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September
Ch. 8) Why Men Earn More
Discrimination? Choices?
Excerpts from Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate by Warren Farrell
“Women who have never been married and
never had children earn 117% of their male
counterparts.”
There is no single issue that bothers women in
the workplace more than the belief they get paid
less than men for the same work.[i]
And for many women, the psychological damage of
being undervalued hurts even more than the economic
damage of being underpaid.
For these reasons, when I was on the Board of
the National Organization for Women in New York
City in the seventies, I led protests against what
I felt was the discrimination the pay gap
reflected. And now, since my wife and two daughters
(both in college) work, discrimination against
women is discrimination against me.
But one question haunted me. “If an
employer has to pay a man one dollar for the same
work a woman would do for 76 cents, why would
anyone hire a man?” If women do produce more
for less, I thought, women who own their own
businesses would earn more than male business
owners. So I checked. I found that women who own
their own businesses earn only 49% of their male
counterparts.[ii]
Are women less effective? No. When the Rochester
Institute of Technology surveyed business owners
with MBAs, they discovered money was the primary
motivator for only 29% of the women, vs. 76% of the
men.[iii] Women
prioritize flexibility, fulfillment, autonomy and
safety. Women aren’t less effective; they have
different priorities.
After more than a decade researching this for my
book, Why
Men Earn More, I discovered 25 of these
differences in men and women’s work-life
choices. All 25 choices lead to men earning more
money, but women having better lives (e.g.,
more time with family and friends).
I was learning that the road to high pay is a
toll road. Real power is about having a better
life. The male definition of power-- feeling
obligated to earn money someone else spends while
he dies sooner--is not real power.
Operationalizing real power involves discovering
which tolls are worth paying. For example, the
average full-time working man works at least three
more hours per week than the average full-time
working woman. Extra hours pay disproportionately.
People who work 45 hours per week earn more than
twice the pay than people who work 35 hours per
week (132% more pay for 28% more
time).[iv] Is the
trade-off worth it? Real power includes properly
assessing trade-offs—assessing your
family’s needs, your talents, your passion,
what different careers pay, and your values.
If the first piece of good news for women is
that they are doing a better job assessing
trade-offs than men, the implication is that men
have more to learn from women than women have to
learn from men.
There is a second piece of good news for
women: it appears women now earn more than men
when they make the same 25 choices (e.g., a
male and female civil engineer both with their
company 10 years, both traveling and relocating
equally, risking equal hazards, working equally
egregious weekends...) Even part-time working women
who work equal hours to men average higher
earnings.[v]
If this is true, then when women and men make
similar choices, does the pay gap either disappear
or get reversed? Yes. For example, women who
have never been married and who have never had
children earn 117% of their male
counterparts.[vi]
(This controls for education, hours worked and
age.)
Why? Without husbands, women have to focus on
earning more (longer hours, moving, traveling,
fields in technology). Without children, men are
freer to earn less—that is, they are freer
to pursue fulfilling careers (e.g., teaching
writing or art) which tend to pay less because the
supply exceeds the demand. The supply exceeds the
demand exactly because they are more
fulfilling.
See if you can find in any text in any other
women’s studies or gender studies class, a
list of fields in which women are paid more. In
Why
Men Earn More, you’ll see 39 of the
major fields in which women are paid at least 5%
more than men—out of the more than 80 fields
that exist like this…
Sources:
[i] Carol Klieman, Chicago
Tribune, reprinted as “Closing Wage Gap for
Women May Depend on a Little Research,” in San
Diego Union-Tribune, September 29, 1997.
[ii] U.S. Department of
the Treasury, Internal Revenue Service, Statistics
of Income Division. Unpublished tables E2-1; E2-3 ;
E3-1; and E3-. Data provided by Dr. Ying Lowry, an
economist at the Small Business Administration.
[iii] Richard DeMartino,
Ph.D and Robert Barbato Ph.D “Gender
Differences Among MBA Entrepreneurs” Rochester
Institute of Technology. United States Association
for Small Business and Entrepreneurship, 2001.Table
7. See www.usasbe.org/conferences/2001/proceedings/papers/018.pdf
[iv] US Department of
Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics, unpublished data
for 2005 from the Current Population Survey, p.
110, Table A-18, "Usual Weekly Earnings of Employed
Wage and Salary Workers by Hours Usually Worked on
Primary Job and Sex, 2002 Annual Averages." Data
provided by Mr. Howard Hayghe, Economist, Bureau of
Labor Statistics Office of Employment and
Unemployment Statistics: (202) 691-6380. The
average worker working 35 hours per week earns
$384; the average worker working 45 hours per week
earns $894.
|
Hours Worked
|
Median Wkly Earnings
(2005)
|
|
30
|
$288
|
|
31
|
304
|
|
32
|
355
|
|
33
|
320
|
|
34
|
365
|
|
35
|
384
|
|
36
|
501
|
|
37
|
475
|
|
38
|
524
|
|
39
|
438
|
|
40
|
605
|
|
41
|
622
|
|
42
|
736
|
|
43
|
721
|
|
44
|
716
|
|
45
|
894
|
|
46
|
808
|
|
47
|
741
|
|
48
|
808
|
|
49-59
|
1,047
|
|
60+
|
1,112
|
[v] U.S. Bureau of the
Census, unpublished data from Employment and
Earnings, Table D-20, “Median weekly earnings
of part-time wage and salary workers by selected
characteristics.”
[vi] U.S. Census
Bureau’s Survey of Income and Program
Participation, 2001 Panel, Wave 2.
© 2010, Warren
Farrell (with Steven Svoboda) vs. James P.
Sterba
* * *
Man is not the enemy here, but the fellow
victim. - Betty Friedan
Warren
Farrell, Ph.D., is the author of numerous
international best-sellers on men and women,
including Why
Men Are The Way They Are
and The
Myth of Male Power.
Women
Can't Hear What Men Don't
Say was a
Book-of-the-Month Club selection and
Father
and Child Reunion has
led to Dr. Farrell doing expert witness work that
has encouraged many judges to keep dads in
children’s lives. Dr. Farrell’s released
Why
Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay
Gap and What Women Can Do About
It in 2005 and
Does
Feminism Discriminate Against
Men? A debate
in 2008.
Warren is the only man in the US
ever elected three times to the Board of Directors
of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in New
York City. He has been chosen by The Financial
Times as one of the world’s top 100
thought leaders, is in Who’s Who in America
and in Who’s Who in the World. He has taught
in five disciplines, most recently at the School of
Medicine at the University of California in San
Diego, and is ranked by the International
Biographic Centre of London as one of the
world’s top 2000 scholars of the Twentieth
Century. He has appeared on over 1,000 TV shows
worldwide and lives in Mill Valley, California with
his wife and two daughters.You can visit him at
www.warrenfarrell.com
or E-Mail
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