fact that women sacrifice income for caring for loved ones requires us to change societal norms to equalize. Slowly the changes are occurring as men increasingly are viewed less as breadwinners and more as equal partners in earning income and sharing household chores. So more laws on equal pay won’t help change the gap but assisting people to share caregiving chores would go much farther to eliminate the gender gap in wages than anything attempted in the last two decades.
Sources:
http://newoldage.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/work-women-and-caregiving/?_r=0
