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Subscribe to RSSTime doesn’t help working women when it comes to the gender pay gap.
On average, women with college degrees or higher see their pay stop growing at about age 39, while men continue to see wage increases until they’re 48, according to a new report by PayScale, an online compensation data company.
That means the wage gap between women and men that begins in early in their careers gets bigger as they age. The PayScale data, which are based on compensation information from 1.6 million profiles submitted by users of the firm’s website, found that women make a median yearly salary of $31,900 at age 22, compared to $40,800 for men; and by their late 40s women are bringing in about $60,000 to the $95,000 average yearly wage men get.
“Male pay is higher, and grows higher and grows faster than female pay over time,” said Katie Bardaro, lead economist for PayScale.
But, she added, much of the discrepancy among the sample they reviewed came form the types of jobs women chose. Women are opting for lower-paying jobs, including everything from human resources to nursing, compared to male choices that are more often higher-paying occupations such as finance and engineering.
Other research has found similar patterns in pay over time, but some studies uncovered a pay difference even when such factors as types of jobs were accounted for.
Catherine Hill, research director of the American Association of University Women, said PayScale’s findings are somewhat limited because they don’t look at the entire population.
Hill’s research, looking at national government data, also shows a growing gap in pay as women grow older. When she compared apples to apples as far as career choices, the disparity remained, albeit smaller.
“We found a pay gap one year out of college among full-time workers where women earned 80 percent as much as their male peers just one year out of college,” she explained. “Then we analyzed all the things that impact earnings such as job choice, GPA, the school they went to, etc. When all’s the same there’s still a 5 percent gap.”
Fast forward ten years, she continued, and the women earn 69 percent as much as their male counterparts. And when the data was controlled for things such as having kids, or taking time out of the workforce, there still was a 12 percent gap in pay between men and women, she noted.
The issue pay gap issue is critical given the ongoing national debate and also pending legislation to address income inequality among men and women. The Paycheck Fairness Act, which failed to pass in 2010, was put to a vote on Thursday in the House and legislators decided not to consider the act. The Senate is expected to vote on the bill Tuesday. The bill would boost remedies for victims of pay bias and also mandate that employers justify pay differences.
“I think it can be very helpful,” Hill said, about legislation that would help close the gender pay gap. “The best employers are doing things they should when it comes to pay but it would be a reminder for all those other employers to catch up.”
There are many reasons for the gap, said Teresa Boyer, executive director of the Center for Women and Work at the School of Management and Labor Relations Rutgers.
“There is simple mathematics,” she said. “Even if you start behind just a little bit that exponentially grows. If you start out with a $1,000 pay difference, over time it can become tremendous, just like compounded interest but in reverse.”
Also, she said, when you look at women’s career trajectories, including things like promotions and positions in the corner offices, women tend to lag behind men.
And there is the issue of choices made when it comes to family obligations, she said, where some may take time off, or pare down careers after having children. But she stressed, “you can’t assume women are making these choices in a vacuum.”
Women often feel they are the only ones to take on responsibility and as a result make changes to their career ambitions because employers give them few options in terms of flexible schedules that could help them stay on the ladder of success.
She pointed to a report released by Pew Research Center in April that found 64 percent of women ages 18 to 34 said being successful and securing a good-paying job was very important or one of the most important things in their lives.
Women, she stressed, “have the desire to be successful and make money.”
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Why don't we do studies to see if women who have children are paid less than those who do. Also, people who switch jobs tend to make more. Is that in the study?
This gender pay thing is just a total crock spun by another special interest. Does anyone think they would release any information that did not further their agenda? Is there any organization that challenges their line of BS? Of course not. Just another way to separate Americans. Lets do gender, race, hair and eye color, income, education, IQ, etc. We can have so many groups of people who are disadvantaged that we can pay everyone more money. Heck, we can just raise taxes.
Maybe we should force companies to pay everybody $50,000 a year regardless of job, age, sex, color etc.
Want to get paid EXACTLY the same - join the military
It's a good thing The Fair Pay act didn't pass, and before anyone jumps down my throat, just remember equal pay does not mean more pay. Employers, especially large corporations, can just turn around and lower the pay of their male workers to the salary they are paying their female staff and say they are paying male and female employees equally and following the letter of the law.
Women would be very happy to be paid the same rate as men while the ladies log more vacation hours, shorter days, more sick days, more vacation days, more strange leaves of absence (non-pregnancy, though even pregnancy is subsidized), no weekend hours.
Stay home and take care of your kids.
Are you not able to?
Posted by the liberal media, for Obama ammunition vs. Romney.
The White House has already jumped on board.
Sheeple are stupid.
ecause my father abandoned us,
Back in the early 1960's, when I was being solely supported by my 55-year-old mother who was earning a minimum wage after we were abandoned by my father, I learned that I could never rely on a man to support me and that children were a drain on a woman's finances, do I decided to go to college, get a degree, never marry and skip having children.
My mother had been born around the turn of the last century to a father who did not believe in education for girls, so he had pulled her out of the fifth grade to take care of her baby sister. Later during the Great Depression she survived by working as an usherette (that's what they called them then to avoid paying the same wage as they did to an usher) in movie theatres. Because of all of this, she knew the value of an education, and she pushed me to go to college because "They can't take an education away from you."
This was just before needs-based financial aid became available, so I knew I would have to earn straight A's to win a merit-based scholarship, so that's what I did, highly unusual for girls in those days. Then I graduated from college with a high GPA, so I could go to grad school, also unusual for women, earned advanced degrees, entered university teaching, which was even more unusual for women, and have committed 50 to 60 hours a week to my career for the last 30-plus years.
I have remained single, have no children, and am happy. At times this was lonely, and as I looked around at my colleagues and friends who married and had children, their lives were better than mine for maybe 10 or 20 years, with nicer houses and cars, but as their marriages broke up, their lives definitely became less pleasant than mine. I own my own place, have a solid career in academia, will have a very nice pension when I retire in a few years, can come and go as I please, and travel extensively overseas about every other year, all things that would be interfered with by marriage and children.
Women should have equal pay for equal work, and they can enhance that by earning advanced degrees, entering a high-powered career which they commit long hours to throughout their lives no matter their marital or parental status, and avoiding children. In addition, laws should be passed to make up for the 5 to 12% pay differential in pay that women earn even if they avoid all of the excuses that corporate American makes for paying women less than men in the same fields.
LeiLanii wrote "laws should be passed to make up for the 5 to 12% pay differential in pay"
What would that entail ? Forcing a female daycare worker to drive a garbage truck at 4am while the garbage trucker works in the day care? The real answer is that men are cheaper to employ as garbage workers. Women would require MUCH higher salaries to take those dirty jobs.
"Women should have equal pay for equal work,"
None of these studies state that women are paid less for the same work. The gender wage gap is about overall income and career choices that women make. Feminist activists are redefining "same" to "equal value" in which whatever fields women choose to work should be valued equally.
Even this decade, with complete financial and social encouragement in any field of study, women flocked to psychology/sociology/education despite public information that math/science/engineering lead to jobs with higher pay.
I don't think it was your choice not to marry. You sound bitter and jaded beneath all the "happiness" you are trying to convice yourself you have. I am happy that you attained your position in life, but truly doubt you are.
Even though the pay-gap myth has been shattered over and over when the comparisons are made for the SAME job with the SAME number of years of experience, the one question Liberals cannot answer:
If what you say is true, then what sense would it make for a business owner to hire ANY man over an equally qualified woman when he can simply hire the woman and pay her less?
P.S. Here's a recent list of Fortune 500 companies headed by Women.
Meg Whitman, HP (#10)
Virginia Rometty, IBM (#19)
Patricia A. Woertz, Archer Daniels Midland Company (ADM) (#28)
Indra K. Nooyi, PepsiCo, Inc. (#41)
Angela F. Braly, WellPoint, Inc. (#45)
Irene B. Rosenfeld, Kraft Foods Inc. (#50)
Ellen J. Kullman, DuPont (#72)
Carol M. Meyrowitz, The TJX Companies, Inc. (#125)
Ursula M. Burns, Xerox Corporation (#127)
Sheri S. McCoy, Avon Products Inc. (#234)
Deanna M. Mulligan, Guardian (#250)
Debra L. Reed, Sempra Energy (#266)
Denise M. Morrison, Campbell Soup (#334)
Ilene Gordon, Corn Products International (#390)
Heather Bresch, Mylan (#396)
Mary Agnes (Maggie) Wilderotter, Frontier Communications (#464)
Gracia C. Martore, Gannett (#465)
Beth E. Mooney, KeyCorp (#499)
This in-equity is set by the Board & HR Policy.
No One Gender is More Superior in Business than the Other.
Here are a few Great Women Leaders: (http://www.guide2womenleaders.com/Current-Women-Leaders.htm)
Margaret Thatcher
Queen Elizabeth II
Chancellor Angela Merkel
Eveline Widmer-Sclumpf
Helle Thorning-Schmidt
Paula A. Cox
Sarah Wescott-Williams
When will the Obama White House pay their women employees the same as thier male employees?? Looks like the Democrats need to clean out their own House before complaining about another people's house.
Men are harder workers.
Congress should put up for a vote that all Women in the Congress should earn 5% less than their comparable male colleagues...
I wonder how many Republican women would vote for that?
When college degrees are evaluated for both sexes, there is no difference between men and women. This is just the usual nonsense "poor me, give me more money" "The white man is keeping me down". Sounds familiar doesn't it.
I have worked more than 40 years in technical companies and for scientists, engineers, computer professionals, even human resources personnel have no disparity between salaries. Just another attempt to shake down companies for money. And by the way, during child raising years men average ~3days/year sick days and women about 20 to stay home whenever any of their children are sick. Another one sided benefit.
guys are better with tolerating nonsense... women are better and smarter performers overall... equality!
like totally
youtube.com/watch?v=ZXbMyvmhIZ4
I would like to see a scientifically valid set of data. I would like to see female engineering salaries compared to male engineering salaries. Where I worked they were the same! All this article does is polarize people with a crock of spin that contains no valid information! How about male doctors and females doctors. Show the people the professions where the differences are great. Don't use age as the axis. One must use "years of professional experience". I thought that was intuitively obvious since industry uses that to put people in pots. It is illegal to use age! I sometimes think that colleges are graduating MORONS! who lack common sense. This report would fail as a 7th grade science fair project. The entire variable analysis is third grade!
What a crock. Impossible, American women have 90% of the jobs, American men are generally unemployed at an older age, victims of gender and age discrimination. The lame scream media always finds a way to massage the truth to fit a political agenda. Reality out in the streets tells a much different story. I'm all for equal pay for equal work. When women 'ask a man to help her do her job' because something is too heavy or too difficult, men better wake up; tell her to get on the bike and figure it for herself and carry the carton as well. Gender equality? Lets see women held to the same legal standard as men in civil and criminal court rooms, do away with the sexist and gender biased 'protected class' baloney, rescind alimony, and let's talk real 'gender equality'. Gender equality is only discussed when women have something to gain, never what they might lose. In what dictionary would that be considered 'equal'? The looney tune left wing dictionary, no doubt.
Most jobs I've seen there is usually a salary range. Many employers ask a worker what salary they were expecting. How did the study control for the possibility that men were being paid more because they asked for higher salaries? Maybe men were rejected more or turned down positions where the salaries were lower, but eventually found one that had the higher salary while women were settling for these lower salaries. I'd like to see how the study controlled for jobs applied to. Maybe men didn't apply to lower paying jobs.
Partly Cloudy...Check the DOL stats. Women are hired at lower salaries because they accept lower salaries men won't. It's why most of the unemployed today 55% are men between the ages of 25 and 55. So you got your high end salaries and now that the CEO wants more of a cut of the profits, men are sitting home on their asses all day while McWifie does all the working. Guess what? The younger generation of women will soon figure out what the Boomer Women did 40 years ago...if they can take care of the kids, earn a paycheck and still manage it all, they don't need Mr. Testosteroni lazy ass sitting back watching her breaking her ass. These younger women will just move on.
TOO FUNNY....you want proof as to why this exists ?...look no further than "Morning Joe"...whenever Joe Scarborough isn't there (like today) Miss Brezinski cannot carry the water....her PMS-like attitude to stories she doesn't agree with makes the other guests uncomfortable,.....LOL..... she deserves her $.77 for every $1.00 Joe gets, it's a good thing she looks great in a tight sweater.
THE TIMING of this is classic; it has NOTHING to do with pandering for the female vote...does it ?.....why if you've been in office for 3+ years (and still haven't passed a budget) all of a sudden you want to rail for equal pay for both sexes...this sounds like a desperate move by a desperate crew.
Gender roles, gender roles, gender roles....
Men, overall, are more productive than women and hence are paid more. Look around- all the roads you drive on, the machines that harvest your food, the houses you live in, the oil we burn and the cars we drive... men are behind just about everything we need to live. Women tend to nurture, raise kids, and take care of family. They choose work that is aligned to these instincts as well.
Jim Reality...Did you want to tell that BS fairy tale to our women in the military? It's time the bully bois got their come uppance. Just because women prefer to be feminine doesn't mean they aren't as strong as men. Give birth to a son and come back and tell us all about how you big, strong men are soooo much more productive.
A woman can work a full-time job outside the home, take care of the kids, pay all the bills and she's not as "productive"? All while Mr. Testosteroni is sitting on his ass watching football or out playing a few rounds of golf in his free time? And if a woman can do all those things and keep her head above water which most women do without a man's help, why in the hell do they even need a man around?
Ewent- they need men around for all the roads, buildings, cars, houses, and just about everything men build.
Your argument is a bit sad because it revolves around comparing women to men on a man's yardstick. Women should have confidence that they are just as good, as strong, as valuable, and as productive as men- just in different ways. Men tend to build tradeable skills designed to bring money as providers. Women perform equally vital of work as nurturers. There differences is that in a relationship these skills are not tradeable for money.
The real injustice is that what is traditionally women's work is not compensated. We could make marriage illegal and set law that anyone who's child is cared for by another, or whos domestic needs are met by another, must pay the caregiver a salary. I think we'd see the income gap dissappear. I've been a stay at home dad and can honestly say it was harder work than my six-figure income job.
Barracuda...Nice to hear that. The more women step outside the world men see them in, the better off their salaries will be. Any woman who expect any man to pay her equally to another man is a fool. Not not not going to happen. Even when the few who do make that attempt, count on it, behind the scenes they've already provided income insurance to the men on the staff as their main priority.
In the words of that Republican IN Senator a month ago, "Men have to earn more because their jobs are more important." And that's the kind of BS women have had to endure since the Second Coming of the Neanderthals.
It has been stated ad nauseum that a "pay gap" exists. Mostly done by female reporters ever pushing the female agenda and sissfying society to the point that no one (especially men) know what is expected of them. Many intelligent people have pointed out that when men and women do the SAME job there is virtually no pay gap. In fact women college graduates are, in alot of instances, are out earning their male counterparts. In Canada, where I live, there is a federal law known as Pay Equity. This is where "work of equal value" is paid the same. So in Canada you get gov't office workers (95% women) earning the same as a forest firefighter. That seems "fair" doesn't it? One group sits at a desk and risks getting a papercut while the others are actually risking their lives. I know the comparison is anecdotal but there are numerous instances where this occurs. So stop spreading this BS. Or if you really want "fairness" how about this. Because women live longer, they shouldn't be able to collect Social Security for several years after men. 65 men, 72 for women. Sounds "fair" to me.