“Equal Pay Day” And The Myth Of Compensation Equality

Across the measurements of job equality, it is remarkable how little improvement there has been for women over the last decade. Pay parity is both made and born at least as it affects the annual compensation of women and minorities. Women are born into an enviroment of pay discrimination and very little that they can do during their working lives changes that.

The recent Catalyst survey of boardrooms and executive suites at Fortune 500 companies showed that in 2009 “Women held 15.2 percent of board seats, a number that reflects little growth over the past five years.” Almost a third of the largest companies in the survey have no women among their top officers as it is defined by the SEC.

But, the inequality gets worse for women who are part of the greater labor force.

On April 20, “Equal Pay Day”, the AAUW, which among other things tracks the compensation disparities between women and men, found that on average women are paid only 77% of what men are to do the same job. The data is based on numbers from the Census Bureau and covers the entire full-time, year-round workforce of people ages 16 and older. And, the compensation comparison was worse for women of color.

The key finding of the study is how much wage inequality changes from state-to-state. In the District of Columbia women make 88% of  what their male counterparts are paid. Perhaps that is because of the high number of federal government employees in the region. In contrast to Washington’s concentration of government workers, California has one of the most diverse number of industries in the country. But the ratio of women’s pay  is 85% of what it is for men. There is, in other words, no perfect pattern to be discerned by geography.

At the other end of the spectrum are Wyoming where women make 64% as much as men in similar positions, and West Virginia and Louisiana at 67%.

The effect of education is seen particularly in Wyoming where  the years spent in school makes a difference in pay.  “Across all of America, a typical college-educated woman, 25 years and older working full-time, earns $50,000 a year compared to $70,000 for college-educated male workers 25 years and older — a difference of $20,000,” the AAUW study points out. Women in this educated group make 88% of what comparable male workers in Wyoming do. In Louisiana, education made no difference. Even the college educated portion of the female population earned 64% of what men did last year. Based on these figures, women are no better off financially for their investment in an education, at least in Louisiana

The unfortunate and most significant conclusion from the AAUW figures is that prejudice in the workplace thrives and nothing that the federal government has done has improved that. Women make up over half of the national workforce now but they have no effective advocates or defenders in Washington. The country is led by a president who is a champion for women’s and civil rights.  At this point, even his presence has had no affect on the improvement in the salaries for women.

The one encouraging part of the data is that women’s pay is very close to men’s in some industries and in some states. What has been obtained in one area can, in theory, could be attained in another.  In order to  insure equality of pay it is essential to understand why some women in some areas make nearly as much as men and in other areas, women make only two-thirds as much.  A bridge between those difference should lower the inequality for all women. But, it does not work that way. Discrimination,the AAUW survey shows, is a result of local and management decisions. All politics are local, and so it would seem, so is most discrimination.

The status of women’s compensation shows the danger of using the average or the median in any set of statistics when its comes to help improving conditions based on prejudice. The government and economists may set as a goal that women should make 85% as much as men within a decade. At the core of that measure is the belief that the fair number, which is 100%, cannot be a reasonable goal.

The issues of wage disparity are not discussed much, at least in the media. This seems to be the result of a capitulation to the status quo. Women have not made progress in the workplace. There is no media story in repeating this over and over. Ennui has become the enemy of women’s capacity to achieve pay equality with men nearly as much as discrimination has. It is part of the numbness that has set in when the public looks at jobs problems. People are inured to statistics about unemployment by race or age except perhaps on the on day a month that the Bureau of Labor Statistics puts out job numbers.

The nation’s attention has been focused on the troubling and immediate problems of the broader economy, the war, the financial and credit crisis and the dwindling job markets. Women’s pay is a backwater issue now.  Persistent and successful discrimination and the understandable battle fatigue from years of battle on the issue of equal pay have created the most successful barriers to equal pay for equal work.

Secretary of Labor Hilda L. Solis said “This Equal Pay Day, I want to recognize that, although progress is being made, equal pay is still far from a reality for millions of working women and their families. We must continue to pursue pay equity with passion and determination.”  But, the facts point to the issue is dead, at least for the foreseeable future.

Douglas A. McIntyre