Gender Income Inequalities Part 2

Part 1 of this blog entry covered some of the historical aspects of gender income. Now lets look at the economic implications of gender income differences. To truly see if employer discrimination takes place you would have to compare men and women who had truly comparable educations, skills, experience, continuity of employment, full-time or part-time work, what occupations they choose, whether they are more or less likely to want promotions, whether they want to travel or work in different environments, among other variables. This is hard to do. Besides there are very few men and women who all have these same variables. Let us examine a few of these variables now.

Occupational Differences

Although physical strength is no longer the most important quality to have for most jobs as it use to be when most people worked in agriculture, heavy industry, or mining, there are still particular industries today where considerable physical strength remains a requirement. Some of these fields requiring more strength are fields with higher pay than the national average. This would thus lead men to have higher average incomes then women. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, women have been 74 percent of what the Bureau classifies as "clerical and kindred workers". But they have been less than 5 percent of "transport equipment operatives." In other words, women are are more likely to sit behind a desk than to steer an eighteen-wheel truck. Women are less than 4 percent of workers in "construction, extraction, and maintenance." They are less than 2 percent of roofers or masons and less than one percent of mechanics and technicians who service heavy vehicles and mobile equipment. These have obvious economic implications, since miners earn nearly double the income of office clerks when both work full-time and year-round. There is still a premium paid for workers doing heavy physical work as well as hazardous work. While men are 54 percent of the labor force, they are 92 percent of job-related deaths. This is due to working the more dangerous jobs which of course pay more.

Continuity of Employment

Women have also made career choices based on the likelihood they would at some point or other become mothers. This usually means a time of withdrawal from the full-time work outside the home, the cost of this factors in occupational choices. Where a occupation is unionized and withdraw means a loss of seniority, this hurts their prospects of being promoted and being retained during times of lay-offs.

This also hurts women's work experience especially when they do not re-enter the workforce until the child reaches a certain age. These interruptions are less common among men of course. The effect of this loss time depends on the occupation. Due to this, promotions are rare but not just those who have lost work time but to those who are likely to lose work time in the future. A promotion to a high level senior position that requires lots of time will be less likely to be given to a woman since there is a good chance for a future interruption of work.

Occupation skills change over time today as well. Rapidly changing computer technology means that computer engineers and programmers are constantly upgrading their skills to keep up with advances in their field. Tax accountants also have to keep up with changes in tax laws, and attorneys must keep up with changes in laws in general. To drop out of these fields and then return in a few years after children have grown up may mean they are behind in the developments in these occupations. Thus women consider these issues when choosing a career. It has been estimated that physicist loses half the value of their knowledge in four years while a professor of English would take more than a quarter of a century to lose half the value of the knowledge in that field. Thus it is not surprising that women work in fields with lower rates of these losses such as teachers and librarians rather than computer engineers or tax accountants. Even when the proportion of women receiving Ph.D.s rose dramatically from the 1970s on, male-female differences in the fields of specialization remained large. As of 2005, women received more than 60 percent of the doctorates in education but less than 20 percent of doctorates in engineering, a field that pays far more.

More in part 3