2005-06 IPR DISTINGUISHED PUBLIC POLICY LECTURE

A Lifetime of Unequal Pay for Women
IWPR president discusses the earnings gap and its consequences

Fall 2006, Volume 28, Number 1

	IPR Director Fay Cook, left, presents Heidi Hartmann with a plaque commemorating her talk at Northwestern.

Heidi Hartmann, president and founder of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) in Washington, D.C., gave IPR’s Distinguished Public Policy Lecture on March 29. She spoke about how women lag behind men in their overall lifetime earnings and the long-term implications of this gap.

Hartmann said she set about revising how to measure the earnings gap because of misleading statistics and conservatives’ denial that a gap exists. Using data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics between 1983 and 1998, she found that the typical female workers aged 26 to 59 earned $273,592, compared with $722,693 in 1999 dollars for the typical male worker in the same age group. The full results were published in “Still a Man’s Labor Market: The Long-Term Earnings Gap,” which she co-authored with Stephen Rose.

“It’s shocking that a woman has only 38 percent of the earning power of a typical male,” said Hartmann, who is also a MacArthur Fellow and a research professor of women’s studies and public policy at The George Washington University.

The study found a much greater gap between men and women than traditional year-over-year measures because it accounts for women who stay out of the workforce to take care of their families, although everyone in the study worked at least one year of the 15.

She attributes the gap to several differences: The number of years that men and women work, the types of jobs they have, and substantial differences in pay scales—even between men and women with the same level of education or in similar occupations.

Being out of the labor force for a year affects men and women almost equally—an adjusted salary drop of around 20 percent. Women, however, accumulate years of low-paying wages and time out due to caring for their families—lowering their overall earnings—while men bounce back quickly from an isolated year here and there.

Heidi Hartmann

“If you think about long-term earnings, dropping out of the labor force is not good,” Hartmann said. But it is especially difficult for women to reintegrate into the job market after having been out for multiple years, she continued.

Part of the problem is the labor force itself. Jobs remain highly segregated. In the six major occupational fields, 75 to 80 percent of workers are the same sex, she said. Typically male-dominated categories the study developed—such as engineering, farming, and factory work—pay more than female-dominated fields such as nursing, administrative support, and food service. Those fields with greater pay equity tend to be either unionized or civil service jobs.

Also, low-wage earners are largely female, Hartmann noted. Of all workers who work every year and earn $15,000 or less on average per year (8.3 percent of the total workforce), 90 percent are women. But women are affected at every level. Even for those who hold full-time, professional or management jobs, the glass ceiling still caps their earnings: They average $51,085 versus $74,877 for men in these fields. For men, the opposite is true: They earn more than women whatever their careers, often with less education.

While progress has been made over the years, the current gap continues to have far-reaching and profound consequences for the entire country. Single women are raising families on earnings well below the poverty threshold.

Hartmann suggested better enforcement of equal employment policies and more family-friendly work polices such as paid parental leave and subsidized child care. More career-track, part-time jobs could help women to increase their earnings as well. But getting to parity also involves a new way of thinking about gender roles in our society, she offered.

“We need to eliminate the double standard in parenting,” she said. “Men seem to be glorified for anything they do, while women are held to a higher standard.”