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If you are
a woman working full time, you will lose between $700,000
and $2 million over your working lifetime -- just because
of your sex. Is that fair? No. Can it be stopped? Absolutely.
In 1964, when
Congress passed the Civil Rights Act that banned workplace
discrimination based on race or sex, women working full
time made 59 cents to a full-time working man's dollar.
That made sense at the time: As a group, women had less
education, less experience, and less opportunity, in
part because they were flatly banned from a wide range
of occupations. At the time, many people thought the
wage gap would close on its own, as the education, experience,
and opportunity gaps went away.
But today,
40 years later, the wage gap stands at 23 cents. Women
working full time -- not part-time, not on maternity
leave, not as consultants -- still earn only 77 cents
to a full-time working man's dollar. That's an enormous
gap, and it has been stalled in place for more than
a decade. It's not closing on its own. It affects women
at every economic level, from waitresses to lawyers,
from cashiers to CEOs. Many women have a sneaking suspicion
that they're unfairly overlooked and underpaid. But
do they realize how underpaid?
Let's look
at the economic losses a woman will suffer over her
lifetime:
A high
school graduate loses $700,000. A young woman
who graduated from high school last spring and went
straight to work would, over her lifetime, make $700,000
less than the young man who graduated next in line.
A college
graduate loses $1.2 million. A young woman
who graduated from college last spring and went right
to work would, over her lifetime, make $1.2 million
less than the young man who received his diploma next
to her.
A professional
school graduate loses $2 million. A young woman
who got a degree in business, medicine, or law would,
over her lifetime, make $2 million less than the young
man at her side.
That graduate
may be you. Or she may be your wife, daughter, niece,
granddaughter, or friend. Whoever she is, the wage gap
will take a heavy toll. That missing 23 cents is a personal
loss: vacations not taken or dental work that's put
off or health insurance that cannot be afforded.
Few women think
this way about the wage gap. Women don't talk about
what they should have earned, or how each year's missing
lump of money -- whether $1,000, $10,000, or $50,000
-- would have added up over a lifetime. Have you ever
heard a woman let herself add up how much she was deprived
of overall or how much more her male coworker could
afford that she could not?
Surely that
attitude is personally sensible: No sane person wants
to dwell on what she believes she can't have. But as
a nation that believes in fairness, self-reliance, and
rewards for hard work, Americans as a whole must consider
what the wage gap means for working women's daily lives:
the missing retirement fund, the nonexistent car, the
precarious mortgage, the food budget that doesn't quite
deliver enough fresh produce to the kids. Maybe an unexpected
change in financial circumstances -- especially the
loss of a husband's income through layoffs, divorce,
or death -- cuts the shoestring on which a woman has
been hanging financially, so that she and her children
are faced with dire financial choices. Why should families
be punished simply because the breadwinner is a woman?
Precisely because
our nation believes so firmly in fairness and personal
responsibility, many Americans assume that our workplaces
do offer equal opportunities for all. And so, for the
last 40 years, most theories about the wage gap have
blamed women for underearning. Obviously, the older
theory has had to be tossed out: Women earn as many
degrees, have roughly as many years on the job, work
as hard, and need money just as much as men do. So why
do women still get paid less?
The most popular
current theory is that women ''opt out" of the
workforce to have children. Those nonworking moms' nonwages
are supposed to bring down women's average wages. But
that's not how the wage gap is figured. The wages of
women who are staying home with the kids or working
part time are not counted in that official Labor Department
average: Only full-time workers' wages are added in.
A variant on
that theory is that women work less hard once they get
pregnant or have children. But is that really true,
or are women unfairly penalized just because, for no
good reason, their bosses and colleagues assume that
female employees can't think both about daycare dropoffs
and third-quarter deliverables? Men have children too,
after all -- and they're rewarded for it, even if their
productivity goes down during those early months of
late-night feedings. Social scientists have documented
a ''mommy penalty" and a ''daddy bonus" right
after a child is born: Women's wages go down, and men's
wages go up, simply because they have children. Do women
choose a mommy track? Or are they ''mommy tracked"
against their will -- or subtly coerced into accepting
less pay while working just as hard?
Let's look
at a few other popular theories: Women ''choose"
lower-paying jobs, because they don't want to do the
dirty work that makes more money. But is that true--
or are women tracked, without their agreement, into
being waitresses or cashiers, and refused interviews
for those higher-paying slots as journeyman plumber
or as bank manager?
Here's another
theory: Women don't negotiate as well as men. But are
all men born knowing how to negotiate, or do they sweat
bullets while they learn?
Here's unsubstantiated
theory number four: Women aren't as ambitious as men,
and prefer more balanced lives. But who said all men
were ambitious? Sure, some women don't want to work
60 or 80 hours a week, and would rather put in their
time, do a good job, get paid and promoted fairly, and
go home. But that's also true for many men. Meanwhile,
plenty of men and women are ambitious, talented, and
driven enough to reach the top -- but up there, men
have an unfair advantage.
Here's the
real reason women get paid an enormous percentage less
than men: because they're women. In other words, because
of sex discrimination.
Sex discrimination
isn't necessarily intentional; much of it happens through
mindless bias and careless stereotyping. But however
it happens, it's unfair, illegal, and widespread.
Take a look
at sex discrimination cases, never before collected,
which you can now find at www.wageproject.org. You'll
be shocked if you look at how much employers have to
pay out each year in sex discrimination cases, through
awards or settlements -- not 10 or 20 years ago, but
in 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005. These cases show how
deeply entrenched discrimination is in every region
of the country and every sector of the economy.
Each year,
American employers are paying out hundreds of millions
of dollars -- in 2002, alone, more than $263 million
-- every year, year after year, for treating women with
extraordinary unfairness. Employers still flatly refuse
to hire fully qualified women into a wide variety of
jobs: forklift drivers, firefighters, salespeople, electricians,
regional managers, stockbrokers, senior executives.
Or they hire women, but refuse to promote them -- as
happens to grocery clerks, police officers, university
professors, and management analysts.
Think that
kind of behavior is impossible in the 21st century United
States? Think again. A look at the case files shows
that even when men and women have equal experience,
responsibilities, and qualifications, employers refuse
to pay women equally: as janitors, skilled woodworkers,
truck dispatchers, municipal managers, senior scientists.
Or they demote or fire women who get pregnant -- waitresses,
shuttle drivers, sales clerks, executive secretaries,
lab researchers, corporate lawyers -- even before those
women go on maternity leave. Or they refuse to do anything
about it when women -- nurses, factory workers, Air
Force cadets, television producers, bank managers, police
officers, deputy attorneys general -- are being groped,
grabbed, sexually taunted, or assaulted on the job.
(While most of us think of sexual harassment as personally
repulsive, the reason it's illegal is that sexual harassment
damages women's ability to earn a fair day's pay.)
Every single
day, women are being outrageously discriminated against,
at every level of the American workforce. Unfair discrimination
happens in tiny dentists' offices and in factories that
are several city blocks long. It happens in manufacturing,
retail, nonprofits, government, finance, education,
media, medicine, and law. Unless you look through the
WAGE Project database, it's hard to believe how many
women are being treated so unfairly that they're driven
to sue, even though they know that by doing so they're
endangering their paychecks and their careers.
Unfair pay
means all women lose. All women -- rich and poor, whatever
their race or color or native language -- are being
cheated by wage inequity. Sex discrimination is far
more entrenched in the American economy than most people
realize. And it won't stop unless, with the help of
each other and of sympathetic men, women act. We must
prove to American employers that we will not accept
the depth and breadth of wage discrimination within
our own workplaces. By chipping away at one deeply embedded
form of discrimination, we can also tear down bigotry
and bias based on race, religion, sexual orientation,
age, and physical ability. We can transform America
into a society of people who genuinely value and respect
one another.
It's been more
than a quarter-century since the women's movement brought
women fully into the workforce. The time is right for
the next step: getting even.
Evelyn
Murphy, a former lieutenant governor of Massachusetts,
is the author of ''Getting Even: Why Women Still Don't
Get Paid Like Men--And What To Do About It," on
which writer E.J. Graff collaborated.
*Reprinted
with permission of the author, Evelyn Murphy.
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