Double Jeopardy: Wage Penalties and Greedy Workplaces Lock Women Out of Earning Potential
Two seemingly unrelated articles from the last week illustrate the systematic obstacles women face in the fight for pay equity. The first article talks about the ways in which women sacrifice career and earning potential to assume home and care responsibilities so that their (typically male) partners can take on jobs with longer, more unpredictable hours. The second article talks about the wage increases in a few states where teachers struck or took other political action over the last year. Taken together, the two articles suggest that there are numerous ways in which women, despite being better educated and more qualified for high-paying jobs than ever before, still lose the wage war.
Women outpace men in terms of earning the types of advanced degrees that would prepare them for high-paying careers full of potential for promotion and wage increases. However, a recent article from the New York Times details the ways in which the highest-paying jobs, which frequently demand long and unpredictable hours, tend to squeeze women out of the workforce. The article identifies rigorous professions such as law, finance, and consulting as 'greedy' which means they “seek exclusive and undivided loyalty.” However, the kind of overwork that used to be limited to the greedy professions now extends to “any job in which someone’s manager stays late or sends emails on weekends and expects employees to follow suit.” Overwork expansion may have many causes, including increased worker availability due to technology or the expectation that workers remain responsive across global time changes. Whatever the cause, the reality is that most companies continue to prioritize their bottom lines. Companies benefit from these always-on workers and workers often feel the pinch: if they are not available around the clock, companies have ample incentive to replace them from the pool of workers who are.
How the Wage Gap Opens and Widens
Facing this, some couples confront a dilemma. If they have home care responsibilities, which typically include children but can extend to care of other family members or kin, one parent may be obligated to take a job with fewer, more predictable hours in order to manage the household, care for a family, and reduce the costs associated with childcare. In many heterosexual partnerships, the individual who opts out of long hours is the woman. This also means that she opts out of the experience, networking, and opportunities that would result in better positions and pay over the course of a career. One way in which the gender pay gap emerges, then, is over the first decade of a career. Equally educated men and women make approximately the same wages when they initially enter the workforce. A decade later, however, women earn less than their male counterparts. This may be in part attributable to the reality that 20% (one in five) of fathers work a job that demands at least 50 hours a week, while only 6% of mothers (about one out of every twenty) work comparable hours. Contributing to the long-term imbalance is the disproportionate wage increase that workers are likely to experience when they take on unpredictable and long hours. The woman interviewed for the NYT article says: “Being willing to work 50 percent more doesn’t mean you make 50 percent more, you make like 100 percent more....The trade-off between time and money is not linear.” Thus, despite equal wage earning at initial entry into the workforce, men and women continue to face unequal burdens regarding work, family, and the choices governing both, all of which influence career and wage potential.
The Wage Gap in Education
Teaching wage structures also place undue burdens on the workers and, because the profession is overwhelmingly comprised of women, the burdens of antiquated pay structures tend to fall on women. For example, in most states, teachers’ salary steps are front loaded. Most of the salary increases are earned in the early part of an individual’s career. The assumption was that teachers – largely women at the time when salary policies were codified – would leave the profession for full-time homemaking once they were married. While teachers do leave the profession, it is often due to concerns about working conditions and they tend to find work in other sectors rather than leave the workforce entirely.
The Economic Policy Institute estimates that the weekly teacher wage penalty reached an all-time high of 21.4% in 2018. This means that the average teacher’s wages per week decreased in inflation-adjusted dollars relative to other college graduates. The penalty holds for both male and female teachers but men pay a larger financial cost just for being teachers, presumably because men make more in non-teaching professions than their female colleagues, so they double benefit from not teaching. The EPI asserts that this wage penalty, the cost someone pays just for being a teacher relative to other similarly educated individuals, is almost certainly responsible for some part of the teacher shortage: teachers leave the profession in order to earn more in other sectors and prospective teachers opt to enter other sectors at the start of their careers in favor of better earnings. Teachers want better pay and with good reason. Teachers (and many other educators) are subject to wage suppression in several ways: the extant gap between men and women, the wage penalty associated with teaching, and the additional care tasks which tend to fall to women.
Things May Be Looking Up
There is some good news. In 2018, teacher strikes made headlines in Oklahoma, West Virginia, Arizona, and a few other states. Those strikes appear to have resulted in increased pay for all teachers in at least a few states. The National Education Association’s analysis of yearly teacher salaries indicates that Washington, West Virginia, North Carolina, and Oklahoma have increased the average teacher salary anywhere from 4.47% to 31.04%. Lawmakers in at least 20 other states have recommended teacher pay increases to their respective legislatures, and advocacy organizations like Red for Ed continue to advocate for pay increases across the country.
What can be done about the many ways in which women experience wage suppression, especially in education? As Harvard economist Claudia Goldin suggests (as quoted in the NYT article), most proposed solutions deal only with symptoms. We’ve talked about some of those solutions on this blog – wage equity, pay transparency, and family leave – and still believe they have value. But the underlying problem is the assumption that anyone should have to work absurd hours: “the ultimate solution, researchers say, is not to make it possible for mothers to work crazy hours, too. It’s to reorganize work so that nobody has to.” So while AEC continues to believe in universal preschool, pay equity, and equal partnership among couples, we are also going to think about and question the ways in which work itself is structured to disadvantage women, those in care professions, and those managing both home and work responsibilities. How can your organization reorganize work to enhance the wellness of your employees and their partners?
- Lauren