Our TV media is not a direct reflection of our society, but it does reflect the attitudes of those in powerful positions. With that in mind, take a look at this video produced by the Women's Media Center (via Digby):
Here is a bill I've been keeping a close eye on for nearly a year:
Under a measure sponsored by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, the court’s ruling that Ms. [Lilly] Ledbetter [of Alabama] failed to file a timely challenge to pay practices at a Goodyear Tire and Rubber Co. plant in Gadsden would effectively be overturned, though Ms. Ledbetter would not benefit directly.
Ms. Ledbetter, who earned thousands of dollars less than male colleagues doing similar supervisory work, was found by the court to have failed to make her claim within 180 days of the company’s pay policy decision. The sponsors of the bill want to clear up that requirement and straighten out what they see as a flawed ruling.
“Never mind that Ms. Ledbetter didn’t know about the discrimination when it first began,” Mr. Kennedy said. “Never mind that she had no means to learn of the discrimination because Goodyear kept salary information confidential. Never mind that Goodyear’s discrimination against Ms. Ledbetter continued each and every time it gave her a smaller paycheck than it gave her male colleagues.”
The House passed a similar bill last year soon after the court decision, but its backers have encountered resistance in the Senate and from the Bush administration, which argues it could spark a wave of lawsuits. Some Senate Republicans have reservations about the measure, but they intend to be careful in their opposition to avoid being portrayed as backing pay discrimination.
The San Antonio Express-News published a letter of mine today, in response to this article from last Sunday's paper. The article focused on women re-entering the workforce after taking several years off the care for their kids. For my letter, they used a title "Show both sides," but a better title would be "Don't ignore the effects of gender bias." Here is the letter:
I am writing to comment on the article by Melissa Fletcher Stoeltje, "Opting Back In."
I applaud the Express-News for taking on such a complex subject, but I was disappointed the author did not discuss the crucial role gender bias has on the work-related choices that families face.
The phrases "opting in" and "opting out" imply free choice, yet the reality for many women who enter or leave the workforce has nothing to do with choice. For the majority of families, simple economics dictates that the parent who can make the most money works and, if possible, the other parent stays home and takes care of the children.
Since, on average, women earn only about eighty cents for every dollar a man earns, most of the parents who "opt out" are women. If the tables were turned, we would be talking about men "opting out" rather than women.
Also, the article overplays a small number of positive stories of women who have succeeded at returning to the workforce, while downplaying a "rigorous survey" that suggests the reality for those who pursue this course is far less encouraging: only three-quarters of highly-qualified women who desire to return to work actually succeed, and less than half at a full-time job.
The author should have devoted much more attention to this other side of the story. Why can't these women find work appropriate for their skills?
Isn't it far more newsworthy when qualified people cannot find appropriate work?
While it may feel better in the short run to ignore the ongoing realities of gender discrimination in the workplace, it does not serve your readers well to give short shrift to this crucial factor affecting the choices of women and their families.
Today was a historic day as Nancy Pelosi was elected the first female Speaker of the House in our nation's entire history. From the Washington Post:
Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) was sworn in today as the first female speaker of the House in U.S. history, as Democrats formally took control of Congress for the first time in a dozen years and immediately set their sights on quick passage of ethics legislation.
Pelosi, 66, took the oath of office at 2:30 p.m. EST after winning election as speaker in a straight party-line vote that reflected the Democrats' 233-202 House majority in the new 110th Congress. Rep. John A. Boehner (R-Ohio) became House minority leader.
Before taking the oath from Rep. John Dingell (D-Mich.), the longest-serving House member, Pelosi pledged in a speech to work in bipartisan fashion toward ending the war in Iraq, reining in deficit spending and raising ethical standards among lawmakers, among other goals.
Hailing her election to the speakership as a "historic moment for the women of America," Pelosi declared, "For our daughters and granddaughters, today we have broken the marble ceiling. . . . Now the sky is the limit. Anything is possible."
As former House Majority leader, now Minority Leader, Republican John Boehner said in introducing Pelosi, "Today is a cause for celebration."
But while we celebrate, let's not forget that, despite the lofty rhetoric, chronic problems remain -- the sky is not yet the limit. And if anything is to be possible for our daughters and graddaughters, we still have a lot of work to do.
Today, there was a heartening, unanimous, decision from the U.S. Supreme Court.
Nine years ago, Sheila White says, she was made to feel very unwelcome as the only woman working in the maintenance department of a railroad yard in Memphis. And today, the Supreme Court said a jury was right to award her $43,000 for complaining about her treatment.Not so heartening is that it took nine years for this common sense decision to get made.
In a 9-to-0 ruling, the justices sided with Ms. White and against the Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway, and in so doing broadened the protections for workers who sue their employers for retaliation after lodging complaints.
Writing for the court, Justice Stephen G. Breyer wrote that "we believe it is important to separate significant from trivial harms." An employee's decision to report discrimination "cannot immunize that employee from those petty slights or minor annoyances that often take place at work and that all employees experience," he emphasized.
But the court found that what Ms. White went through went beyond the trivial and the annoying.
A couple days ago, I pointed out how one very common excuse heard from wage gap deniers is false: the idea that women earn less than men because women take large amounts of time off from their careers. The final nail in the coffin for that myth is a GAO report from 2003 that performs a detailed analysis of salary data for men and women, controlling for numerous independent variables such as annual hours worked, time out of the labor force, work experience, highest education achieved, industry, and more. Controlling for all those variables, the study still found a pay gap of over 20% between men and women in the year 2000.
It didn't take long for me to find the myth still being propagated. The very next day, a conservative contributor to the blog Polar Opposite Politics quoted another blog saying:
When I am confronted with evidence that women earn less than men I do not take this as a sign of discrimination. Instead, I point out that if you add to the regression a variable measuring continuous attachment to the work-force the difference in wages fades away.
I pointed out the data directly contradicting this statement, and that got us started in a conversation about this issue (at both his blog and mine), as he continued to insist that the wage gap could be "easily explained away" by women's choices.
One weakness of the GAO study is that it only controlled for occupation via broad categories such as "professional, technical" and "nonfarm laborers." But this does not mean the wage gap can be explained away be different occupational choices by men and women within these broad categories. Further studies demonstrate that the wage gap persists even in much more specific occupational categories. In fact, a significant pay differential exists in virtually every single such category.
The Census Bureau released a study in May 2004 entitled "Evidence From Census 2000 About Earnings by Detailed Occupation for Men and Women." On page 12, it states:
Fifteen of the 20 listed [highest-paid] occupations for men appear on the list [of the 20 highest-paid occupations] for women, and in all cases, the female median is less than that for men. In fact, the occupation third on the list for women makes the same as the occupation last on the list for men ($67,000). A similar pattern is shown for the lowest-paid occupations (Table 6). Sixteen occupations appear on both lists, and in all cases but one ... women make less than men in the same occupation.
In only 11 out of 422 detailed occupations with 10,000 or more year-round full-time workers did the Census Bureau find that female median earnings were statistically indistinguishable from male median earnings.
Among the highest-paid occupations: women physicians and surgeons earn 63% of what men do; women dentists, 62%; women judges, magistrates, and other judicial workers, 57%; women actuaries, 70%; women economists, 82%; women chemical engineers, 80%; women chief executives, 63%.
Among the lowest-paid occupations: women dishwashers earn 86% of what men do; women farmers and ranchers, 60%; women cooks, 88%; women maids and housekeeping cleaners, 79%; women teacher assistants, 75%.
Take this Census data, across 411 out of 422 detailed occupations, combine it with the GAO study that controls for numerous independent variables, and the existence of a wage gap that is not "easily explained away" is readily apparent.
Unfortunately, discrimination, both the overt kind and the more subtle, social-pressure, kind, cannot be measured via studies like these. No one admits to purposefully paying women less for equivalent work. (After all, it is technically against the law these days.) So those who seek to deny the significance of discrimination continue waving their hands and inventing more and more excuses for the huge amounts of data that demonstrate the large pay differential between men and women.
Perhaps, as the Census Bureau hypothesizes for the pay gap for physicians and surgeons, "different degrees of specialization within an occupation and different choices of industry or business organization may affect the ratio. For example, women might choose more frequently than men to practice in lower-paid medical specialties (such as pediatrics) or in lower-paid institutional settings (such as health maintenance organizations)."
Even if this were so, which is not at all clear, and even if this were purely due to women's personal preferences, which again is not at all clear, this argument cannot be plausibly extended across 411 out of 422 occupations. Alas, experience shows that this does not stop the wage gap deniers from trying.
The GAO, in concluding their study, offers up some further speculative straws for the wage gap deniers to grasp:
Some experts believe that women and men generally have different life priorities—women choose to place higher priority on home and family, while men choose to place higher priority on career and earnings. These women may voluntarily give up potential for higher earnings to focus on home and family.
This non-expert, but very interested observer, finds that argument extremely unconvincing. In this country, women have a long history of being underpaid relative to men for the same work. Has it all suddenly ended in the last 20 years? Both anecdotal evidence and the hard data strongly suggest not.
As many have heard, yesterday was Equal Pay Day. Full-time working women, on average, have to work an en extra three-and-a-half months to earn the same amount of money as full-time working men make in a year.
To all who care about basic fairness, this should be a scandalous situation. Many people, however, dispute that there is even a problem. In doing so, they promulgate numerous myths—myths that have seeped into the collective conscience of a large fraction of the country.
One particularly popular myth is that women earn less because many of them take large amounts of time off from their careers to spend at home raising children. A typical version of this fallacy goes like this:
Consider that women typically take about a decade out of the workforce caring for family. It’s reasonable that a 35-year-old woman reentering the workforce after ten years earns less than a man or woman who worked continuously during that time.
Sadly, this argument isn't just promoted by the pay-gap deniers, who are so common amongst right-wing pundits these days. I've even seen this raised by those who know the pay gap is a serious problem that needs to be addressed.
Many studies have been done that take differences in experience, education, and numerous other factors into account. The pay gap between men and women persists even after these factors are included. For instance, a comprehensive study by the General Accounting Office released in late 2003 reports:
We found that before controlling for any variables that may affect earnings, on average, women earned about 44 percent less than men over the time period we studied—1983 to 2000. However, after controlling for the independent variables that we included in our model, we found that this difference was reduced to about 21 percent over this time period.
The "independent variables" considered in this study include all of the following: annual hours worked, time out of the labor force, work experience, highest education achieved, full-time versus part-time schedule, length of unemployment, tenure, occupation, industry, self-employment status, and numerous demographic variables. Yet even after controlling for all these complicating issues, women still earn 21% less than men, a figure barely different from the more simply measured value of 24%.
The idea that the pay gap is due largely to women taking time off to raise children is thus complete fiction.
A blogger called Pinko Feminist Hellcat rants about stories on a Census Bureau wage study released yesterday. The news stories headline the differences in pay between asian, white, black, and hispanic college-educated women. (I heard a report on NPR yesterday evening with the same angle.) Buried is the news that the earnings of white college-educated men blow those of all these categories of women away. And of other categories of college-educated men, too.
The real story about the earnings of college-educated people:
Bitch Ph.D., Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon, and Jessica at feministing have further comments on this atrocious journalism.
UPDATE: To find out exactly how many outlets missed the real story, I did a Google News search for "Census pay differences" and clicked on the link for all 195 related stories. On the first page of that search, there were approximately 30 stories, only 2 of which highlighted the real story. Kudos to those newspapers: the Minneapolis Star-Tribune (Salaries still straddle wide divide in gender and race) and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram (Anglo men still far out-earn women, minorities).
As you may already know, current and former female Wal-Mart employees have been engaged in a lawsuit against the giant retailer, accusing the company of gender discrimination in pay and promotion. Last year, the case was granted class action status and thus became a real threat to Wal-Mart's bottom line and a potential boon to those battling gender discrimination throughout the country.
Now (as Nathan Newman points out), Business Week writes that Wal-Mart's current defense against this lawsuit is to challenge the constitutional legitimacy of nation-wide class action suits themselves:
Wal-Mart's ambitious legal strategy strikes at the heart of what it means to file a class action. The company maintains that its constitutional rights would be violated if the court allows a suit to go forward involving up to 1.5 million of the retailing giant's current and former female employees. Because such a case would deprive the company of its rights to defend itself against each woman's claim, it argues, the courts should allow suits only on a store-by-store basis. If the Ninth Circuit agrees and strikes down the multistate action certified by a lower court, it would likely kill the largest employment class action in U.S. history. More broadly, it would open wide the door for all large companies to make similar arguments. "A victory for Wal-Mart might mean that plaintiffs can't bring nationwide class actions anymore and that they might have to do them locally or regionally," says Mark S. Dichter, a management-side employment lawyer at Morgan, Lewis & Bockius LLP.
Business Week goes on to point out that this seems like a long-shot strategy for Wal-Mart. But with the current makeup of the Supreme Court, nothing is guaranteed. This is worth keeping a close eye on, especially since ramifications of a negative decision would extend far beyond the worthy realm of fighting gender discrimination.
The anonymous blogger known as Bitch, Ph.D. has delved into the transcript of Harvard President Larry Summers' remarks on women in science and discovered that the press reports may actually have gone easy on him.
Recent Comments