Pay Inequity Shows No Signs of Waning
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At many of the nation's biggest companies, the wage gap between white men and nearly everyone else in the workplace still exists, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of Bureau of Labor Statistics and Census Bureau analysis. In fact, it was only with Asian-American men, where median wages were just one percent less than those of white men who worked full-time, that the wage gap was nearly obliterated. Everywhere else, wage gaps were not only apparent, but in many cases, substantial. By race, Hispanic women were found to earn 52 percent of the annual pay of white men in the same roles, black women earned 63 percent, white women earned 73 percent and Asian-American women earned 78 percent. Young women earned 20 to 25 percent less than young men at the same education level--about equal to men at an education level below theirs. Meanwhile, white men still wielded the most power in business, making up 81.6 percent of the work force and 83.5 percent of the managers. Men of color held only 6.4 percent of corporate officer positions at 260 big companies. "It's disheartening because the rate of progress toward equality that we saw in the 1970s and 1980s has slowed in recent years," Heidi Hartmann, president and economist at the Institute for Women's Policy Research, told the Journal. "At the current rate, equal pay will take another 50 years." |
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Comments (8)
Men are more likely than women to leave lower-paying career fields--like education, for example.
I did!
Posted by Russ Sharp | February 29, 2008 1:09 PM
And the pay disparity of the meger few men of color is???
Posted by Anthony Hicklin | February 29, 2008 1:14 PM
"It's disheartening because the rate of progress toward equality that we saw in the 1970s and 1980s has slowed in recent years"
What's disheartening is that we still continue to kill trees and waste ink and electrons on stories like this, which make no attempt to control for quality of life choices, quality of employee, currency of skill set, or any other factor which might actually be pertinent to the question of what value an employee has to her employer.
What's disheartening is we must continue to be bombarded by morons who think inequality of outcomes is the same thing as inequality of opportunities.
By the logic of the article, we must infer that non-Asian minority males are locked out of these professions. Unfortunately, an examination of graduation rates in technical
majors of non-Asian minorities reveals that for whatever reasons, these men are simply not interested in this type of education (and therefore employment.) Sadly, the day when we will read about how "non-Asian minority men are still shut-out of IT." can only be a few days or hours away.
Posted by Fred Zarguna | February 29, 2008 5:04 PM
"What's disheartening is we must continue to be bombarded by morons who think inequality of outcomes is the same thing as inequality of opportunities." -- Fred Zarguna
That's brilliant.
Posted by Kyle Wagner | February 29, 2008 5:23 PM
Main problem of feminists like the author Ms. Perelman is to confuse being equal and being the same. The evident reason of different AVERAGE pay for different social groups is that an AVERAGE work performer is not the same for all groups, but DIFFERENT one with different AVERAGE work performance, hence pay.
By logic of Ms. Perelman, one can conclude from her article that among women themselves there is no pay equity either. Say, Hispanic women might be found to earn 67 percent of the annual pay of Asian-American women in the same roles, while black women earned 81 percent of that.
It would be interesting to compare annual pay of black women and Asian-American women groups in the professional basketball field: is there pay inequity, much less signs of waning?
Posted by D. Jones | February 29, 2008 8:48 PM
To figure out if there is inequality of pay, you need to at least compare people of equal focus. I guess I'm one of these white males you speak of. The focus of my life has been my work (My ex-wife would attest to that). I have minority friends, and their focus is not what mine is. My blood brother focused on what he "enjoyed doing" .vs. what paid well. I got a BS in Math/Computer Science, at a community college and at a state college no less, because I wanted a good job. He studied history at an Ivy League school, Cornell and then Harvard, and then got a law degree. I drive a Lexus. He drives a Ford Taurus. My house is twice the size. He's still married and has more friends. Someday he thinks his social connections will pay off. He might be right, but so far my work connections have been paying better than his social connections.
My African American childhood friend Marty, two years by junior, always beat me at chess. He's a gym teacher. I'm a system software analyst. Yes, I get paid more. I really don't think that gives him or my brother the right to pick my pockets, whether through taxation or any other "legal" means. Neither have as good of a medical plan, 401K plan, nor a savings account with much in it.
It's all about choices, and my choice was to study what paid better. It wasn't any more complicated than that, and has nothing to do with skin color discrimination.
Posted by Dan Rolsina | March 1, 2008 11:28 AM
You sophistic thinking is causing us to ignore the solution. Instead of comparing a persons earnings to their skin color or sex WHy don't we compare apersons earnings to a.parents marital status, parents education,and the individuals childhood family situation.The bottom line is the bottom line the owners of all the professional sports teams pay their players fantastic salaries and the skin color has little to do with it.This is not to say that discrimination doesn't exist a black employer given the choice between a white man and black of equal skills and appearance will probably pick his own race same with white and yellow.However I will agree that this does not hold with sex, women with same skills earn less?
Posted by Andrew Vranich | March 3, 2008 2:30 AM
Fred is right! Inequality of outcomes is no indicator of opportunities.
What kind of morons? Notice a white woman wrote the article. They try to find common cause with men of "color" . Well, Indian men and chinese AND ASIAN ARE DOING BETTER THAN WHITE MEN.
WHAT THE AUTHOR MEANS IS" PAY WOMEN MORE FOR MAKING BAD CHOICES.
Posted by DavidB | March 3, 2008 7:02 AM