Getting Even

Why Women Don't Get Paid Like Men--And What to Do About It

Evelyn Murphy, E.J. Graff

• Publisher: Touchstone
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9780743274678
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Are you (or a woman you love) being cheated out of 33 percent of your earnings? If you're a woman, over your working lifetime you will lose between $700, 000 and $2 million -- simply because of your sex. Is that fair? No. Can it be stopped? Absolutely.
The wage gap is a steady drain on the daily lives of women and our families. Rarely do we step back and add up what's missing -- better medical treatment, child care, housing, food, or retirement savings that women could have afforded if they were paid as well as men.
Getting Even exposes the discrepancy between what women and men make -- and how it affects us all. It reveals that the wage gap is not going away on its own. And it explains how to close the wage gap -- and, finally, get women even.
In this intelligently argued and startling book, Evelyn Murphy, Ph.D., humanizes the numbers through real-life stories and a wealth of data that has never before been examined. She shows how the wage gap pinches the daily lives of families throughout the country, at every economic level and in every industry. And she explains why, even though women have more opportunities than their mothers did, the wage gap persists: The American workplace still harbors an astonishing amount of discrimination, including blatant as well as complex hidden barriers, unspoken assumptions, unexamined attitudes, and habitual ways of behaving.
But Murphy also brings good news: The wage gap can be closed. Having served as an economist, politician, public official, and corporate officer, she has a 360-degree view of the problem -- and of the solution.
In a book that will explode into public debate, Murphy issues the indictment, rouses us to action -- and tells us exactly how to get even.

PART1

Why Not a Dollar?

CHAPTER1

Introduction

Are you paid as much as a man would be if he had your job?

Most working women today, if they’re over thirty, would probably blurt out, “No. A man would be getting more.”

Their intuitive sense is borne out by the facts. Women working full-time—not part-time, not on maternity leave, not as consultants—still earn only 77 cents for every full-time male dollar. Very few individual women can ever find out exactly what their male counterparts would be making in the same job. But that yawning gap between the average male and average female paycheck is a pretty good clue that he’d be paid more.

If you’re a woman, what would you do with that extra 23 cents—an increase of nearly one third on top of your current 77-cent paycheck—a raise that got you even with men?

The wage gap has been stalled for more than a decade. It exists between women and men working at every economic level, from waitresses to corporate lawyers, from nurse’s aides to CEOs. Getting Even tackles the questions: Why are women’s paychecks still so far behind? And what do we have to do to catch up?

Let me explain how I became interested in women’s pay—and why these questions are particularly urgent now. Back in the 1960s, when I started working full-time as a newly minted Ph.D. economist, women earned 59 cents for every dollar earned by men. At the time, I accepted the common explanation that the gender wage gap existed because of a “merit gap.” Women, this theory went, were not as well educated as men, hadn’t worked as long, or were working in low-skill, stopgap jobs until they got married while men were working at higher-end jobs as family breadwinners. But this “merit gap” was closing. Women were streaming into colleges and jobs. Like many observers, I was convinced that the wage gap would soon close.

Over my working life, I have kept my eye on that number. And for roughly the next two decades, my widely shared expectation seemed to be coming true. The gender wage gap narrowed slowly but steadily. By 1993, women were making 77 cents to a man’s dollar.

Then came a shock. In 1994, despite the growing economy, the gender wage gap abruptly widened. A wider wage gap? That took my breath away. Worse, this reversal came at a time when the Dow Jones Industrial Average was starting its spectacular climb and the economy was chugging into a period of historically high employment, when every worker was needed, when highly qualified women had long been graduating at the same rates as men. How could that be?

Nor was this increased wage gap a statistical aberration. Over the next several years women continued to lose ground. This made no sense. More than 40 million American working women were educated, experienced, and holding full-time jobs comparable to men’s. This was a fair comparison of full-time female workers to full-time male workers, apples to apples. It left out all women who worked part-time, who were on leave, or who had dropped out of the labor force to be stay-at-home moms or caretakers for elderly relatives. Like men, these women had families dependent on their earnings. Some, like some men, were furiously ambitious, working night and day to get ahead. Most, like most men, worked hard at their nine-to-five or swing-shift schedules to keep those badly needed paychecks coming in. Why, instead of catching up, were these hardworking women suddenly falling further behind? What had changed? And why weren’t women alarmed by this?

Maybe it was because individual working women didn’t necessarily notice that they were losing ground. In fact, many women were dumbstruck by how much more money they were making than they’d ever imagined possible. Women were comparing themselves with themselves, their income and achievements with their own expectations—and by that measure, they were doing great.

But the wage gap is not about an individual’s comparison with herself. It compares the average earnings of all women with the average earnings of all men. Over the course of the decade, many women’s earnings rose. Yet as the economy steamed ahead in the mid-1990s, on average, women’s earnings did not go up as much as men’s did. For instance, women in their late fifties and early sixties saw their paychecks growing as they approached retirement—but men of the same age saw their paychecks increase almost seven times more than women’s did. And that signaled a major social injustice.

The real outrage was that precisely the opposite should have happened. The 1990s was the decade in which women should have closed the wage gap. Women had all but closed the “merit gap.” But the wage gap had not only remained astonishingly wide but was going backward. The mid-1990s’ widening in the wage gap was too large and too sustained to be explained by casual social theories such as time-outs for motherhood, new elder care demands, welfare moms forced to work, or a handful of high-achieving women who abandoned their careers. And the persistently wide size of the gap—almost 25 cents—required explanation. Why weren’t women’s earnings catching up to men’s in these boom times, when the gap should have closed?

Having watched the wage gap all my working life, I couldn’t get my mind off these questions. For me, the wage gap is a keenly personal issue. Neither of my parents went to college; I didn’t start out aimed toward an intellectual or professional career. To put myself through college, I waited tables at an ice cream parlor, punched a desk calculator, and did general office work at a government job. I’ve always known I had to live on my paycheck—and that many other women must as well.

And so I began asking everyone I came across—nurses, businesspeople, politicians, journalists, academic researchers, transit authority workers, women and men, black and brown and white—how they might explain this shift. Few had noticed. But after a pause, whomever I was speaking with almost invariably started to tell a story of unfair treatment in the workplace. For instance, a top-ranking physician at a Boston teaching hospital told me that of course female doctors didn’t earn as much as the male doctors: while women did the grunt work in committees, men were awarded administrative appointments that boosted their income. A veteran clerical worker in California said that, despite her college degree and twenty-five years’ experience, she earned less than the newly hired, unskilled men her government department hired to pick up “ratty old sofas” abandoned on curbsides. And a laid-off computer programmer, a strong and athletic woman who tried to get temporary “light industrial” work—unskilled factory or construction labor—was told to come back on a day when they had “women’s work” such as filing or telemarketing. Consider the experience of a midwestern psychiatric case manager. When her unit had an opening, she suggested a man with whom she had previously worked. “He didn’t have any more experience than I did,” she recounts. “They offered him the job at, like, three thousand dollars more than what I had been offered.” She knew that because he told her.

The details varied. But the theme was utterly consistent: Men’s jobs paid more. Men advanced more easily. And that was costing women money—real money that we needed in our everyday lives, to buy groceries or put a down payment on a house or save for retirement.

Most women harbor some such memory of unfair treatment, some irritating or infuriating moment that almost surely set back her wages: that job where colleagues treated her as incompetent, the position where the manager insisted on taking the team to Hooters each Friday until she finally left for a lower-paying spot, or the time her manager passed her over for promotion because, he said, now that she was a mom she had other responsibilities. Most women have such a story to tell.

Throughout Getting Even, stories will be told of women who volunteered to talk about their experiences at work. Some of these were solicited in a small-scale research project of the kind social scientists call “qualitative” rather than “quantitative.” I recruited women through several public Web sites.¹ Others found their way to me informally, as the word got out about what I was doing. Still others were found because they were named plaintiffs in discrimination lawsuits or because their EEOC attorneys asked them if they would be willing to speak with me. Many asked for anonymity, out of concern that their stories might be used to set back their paychecks. These women were by no means a “random sample,” as that term is used in statistics or social science. Nevertheless, they come from very different walks of life. They live in a variety of regions and work in many kinds of jobs and industries: a secretary in Hollywood, a corporate executive at a Fortune 100 manufacturing firm, a manager in the U.S. Justice Department, a midwestern insurance analyst, an independent New Hampshire carpenter, and so on.

I tell these stories to illustrate and illuminate the stark data that is Getting Even’s backbone. Women today are stuck making almost a quarter less than men. Why? Because of unfair treatment on the job—unfair treatment that may not always be intentional, but is so deeply ingrained that it will continue unless we act.

Getting Even is written for every woman—and for every man who cares about the women in his life. It’s written for the woman who has seethed under such a moment of injustice—and for the man who’s been furious on hearing her tale. It’s written for the woman who assumes she is getting paid fairly but who has not yet considered how unfair treatment might be crippling her paycheck—and for the man who hasn’t yet recognized how his wife’s crimped wages are hurting their family finances. Most important, Getting Even is written for every woman who doesn’t want to pass the wage gap on to her daughters—and for every man who cares whether his wife, girlfriend, daughters, sisters, nieces, and granddaughters are being paid fairly.

Getting Even’s premises are simple. The gender wage gap is unfair. It’s still with us, and it’s not going away on its own. It pinches the daily lives of women throughout the country, at every economic level. It is being passed along from one decade to the next, from one generation to the next. It measures discrimination against women on the job, which comes in many forms. The most blatant barriers to women in the workforce may be down, but that just makes eliminating the “hidden” barriers—unspoken assumptions, unexamined attitudes, habitual ways of behaving—that much more urgent. In 2000, two thirds of all U.S. working women were still crowded into twenty-one of the five hundred occupational categories. Legal changes have been helpful, but government can’t do everything that’s necessary to close the gap the rest of the way.

But there is a solution. Women (and sympathetic men) have to stop making excuses about why our wages are lower than men’s. We have to look at the problem squarely, as this book will. And then we have to work together at the pragmatic solution laid out in Getting Even’s final section. A few visionary employers, such as MIT’s former president Charles Vest, have figured out how to treat women fairly. The solution is not rocket science. It involves paying close and sustained attention to how women and men are treated and measuring progress along the way. Working women (and the men who care about them) need to stand up for ourselves on the job. We need to work together to pressure every boss to follow MIT’s lead and to get women even. If we all work at this together, steadily and attentively, women can—and will!—be paid just like men, in just one decade.

That’s why I’ve titled this book Getting Even, which is meant to be simultaneously provocative, funny, and quite serious. You’ve heard the saying behind it: “Don’t get mad; get even.” I’ve always taken this to mean we should be smart about how we correct wrongdoings. Anger has its place, if it prompts you to respond with thoughtfulness and care. That’s this book’s goal: to get you angry enough to act; to offer up an overall strategy that will fix women’s wages; and to give you constructive tools so that you, as an individual, can get financially even with men. Getting you angry should, unfortunately, be easy enough. Getting Even will do this simply by examining how much the wage gap is costing women, each and every day. It will show you what it means to be deprived of nearly one fourth of your rightful income. It will calculate how much you—or your sisters, daughters, nieces, granddaughters—are losing over a lifetime. The wage gap has a higher cost than most women will admit to themselves. Getting Even will look unflinchingly at that deprivation.

The subtitle tells you a little more: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men—and What to Do About It. That word “why” is important. This book is full of stories, statistics, research, and facts—about sex discrimination, about the wage gap, about lawsuits, about women’s experiences on the job—so that you can see that, when you face unfair treatment, you are not alone. We have to know why things are as they are before we can come up with an effective plan for what to do. (If you’re interested in more scholarly detail about the whys and wherefore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Colophon
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• PART 1: WHY NOT A DOLLAR?
• PART 2: NOW ADD DISCRIMINATION
• PART 3: GETTING EVEN
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Authors