20 responses so far ↓

• 1 Ryan // May 10, 2010 at 4:49 pm

  I think this study is quite misleading. Since I am not an expert on the topic in general, let me talk specifically to pharmacy, which is an area where I actually know something since my wife is a pharmacist and I have other good friends who work in the field as well.

  Within pharmacy, I can think of a few reasons why a male pharmacist might have greater average weekly earnings that are 14% greater than an average female pharmacist:

  1) Retail pharmacists get a raise when they advance from a staff pharmacist to a store manager (or, from store manager to a district manager). At the chain where my wife works, she as well as many other pharmacists (skewed heavily female) have been offered a store manager position, but turned it down. The raise just wasn’t worth it for all the extra duties and hours that come with it.

  2) Relatedly, it is interest to note that when my wife had a rotation at a position working at a pharmacist at a government run medical illness facility, I believe all the pharmacists there were female. For a pharmacy position, that was a relatively low paying position, but had out of this world benefits (as most government positions do) and had very low stress. I would suspect that females (especially married females for whom the job is a second income) gravitate to these sorts of positions rather than kill themselves for and extra 20k a year.

  3) Younger pharmacists are probably 70/30 female, while the distribution is flipped among older pharmacists. So in positions where more senior folks get paid more, the older group (skewed male) is going to out earn the younger group. Furthermore, to this point, the amount of time that women are on maternity leave will obviously reduce the number of years of experience they have attained. So your average 50 year old male may have at least 1-2 more years of working experience than your average 50 year old female on this basis alone.

  I strongly suspect if you control for these variables and did a more thorough study that compared males and females in pharmacy with the same title and working for the same types of employers and with the same number of years of working experience, the difference in wages between the sexes would be minuscule to non-existent.

  Now, to be fair, in a more business-oriented role, it wouldn’t surprise me if there was still a small difference between male and female wages. However, I doubt this gap would be any bigger than other gaps you could find within the sexes, such as the gap in wages between tall males and short males or the gap in wages between more attractive women and less attractive women.

• 2 Cindy // May 10, 2010 at 5:01 pm

  Hmmmm. A young male disbeliever. Any opposing point of view?

• 3 The Lorax // May 10, 2010 at 7:13 pm

  Maybe the study is wrong–but it doesn’t eliminate the existence of the pay gap, no matter how small.

  I think the tendency to compare professions like pharmacy, etc. which require advanced education misses the real pay disparity, which is in low-paying jobs where workers–especially women–are not empowered.

  I suspect that the women who need that extra money the most are the ones taken advantage of the most.

  We’ve tried fixing it, but more needs to be done. Lily Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was one of those steps.

• 4 Cindy // May 10, 2010 at 8:17 pm

  I think true parity will take more than a law that someone can work around.

• 5 Ryan // May 10, 2010 at 8:48 pm

  Since I suspect we can agree that businesses have a profit motive, if women were actually paid less, wouldn’t we expect that companies would hire up all the females and leave the males for the unemployment line?

  In other words, if the line about women make 80 cents on the dollar for the exact same work were true, then what is your working theory for why the market does not correct for this? Is your position that the sexism is just so strong that it trumps the desire for a profitable business? I just want to understand where people on the other side of this are coming from…..

• 6 Cindy // May 10, 2010 at 8:55 pm

  Simmer! I’m not saying it’s deliberate. I am saying from my own anecdotal evidence (you shared yours) it does appear to happen. There may be lots of reasons justified, but honest to goodness, hand on the Bible, Ryan, I have, in my lifetime, heard a human resources person proclaim “but he has a family to take care of” as a reason for salary disparity. It may seem foreign to you, but it does happen.

• 7 The Lorax // May 10, 2010 at 9:15 pm

  I feel the same about true parity–but it is indeed a step.

  The market doesn’t correct the problem because women are paid lower because women are devalued, not just taken advantage of.

• 8 Randy in Richmond // May 10, 2010 at 10:35 pm

  I think Ryan makes some good points. When I saw the list was on a CNN piece my antennae went up and I went to the BLS site. If the stats are correct there is a gap. But CNN’s statement about ” women who worked full time earn 80% of what men earned in the same position ” is not a valid statement based on the report itself.
  The report states the 80% is based on ‘average weekly median pay’ for all positions–not a category by category comparison.

  http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom2008.pdf

  Some may say this is nitpicking but this small fact makes Ryan’s reasoning more palatable. It also points out how CNN continues to be more agenda based than news based.

• 9 Cindy // May 11, 2010 at 5:38 am

  80% was a generality I used. If you click on the article it shows each occupation and the percentage associated with that occupation. I’m not sure how one would assign “agenda” to that information.

  I find it interesting that two who disagree are male. Ladies?

• 10 Wilson828 // May 11, 2010 at 7:34 am

  Right away you leap and make it a sexist thing – 2 men (now 3) comment.

  I too think Ryan makes some valid points – for this specific profession, his specific knowledge of business practices for the company(s) he is familiar.

  I have been managing a large collection of professional/managerial people for a long long time. Over 22 years in my 32 year career. Both men and women. I have always and intend to always reward based upon merit regardless of sex or marital status.

  But I will tell you – on those very rare occasions that I have anyone working for me who are part time … I will often not raise their salaries or pay because they are there for .. well … other than career purposes. It’s simply a waste of money not to balance p/t people against full time career people. Oh well.

  I can tell you though that there are those managers who work for me, and I have to watch them, that they do not make unfair judgments during salary administration.

  So does it exist? Oh yeah sure it does.

  But there are reasons sometimes it exists – like in Ryan’s examples. There are circumstances that influences situations where on first glance it may appear in one regard, but it is something else entirely.

• 11 Cindy // May 11, 2010 at 7:50 am

  So it happens, but you think there’s a reason for it, so it’s all ok. Hmmm.

• 12 The Lorax // May 11, 2010 at 8:30 am

  Do y’all think I’m a lady? Wouldn’t be the first time…

• 13 Cindy // May 11, 2010 at 8:37 am

  Oops. Good point! Still, I find it interesting none of the women are weighing in on this one.

• 14 The Lorax // May 11, 2010 at 9:37 am

  Maybe they are too busy working 20% longer hours to make up the gap

• 15 Barb // May 11, 2010 at 1:11 pm

  In 1981, I and another female manager were promoted at one of the large, well known insurance firms. What I came to find out a few years later, was that neither of our salaries were brought up to the minimum pay range for the job. The two male incumbents were paid over the minimum. The reason why, I was told by an individual who was in a position to know, was that the male senior VP felt the raises to the minimum would be “too large.” The salary levels for management jobs were not made widely known, but there were ways of finding out.
  I was responsible for directly managing 52 individuals plus several multi-million projects, for $ 23,500 a year. I earned less than all of my higher level reports, which I knew since I was administering their salaries. A few years later, I moved out of that job into a technical specialist area, where the salary range was the same but the job lacked the long hours, the work taken home every evening and weekend and the stressful responsibilities.

  Since then, I’ve counseled men and women alike not to pursue a “management” job just for the title or prestige. It may very well pay less than a technical job, but require a much bigger pound of flesh. I retired a few years ago, but still find high paying work in my technical area, which I could never find as a “manager.”

• 16 Ryan // May 12, 2010 at 9:16 pm

  Here you go Cindy….. case closed!

  http://abcnews.go.com/WN/women-ceos-salaries-caught-men/story?id=10630664

• 17 Cindy // May 13, 2010 at 5:14 am

  Case closed? Come on, Ryan, the first line of that story is “While the average earnings for women still lag behind those of men…”

  Silly boy.

• 18 Kathryn // May 13, 2010 at 5:26 pm

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NKXNThJ610

• 19 Cindy // May 13, 2010 at 6:27 pm

  “Take that you sexist pig!”

  Kathryn, my dear, that’s the funniest thing I’ve seen all week. I’m going to embed it below to make it easier to view:

• 20 Pat // May 14, 2010 at 7:57 am

  I’ve gone back and forth on whether to comment because my experience was a while ago (17 years to be exact). When I was in college I had an unpaid internship with an advertising agency, and I also worked in another office to help pay my tuition. Upon graduation the advertising agency hired two new employees – myself and another young man. He did not have any internships or prior job experience, and his starting salary was $3K higher than mine. Of course, I didn’t know this. My department head was a woman and when she found this out she went to bat for me and I ended up with a $3K raise within the first month of being hired. That was a lot of money! Otherwise, I would have never known. Do I think this still happens? Absolutely. However, salary isn’t a general topic of conversation and is seen as a personal issue so it’s often difficult to find out that this is happening in our workplaces.

  Love, love, love the Bronte Sisters Power Doll video! Thanks for sharing – made my day!

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