A recent study looks at
the gap between men and women’s earnings in America. This
“gender wage gap” is the cause of ample animosity between those who
believe pay differences stem from sexism and those who believe the
gap can be explained by differences in men and women’s work
choices—a false dichotomy if their ever was one (I’ll take
a-little-of-column-A, a little-of-column-B here, please). Those who
believe the gap stems from life choices tend to focus on women
taking time off for childrearing and going into less lucrative
fields. According to researchers from Indiana and Cornell
Universities, the wage gap’s persistence can also be attributed to
a greater proportion of men working 50 or more hours per
week.
“Despite rapid changes in women’s educational attainment and
continuous labor force experience, convergence in the gender gap in
wages slowed in the 1990s and stalled in the 2000s,” explain
researchers Youngjoo Chaa and Kim A. Weedenb in their paper’s abstract.
Looking at data from 1979 to 2000, Chaa and Weedenb found that
while hourly wages overall stagnated during the period, the hourly
wage of workers who put in 50 or more hours per week—a practice
they describe as “overwork”—actually went up. “Because a greater
proportion of men engage in overwork, these changes raised men’s
wages relative to women’s,” they write.
It’s not merely that more men than women were working
50-hour-plus workweeks but that hourly workers in this category are
the only ones who saw their wages rise in the last decades of the
20th century. Kind of a double-whammy of wage gap exacerbation, if
you will. Taken together, the increasing prevalence of “overworked”
employees, the fact that more men than women fall in this category,
and “the rising hourly wage returns to overwork” have
magnified the gender wage gap by an estimated 10 percent according
to the paper, published in the American Sociological
Review.
“This overwork effect was sufficiently large to offset the
wage-equalizing effects of the narrowing gender gap in educational
attainment and other forms of human capital,” the researchers note.
The effect was strongest in professional and managerial jobs,
“where long work hours are especially common and the norm of
overwork is deeply embedded in organizational practices and
occupational cultures.”
With child care and shuffling still falling much more heavily on
women, it’s no surprise that less female employees are able to put
in 50 or more working hours weekly. And I think this illustrates
nicely why the sexism vs choices dichotomy is wrong.
Clearly no one is discriminating against women by paying
them less for working less hours—there is no central sexist actor
here. But there is a subtly sexist view permeating our
culture that says caregiving is a gendered job.
Surely many women have zero qualms about being the primary
parent; surely many others feel somewhat slighted by the situation.
It’s impossible to separate gendered choices from gendered
disadvantages.
With this in mind, it makes no sense for the government to try
and rectify the wage gap administratively because there is
literally no way to account for all the contributing variables—such
as this overwork one. How could anyone have predicted that hourly
wages for “overworkers” would rise while general wages stagnated?
How can bureaucrats possibly correct for cultural expectations?
Focusing on the wage gap per se will go nowhere near as
far toward closing it as focusing on the culture that creates it
can.
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