Is Your Income a Victim of Gender Bias?
WRITTEN BY: JENNA ANDERSON
Did you know that Tuesday April 19th, 2016 was Canada’s Equal Pay Day? Equal Pay Day is the date that an average woman must work until to earn what an average man earned in the previous year. That means that women had to work 78 MORE DAYS to earn what men did in 2015! Non-Caucasian women would have to work even longer, until June or even further into the calendar year, to achieve equal pay. Canadian women earn on average 73.5 cents for every dollar that a Canadian man makes. The National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) started Equal Pay Day in 1996 to create public awareness surrounding the gender income gap in the United States. While the gender pay gap steadily began to decrease in the 1950s and 1960s due to the introduction of gender equality laws and policies, the pay gap has stagnated over the past few decades.
Economists claim that approximately 1/3 to 1/2 of the pay disparity can be attributed to differences in education, experience and/or number of hours worked. However, that still leaves 1/2 to 2/3 of the gap unexplained. Many point to gender-discrimination within organizations, whether it is overt or implicit, as the culprit. In addition, the fields that certain genders choose to enter may play a role in the pay gap. A study from Cornell University found that the biggest factor in the gender pay gap might be the difference in industries and occupations that men and women separately dominate. For example, the median income of information technology managers (a field dominated by men) is 27% higher than human resources manages (a field dominated by women).
So the question is, why do some fields make more money than others? Many claim that those fields may require more education, skills, smarts or may even be more dangerous. However, today these arguments have been greatly disproved. Women even outnumber men in university enrollment, which suggests that women's education is comparable if not greater. So do women just happen to choose lower paying fields than men? Gender may play a factor, as suggested by this study (Occupational Feminization and Pay: Assessing Causal Dynamics Using 1950–2000 U.S. Census Data), however they found the issue was that employers were valuing women's work less. The study found that when women begin to enter fields in greater numbers, the pay declined. One example of this in STEM is computer programming, which was a field historically dominated by women. In the 1960s women made up about 50% of all computer programmers. Today, the number of women applying for entry to computing degree programs in North America is under 20%. When computer programming was seen as women’s work, it was considered menial, however when men began to increase in numbers within the field it became more prestigious and the pay increased.
The question now becomes how do we close the gender pay gap? Transparency is one suggestion. Many women are unaware that they are paid less than their male counterparts. If salaries are made public, people will be more likely to ask for fair and equal compensation. The province of Ontario is attempting transparency through the SunshineList.ca, a website that publishes a list all of the public employees who earn $100,000 and above. Another suggestion is to decrease barriers of entry to women entering male dominated fields. For resources to help increase women and girls in STEM fields visit our resources page.
If you would like to learn more about the gender pay gap, check out Stuff You Should Know’s great podcast episode: How the Gender Pay Gap Works.