I missed this the first time around, but now I am "happy" to report
that the gender pay gap is narrowing. On August 31, 2006,
just in time for Labor Day, the US Dept. of Labor issued
href="http://www.dol.gov/asp/media/reports/workforce2006/factsheet.htm">a
report that shows a shrinking of the gender pay gap.
Here are two of the items they chose to highlight:
- Although women, on average, may earn less than men for a
variety of
reasons, including differences in work schedules and career decisions
to accommodate raising their families or taking care of loved ones,
education is a great equalizer, accounting for more
favorable changes in real earnings for women
than for men over the last 25 years. - What has been called the "pay gap" is shrinking
and is now the smallest it has ever been since the Bureau of Labor
Statistics (BLS) began tracking this data.
Of course, there are two sides to every story.
Whenever
people start analyzing large data sets, they somehow find ways to pull
out numbers that make their point. Here is another way to
look at the same data:
I had to shrink it a little to fit, but you see the point.
The gender pay gap is shrinking, but only because the pay for
men is falling faster than the pay for women.
The graph is from the Economic
Policy Institute's
href="http://www.epi.org/content.cfm/webfeatures_snapshots_20060906">Economic
Snapshot for September 6, 2006. They say:
Of course this projection is preposterous, but it
clearly shows the
absurdity of celebrating that men’s pay is shrinking faster
than women’s
If the trends continue, in 2024 there will be no gender pay gap, and
men will be earning about half of what they used to make.
Contrary to the BLS report, it is not education that's the
great equalizer; it's trickle-down economics. If everyone is
at the bottom, then everyone is equal.
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I think the "projection" is pretty specious - the previous data seem to show A)an overall very slowly falling male pay rate between about 1970 and the present, with somewhat regular up-and-down cycles and B)a more-or-less steadily rising female pay rate over the same time (which seems to be affected by the same up-and-down cycles but to a far lesser degree).
The "projection" seems (at least by "eyeball") to be taken from just the last few years, which seems to show male pay plummeting even faster than women's pay, but this is during a "down" cycle (if, indeed, it really is a cycle and not just coincidence). The last few years trends look very similar to the trends at, say, the late 80's/early 90's. And the late 70's/early 80's. And the early 70's. If the trends continue, it looks like we're about to go through recovery from the current downturn, and both male and female pay will start rising - female pay rising faster than male pay overall.
Hmmm...isn't there an election coming up?...what a coincidence...
My interpretation of the graph is that steady progress on the problem of the wage gap is being made, though work needs to continue to finish solving it.
"...but this is during a "down" cycle (if, indeed, it really is a cycle and not just coincidence)."
Meaning the recovery from a recession? How is a recovery a 'down cycle'?
I think in order to see the EPI's point clearly, you need to click through and read the BLS report first. They trumpet the smaller gender gap as a sign of progress, which it clearly is not.
Their point is that the BLS report is not to be taken at face value.
My point is that this is another illustration of how misleading statistics can be.
What I was getting at is that if you look at the previous trends they seem to "bounce" (very slightly for women's wages, more so for men's wages) more or less regularly, otherwise seeming to be more or less flat (since around 1970) over all for men and slowly steadily rising for women.
The "projection", on the other hand, turns this into a sudden linear downtrend. The more-or-less regular-looking "bounce" cycle, particularly for men's wages, LOOKS like it's about where it ought to be bouncing back up again, if the previous "bounces" are indicative at all. In any case, the trends definitely don't look linear.
Just supporting the "misleading statistics" angle of the original post, that's all...probably somewhat pedantically.