The pay gap, much like climate change, is probably a myth. This, anyway, is what many people (usually men) would have you believe, even faced with a mountain of data that suggests otherwise. And even when they do grudgingly accept stats – in 2015, women earned 83% of what men earned, for instance – they’ve normally got a personally reasonable, not-at-all-sexist explanation for it. Women just aren’t ambitious or well qualified; they don’t ask for raises; they drop out of the job market to have children. Basically, it’s the woman’s fault.
What to make, then, of a new report from the Economic Policy Institute which finds that, right out of college, women earn about $3 less per hour than their male peers? The EPI found that “while young men (age 21–24) with a college degree are paid an average hourly wage of $20.87 early in their careers, their female counterparts are paid an average hourly wage of just $17.88”.
This $2.99 hourly difference, the equivalent of an annual wage gap of more than $6,000 for full-time workers, is particularly striking “as young women have higher rates of bachelor’s degree attainment (20.4%) than young men (14.9%)”. What’s more, because it’s an entry-level job, it’s hard to argue that women simply haven’t asked for raises or aren’t ambitious enough.
What one might more plausibly argue, however, is sexism. In the job market, women simply don’t get the benefit of the doubt, while men do. Bosses focus more on men’s potential, while women have to prove themselves again and again, in the face of thousands of years of ingrained prejudice, in order to get to a similar place to that of men.
Take a recent Hollywood Reporter story about Patty Jenkins, director of the new Wonder Woman movie, for example. The very first paragraph of the article states (in big, bolded letters): “Warner Bros. gambles $150m on its first woman-centered comic book movie with a filmmaker whose only prior big-screen credit was an $8m.”
As was quickly pointed out by numerous people, many men have made the jump from small indies to massive blockbusters without it being branded “a gamble”. Gizmodo even compiled a list of them. It includes the likes of Marc Webb, whose debut, 500 Days of Summer, cost $7.5m and who then (in an pleasing example of nominative determinism) went on to direct The Amazing Spider-Man with a budget of $230m.
I know I’m just a woman and all, and this might be over my head, but sexism seems to me to be the most reasonable explanation for how women are considered and compensated as compared to men. And yet, it seems to be a very difficult explanation for some people to swallow.
Perhaps because it challenges notions that men just get where they are because of hard work and intelligence and nothing else. But whatever the reason, there seem to be constant efforts to undermine the validity of the wage gap.
A recent example of this is an analysis of S&P 500 companies by the Wall Street Journal. The Journal excitedly announced that while only 5% of these companies had female CEOs, the women earned more than their male counterparts; the 21 female CEOs earned a median salary of $13.8m last year, while the 382 men earned $11.6m.
These figures gave rise to a slew of headlines about the CEO gender gap reversal (see, the pay gap is a myth!) which gave rise to another slew of headlines explaining how the first set of headlines were BS (Bad Statistics). And, indeed, the Wall Street Journal’s analysis is a brilliant example of cherry-picking numbers to pick your narrative.
“Here’s a more telling stat,” pointed out Fast Company. “Consider this pay gap: The top-earning male CEO, Charter Communications’ Thomas M Rutledge, raked in $98m in 2016, while the top-earning woman, HP’s Meg Whitman, earned $35.6m.” That’s a pretty big pay gap and it’s not favoring women.
Ultimately, we shouldn’t need more statistics or reports to prove that men and women aren’t treated the same in the corporate world. That should be obvious with common sense and a set of eyes. What we do need, however, is for people at the top to stop trying to prove that sexism is some sort of myth and, instead, start shifting the status quo.
