Today’s women who are well-established in their careers in their 30s and 40s are doing better than their mothers who are also tertiary educated in terms of closing the gender wage gap. The gender wage gap in the chart below is unadjusted. It is the raw gender wage gap for women aged 35 to 44 and for women aged 55 to 64.
In Canada and the USA there is been no progress at all. In New Zealand, the gender gap between male and female tertiary educated workers is a little larger for today’s prime age women graduates than for older female workers who completed a tertiary education.
I suspect that gender gap be no smaller for today’s career women as compared to two decades ago has something to do with compensating differentials.
Today’s career women want it all: both motherhood and a career. They trade-off work-life balance for wages.
Women choose university degrees and occupations that are more agreeable to a balancing motherhood and a career.
There are large differences in the education premium between English speaking countries and also by gender. The tertiary premium in New Zealand is pretty poor compared to the USA, UK or Ireland and is still mediocre when compared to Australia and Canada.
It seems that the top 10% of men are so busy oppressing the top 10% of women that they forgot to keep up the violence inherent in the capitalist system against the bottom 10% of women. The gender pay gap at the bottom of the economic strata closed quite dramatically and consistently since 1970 or as far back as data was available in Australia, New Zealand, the UK and USA. Much of the closing of the gender pay gap for the low-paid was under the scourge of Reagan, Thatcher, Hawke and Keating and Rogernomics.
Source and Notes: OECD Employment Database. The gender gap plotted below is unadjusted. It is calculated as the difference between the 10th percentile earnings of men and the 10th percentile earnings of women relative to the 10th percentile earnings of men. Estimates of earnings used in the calculations refer to gross earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. However, this definition may slightly vary from one country to another.
By comparison to this dramatic liberation of women from the gender pay gap at the bottom, the gender pay gap for full-time employees has not really tapered down that much at the top of the income distribution and has been pretty flat for coming on 20 years. It seems the class war is over and has been won by women at the bottom but not at the top?
Rather than up the workers, the battle cry of the Posh Trots is up the managers, liberate them from insidious pay inequities imposed upon them by a vast sexist conspiracy of male managers.
Source and Notes: OECD Employment Database. The gender gap plotted below is unadjusted. It is calculated as the difference between the 10th percentile earnings of men and the 10th percentile earnings of women relative to the 10th percentile earnings of men. Estimates of earnings used in the calculations refer to gross earnings of full-time wage and salary workers. However, this definition may slightly vary from one country to another.
This failure to close the gender pay gap at the top requires more investigation. The available of reliable contraceptives in the late 1960s led to an explosion of investment by women in long duration professional education and in careers where absences because of motherhood in their 20s and 30s was penalised in terms of human capital depreciation and promotional opportunities.
The reason for the endurance of the gender pay gap at the top of the income distribution is compensating differentials. Women at the top were able to have it all.
Professional women could invest in a career and a family and mix-and-match according to their own preferences for career and family and timing of births rather than the preferences of others who looked upon them as some sort of pathfinder for their gender. It is at the top of the income distribution where short absences from the workplace can has very large consequences for wages and promotion.
With 40 to 50% of women, and many more in Canada, now going on to tertiary education, claims such as recently by the OECD and IMF that there is problems of access to education as a driver of inequality seem even more doubtful.
Not only do women have to overcome the financing constraint on going onto higher education that so troubles the IMF and the OECD, women of today and yesterday must overcome the dead hand of patriarchy. They have the both the top 1% and all men scheming against them, apparently. Despite this double secret double conspiracy against them, the number of women going on to some form of tertiary education has increased rapidly within a generation from an already high base.
Wages growth is no exception with female wages growth quite good for a long period of time after the 1970s – a period in which male earnings stagnated.
The beginning of male wage stagnation seemed to coincide with the closing of the gender wage gap.
Presumably if men were previously profiting from patriarchy, that should have some implications for future wage growth and promotions for men as women catch up.
Presumably if men were previously profiting from patriarchy, that should have some implications for future wage growth for men as women catch up. Men lost the wage premium they previously earned from the sex discrimination directly in hiring, wage setting and promotions and investing in more education because they expected to be discriminated favourably at the expense of women.
Not surprisingly the convergence in the male-female wage ratios started in the 1970s which was the decade that male wage stagnation started.
The gender wage gap started converging again also pretty much in lockstep with the top 1% starting to grab higher and higher proportions of income.
Hollywood movies write women out of the script & create a make-believe world where men do all jobs.Ace chart http://t.co/0eM17kRJKW— paulkirby (@paul1kirby) September 10, 2015
Why Evolution is True is a blog written by Jerry Coyne, centered on evolution and biology but also dealing with diverse topics like politics, culture, and cats.
In Hume’s spirit, I will attempt to serve as an ambassador from my world of economics, and help in “finding topics of conversation fit for the entertainment of rational creatures.”
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