On September 28, the Joint Economic Committee held a hearing, “New Evidence on the Gender Gap for Women and Mothers in Management.” The hearing focused on a Government Accountability Office (GAO) report on the representation, characteristics, and pay of women in management positions.
Chair Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) said, “Women’s representation in management professions in 2007 was essentially unchanged from 2000. And motherhood continues to be a penalty for women. A previous GAO report showed that fathers enjoy a bonus, while mothers pay a penalty for their decisions to have children. I like to call this the ‘Mom Bomb.’ Today’s GAO report shows that Management Moms earn just 79 cents for every dollar earned by Management Dads – a figure that hasn’t budged since 2000. In all but one industry, fathers are more likely than mothers to be managers. When working women have kids they know it will change their lives, but they are stunned at how much it changes their paycheck. While women’s earnings are a critical element to families’ economic security, this is particularly true for families where the wife is a manager. Across all industries, married female managers are just like male managers in one key regard: they are their families’ majority breadwinners. But married male managers’ paychecks represent about 75 percent of their families’ total earnings, as compared to the 55 percent of total family earnings represented by married female manager’s paychecks. The impact of the wage gap is particularly painful in our current economic downturn as families struggle to make ends meet in the face of stagnant wages and job losses.”
In discussing the results of the report, Dr. Andrew Sherrill, director of Education, Workforce, and Income Security at the GAO, said, “In summary, when looking across all industries combined from 2000 to 2007, female managers’ representation and differences between female and male managers’ characteristics remained largely similar. In 2007, women comprised an estimated 40 percent of managers and 49 percent of nonmanagers on average for the 13 industry sectors we analyzed—industries that comprised almost all of the nation’s workforce—compared to 39 percent of managers and 49 percent of nonmanagers in 2000.” Dr. Sherrill added that, “According to our estimates, female managers in 2007 had less education, were younger on average, were more likely to work part-time, and were less likely to be married or have children, than male managers. While the average female married manager earned the majority of her own household’s wages, her share of household wages was smaller than the share contributed by the average male married manager to his household’s wages. These findings were generally similar to findings for 2000. While both male and female managers experienced increases in attainment of bachelor’s degrees or higher, women’s gains surpassed men’s. According to our estimates, male managers with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased three percentage points from 53 percent in 2000 to 56 percent in 2007, while female managers with a bachelor’s degree or higher increased six percentage points from 45 percent in 2000 to 51 percent in 2007. Similarly, while the share of male managers with a master’s degree or higher went up less than one percentage point from 2000 to 2007, the share of female managers with a master’s degree or higher rose nearly four percentage points.”
Dr. Michelle Budig, associate professor of sociology at the University of Massachusetts, described the wage penalty for motherhood, which many women in management positions face once they have children. Dr. Budig said, “My research and [that of] others demonstrates that a significant portion of gender-based differences in employment, earnings, and experiences of discrimination are increasingly related to parenthood, and the greater struggles of mothers to balance careers and family demands…Whereas childless women earn 94 cents of a childless man’s dollar, mothers earn only 60 cents of a father’s dollar. While causality is complex, there is a strong empirical association between the gender gap (pay differences between women and men) and the family gap (pay differences between households with and without children). Economist Jane Waldfogel’s research shows that 40 percent to 50 percent of the gender gap can be explained by the impact of parental and marital status on men’s and women’s earnings. Moreover, Waldfogel shows that while the gender pay gap has been decreasing, the pay gap related to parenthood is increasing.” Dr. Budig adds, “All women experience reduced earnings for each additional child they have. This penalty ranges in size from – fifteen percent per child among low-wage workers to about four percent per child among high-wage workers. That mothers work less and may accept lower earnings for more family-friendly jobs explains part of the penalty experienced by low wage workers, and that mothers have less experience, due to interruptions for childbearing, explains a part of the penalty for high-wage workers. But a significant motherhood penalty persists even in estimates that account for these differences, such that the size of the wage penalty after all factors are controlled is roughly three percent per child. This means we would expect the typical full-time female worker in 2009 to earn roughly $1,100 less per child in annual wages, all else equal.”
Diana Furchtgott-Roth, senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, discussed several factors that influence the wage gap between female and male managers, saying, “Mothers often choose to work fewer hours and do flexible jobs in order to spend more time with their children, and it is highly unlikely that mothers perceive childcare as a burden. Professor Elizabeth Fox-Genovese writes from her research that ‘even highly successful women frequently want to spend much more time with their young children than the sixty-hour weeks required by the corporate fast tracks will permit.’ Having done a thorough study on the extent to which non-discriminatory factors explain the wage gaps, Professor June O’Neill and Professor Dave O’Neill of the City University of New York argue that the gender pay gap arises from women’s choices on ‘the amount of time and energy devoted to her career, as reflected in years of work, experience, utilization of part-time work, and other workplace and job characteristics.’” Ms. Furchtgott-Roth adds, “Childbearing may be the reason for some differences in preferences between men and women, but experimental psychology proves that women’s preferences are different than men’s even regardless of the presence of children. Professor Rachel Corson of the University of Texas at Dallas and Professor Uri Gneezy of the University of California, San Diego conducted a thorough review of experimental studies on behavior and found that women and men have significant differences in preferences when it comes to risk-taking, social preferences, and competition. Lab results reported that women are more risk-averse, less competitive and are more sensitive to subtle social cues than men, leading them to choose professions with less risk-taking, fewer degrees of competition, and careers that are deemed socially appropriate for them. This behavior translates into lower pay and slower advancement within their chosen professions, a phenomenon that is allegedly called the ‘pink ghetto.’ Taking into consideration such evidence, it becomes clear just how simplistic the argument for discrimination theory really is…With all these elements working against the unexplained pay gap, it is simply irrational to argue that it exists because of ‘persistent discrimination.’ It also shows how government intervention targeted towards discrimination will not be effective. However, supporters of the discrimination theory have kept pushing bills like the Pay Check Fairness Act [H.R. 12/S. 182], which have a higher potential of harming women than helping them. For example, in order to escape the heavy guidelines set by the Pay Check Fairness Act, employers may actually find it easier to hire males than females.”
Ilene Lang, president and chief executive officer of Catalyst, also testified about the results of a new Catalyst report, Targeting Inequity: The Gender Gap in U.S. Corporate Leadership.
