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Focus on Gender
Latest Research on the US Gender Pay Gap
Pew Research, In “The Narrowing, But Persistent, Gender Gap in Pay,” Pew finds women earning 82% of what men do in median hourly earnings of full- and part-time workers, with the gap narrower for younger adults. It attributes the gap’s persistence to discrimination, caregiving, and more women in lower-paying occupations.
Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “The Gender Wage Gap: 2017 Earnings Differences by Race and Ethnicity,” delves more deeply, finding the gap largest for Hispanic women, who earn only 62% of what white men do, resulting in average full-time weekly earnings below the food stamp threshold for a family of four. Their research also identifies that women in the highest paid occupations see the highest pay gaps, and 8-times as many women as men work in occupations with poverty-level wages. For greater detail, download the report.
FiveThirtyEight: “The Pay Gap is Way Too Entrenched to be Solved by Women Alone” cites Cornell economists who find that sex segregation (jobs largely done by women versus men) now accounts for over half of the gender pay gap. As a result, further progress will likely involve organizational changes such as increased transparency, pay for comparable work, and normalizing part-time work financially.
When first entering the tech industry, US women request and get 98% of what their male counterparts do, according to data from Hired's "The State of Wage Inequality in the Workplace." However, the gender pay gap grows as women’s experience increases. This is due in part to subsequent salary requests compound women’s initial pay inequities. And the situation is worse for women who identify as LGBTQ and women of color. Overall, offers to women are 4% less than those for men working in the same job at the same company, and men get higher salary offers 63% of the time.
Coverage of UK Pay Gap Reporting
Observing that recent pay equity disclosures required by the UK Equality Act, “… have made for some uncomfortable reading for company executives,” the New York Times cites some glaring gender pay gaps and describes how other companies, “… have scrambled to counter the fallout from the embarrassing reports.”
The Toronto Star reports women’s salaries being 35-44% of men’s, and bonuses for women between 64% and 72% lower than men’s at the Royal Bank of Canada, Scotiabank and Toronto-Dominion. The newspaper names other companies with gender pay inequities, even in companies at which most of the workers are women.
Bloomberg Businessweek shines a light on the practice of British law and accounting firms leaving their (mostly male) partners out of their gender pay reports, arguing that partners are shareholders rather than employees. Doing so makes those companies’ pay gaps appear to be in the range of 20% when, if partners were included, the gap would be 40%.
The US Ninth Circuit of Appeals issued its en banc decision in Rizo v. Yovino, effectively saying that using woman’s previous salary as the sole justification for paying her less than a man in that position is gender discrimination and violates the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
