Gender Income Inequalities Part 1

I recently had a short text conversation about gender studies/income differences with a new good fun friend of mine. For the record I rarely have those conversations through text messaging. The discussion went away from gender studies and specifically about the discrimination of women in our society primarily through income differences and occupations and promotions. And the discrimination is apparent and obvious due to the differences in income between men and women. Well this is the thought of most Americans but in reality and I will attempt to show you in the following two posts, discrimination plays a small if any true significant affect on income differences amongst men and women. This will not be a typical blog entry. It will be longer than usual even for my blog posts. In Part 1: I will look at the history of these differences and the correlations that are apparent.

There is not doubt and no argument against the fact that in most societies throughout history, women have earned lower incomes than men. But this has caused many fallacies to form. For most people, the prevailing opinion is that discrimination is the main factor in these differences. This is mostly due to the media, political arena, the intelligentsia(colleges and teachers/professors), and finally the courts of law even. But Thomas Sowell says that this "explanation cannot withstand the scrutiny of history and of economics."

There is no question that in almost all societies, women and men have been treated differently from birth on. In some societies, girls have not been educated as often as boys or to the extent of boys. This undoubtedly has led to women being less qualified to hold jobs requiring education. Societies that do this throw away much of the economic and other potentials of half their populations. But this is not to say that employers discriminate when hiring workers given this fact. Under this scenario, women and men would end up with different levels of knowledge, skills, and work experience. These times have changed though and fewer societies have these same restrictions against women. But this is not going to change employment and income differences over night. Even in the twenty-first century, "two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women" according to The Economist magazine.

Years ago when most work was done on the farm, mines, or in regards to shipping, physical strength was a necessity to be a truly productive worker. We can blame God that he made men stronger then women in general but discrimination is definitely not the reason that more men had jobs in this era. Over time human muscle has been replaced by machine power and skill development and education has become more important than pure physical power. This has lessened the gap between the productivity levels of men compared to women. At the time when physical strength was a priority, many desperately poor people in China, who were living on the edge of starvation, would kill their infant girls due to the fact that their physical development would not be enough to produce enough food to sustain themselves and thus without a surplus of food these families often killed their newborns who were girls. This was not always an attempt to control population growth but an economic concern in China.

With this change in productivity characteristics, the age of which people reached their peak earnings began to rise as skill development and experience were now a prime for productivity. This lowed the differences in male-female comparisons. But today the top factor affecting the still sizable gap between men and women incomes is real simple: Child bearing. Again we can blame God for this. Mothers as a group fall behind men in income as domestic responsibilities reduce the ability of women with babies and small children to work continuously at full-time in the workforce. This means they lose two things: skill development and experience. Those are the two most important factors in productivity of an individual. Many of these changes have ran in correlation to the 1960's feminist movement amongst other movements. Many contribute the lessening income gap to the more "enlightened" views of women by society. Thus they want more government policies and laws passed to continue this trend. But history contradicts this theory.

History shows us that employer discrimination and the career paths of women bore very little resemblance. The fact is that the proportion of women in the professions and other high level positions was greater during the first decades of the twentieth century than in the middle of the twentieth century- and all of this was before either anti-discrimination laws or the rise of the feminist movement. The proportion of women among the people listed in Who's Who In America in 1902 was more than double the proportion in 1958. The trend of women as a percentage of academic was up from 1910 to 1930 and down after that, with a possible upward trend in recent years, according to the same 1964 study. Other facts back this up like more women received doctoral degrees in 1921 and 1932 but this was back down again in the late 1950's and early 1960's. These same trends existed in biological sciences, economic degrees, humanities, chemistry, and law. Even employment in colleges amongst women was down in 1961 as compared to the 1930's. This was even seen in women's colleges, run by women such as Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr. There is no way this was due to discrimination.

Why did these changes take place? Really simple in fact. Women's marriage and child-bearing patterns changed during those same times. During the early decades, the median age that women were first married was higher than at the mid-century. Most women who staffed women's colleges during the early era were not married at all. As the median age of marriage began to decline, the representation of women in high-level occupations and recipients of postgraduate degrees also declined. This decline in the median age of marriage ended in 1956 and began to rise again. This is why more recent data shows the gaps again closing between men and women. The birth rate also began to decline from 1957 on, and by 1966, it was as low as it have been back in 1933. The 1970's saw women's share of doctoral degrees again rise. Remember also the role that the "baby-boom" would have played shortly after WWII.

Women's rise in higher-level occupations in the second half of the twentieth century continued to follow the rise in their age of marriage which rose sharply and finished the century much higher than it was at the beginning. The birth rate also fell sharply and was much lower at the end of the century than even the beginning. Women rose to record high levels in higher education and higher occupations. Women's percentage of postgraduate degrees in general, master's degrees in business and law degrees, medical degrees, and Ph.D.s all skyrocketed from the 1970's on according to Economist Thomas Sowell.

There was also a narrowing of the labor force participation gap as well. In 1950, 94% of men but only 33% of women were in the workforce. The gap of of 61% points narrowed to 45 by 1970. At the end of the century the gap was only 12 points as 86 percent of men and 74 percent of women were in the labor forces. Almost as important, women also entered occupations where men were previously predominant, especially those fields requiring a college degree. The continuity of women's employment also increased after 1970, although the gap between the continuity of men's and women's employment did not disappear and women continued to work part-time more so than men.

These positive changes in the second half of the twentieth century all follow in line with the changes of women's age of marriage and child-bearing. Male-female differences in income did not disappear completely. These differences have more to do with career choices than they do discrimination. That is more economics and less history... which I will cover in part 2 coming soon.

Book most of this came from: Economic Facts and Fallacies by economist Thomas Sowell

Sowell cites:

The Economist magazine
A New York Times article by Tama Lewin
Charles Murrays IThe Inequality Taboo"
Quarterly Review of Economics & Business, Feb 1961
Jesse Bernards: Academic Women
U.S. Bureau of the Census, Historical Statistics of the United States Colonial Times to 1970