Transcript Lesson 1: Sociological Constructs and Theories

Lesson 7: Work and
the Economy
Robert Wonser
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The Ideal Worker
Who is the ideal worker?
 Unencumbered by familial duties, never
leaves work early for the sick child, driven
and committed to the job, unlikely to leave
work to bear and raise children
 In short, he is not a mother.
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Gender Gap in Wages
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The pay gap has barely budged in a decade.
 In 2013, among full-time, year-round workers,
women were paid 78 percent of what men were
paid.
Women in every state experience the pay gap, but
some states are worse than others.
 The best place in the United States for pay equity is
Washington, D.C., where women were paid 91
percent of what men were paid in 2013. At the
other end of the spectrum is Louisiana, the worst
state in the country for pay equity, where women
5 were paid just 66 percent of what men were paid.
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The pay gap is worse for women of color.
 The gender pay gap affects all women, but for women of
color the pay shortfall is worse.
 Asian American women’s salaries show the smallest
gender pay gap, at 90 percent of white men’s earnings.
 Hispanic women’s salaries show the largest gap, at 54
percent of white men’s earnings.
 White men are used as a benchmark because they make
up the largest demographic group in the labor force.
Women face a pay gap in nearly every occupation.
 From elementary and middle school teachers to computer
programmers, women are paid less than men in femaledominated, gender-balanced, and male-dominated
occupations.

The pay gap grows with age.
 Women
typically earn about 90 percent
of what men are paid until they hit 35.
 After that median earnings for women
are typically 75–80 percent of what men
are paid.
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While more education is an effective tool for increasing
earnings, it is not an effective tool against the gender pay
gap.
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At every level of academic achievement, women’s median
earnings are less than men’s earnings, and in some cases, the
gender pay gap is larger at higher levels of education. While
education helps everyone, black and Hispanic women earn
less than their white and Asian peers do, even when they
have the same educational credentials.
The pay gap also exists among women without children.
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AAUW’s Graduating to a Pay Gap found that among full-time
workers one year after college graduation — nearly all of
whom were childless — women were paid just 82 percent of
what their male counterparts were paid.
Women earn less when they get the same education.
The first year out of college is the prime time for women
and men to make comparable earnings: they are young,
childless, and have just as much inexperience as their male
counterparts.
But women make less than men in their first year after
graduating, even when factors such as schools, grades,
majors, and others are taken into account.
That educational gap will follow them no matter how much
more higher learning they invest in: at any educational
level, a man with the same degree earns more, on
average.
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Discrimination is a Major
Contributor to the Gender Pay Gap
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Women earn less thanks to discrimination.
It’s fair to say that not all of the gap is due to
discrimination.
Certainly women are clustered in low-wage work —
they are about two-thirds of the country’s minimum
wage workers — and often have to interrupt their
careers to care for family members, all of which
impacts their earnings.
But even when various factors like these are taken
into account, the entire gap doesn’t disappear.
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When the Government Accountability Office last
looked at the gap, it couldn’t explain 20 percent
of the disparity in pay between men and women,
something that could be at least in part caused
by discrimination.
A more recent study by economists Francine Blau
and Lawrence Kahn found that while experience,
occupation, and industry explain much of the
gap, there is still more than 40 percent of it that
remains unexplained, the part that could be
chalked up to discrimination.
Gender Expectations in the
Economy
Women are
about twice as
likely as men to
say they had
been
discriminated
against at work
because of their
gender (18% vs.
10%)
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Male and Female Median Earnings,
1959–2008
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Median Lifetime Earnings by
Educational Attainment, 2009 dollars
All
people,
not
broken
down
by
gender
or race
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, Median Lifetime Earnings
Educational Pay Gap by Gender
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Gender Gap with Typical Timeout
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How to Close the Gender Wage
Gap
For companies:
 While some CEOs have been vocal in
their commitment to paying workers fairly,
American women can’t wait for trickledown change. AAUW urges companies to
conduct salary audits to proactively
monitor and address gender-based pay
differences. It’s just good business.

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Closing the Gender Wage Gap
For individuals:
 Women can learn strategies to better
negotiate for fair pay.
 Improved negotiation skills can help close
the pay gap.
 Real reform must be institutional though,
not individual.
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The Glass Ceiling
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Besides having different pay, women and men
have different ranks in corporate and government
jobs.
The higher you go, the fewer women and
minorities you will see.
This “glass ceiling” confronting women and racial
ethnic workers is a global phenomenon.
On the other hand, men in women-dominated
professions often “ride the glass escalator” (get
preferential treatment) as tokens
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There are more men on corporate boards named
John, Robert, William or James than there are women
on boards altogether
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Sex, Gender, and Life Chances
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This has led to a situation called the
feminization of poverty, which is the
economic trend showing that women are
more likely than men to live in poverty, due
in part to:
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the gendered gap in wages,
the higher proportion of single mothers
compared to single fathers,
and the increasing cost of childcare.
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Emotional Labor
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Women’s and men’s work differs in the emotional
labor involved in their jobs.
In this largely invisible aspect of many jobs (flight
attendant, wait-staff, secretary, teacher, sales
clerk, and health care worker), employees must
show such feelings as attentiveness and caring
and suppress feelings such as boredom or
irritation.
Approximately one-third of U.S. workers, most of
them women, work in jobs that require them to
smile, nod, greet, pay attention to, and thank
customers.
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Motherhood Penalty

Generally, motherhood has a negative
effect on women’s wages
two recent studies find that employed
mothers in the United States suffer a
per-child wage penalty of approximately
5%, on average after controlling for the
usual human capital and occupational
factors that affect wages (Budig and
England 2001; Anderson, Binder, and
Krause 2003)
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According to Correll et. al, mothers are penalized on:
 perceived competence
 recommended starting salary.
Men were not penalized for, and sometimes benefited
from, being a parent.
The study showed that actual employers discriminate
against mothers, but not against fathers.
The researchers sent out fake resumes for a childless
woman and a mom, both equally qualified.
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The parent-resumes listed “Parent-Teacher Association
coordinator” under the heading “other relevant activities,” as a
way to flag that the candidates were parents.
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They found that the moms were viewed less
favorably than the non-moms and were substantially
less likely to be hired.
What’s more, mothers were offered $11,000 a year
less in compensation, on average, than a childless
job candidate with the same qualifications.
The study’s authors also sent fake resumes to more
than 600 jobs over an 18-month span.
The women with no kids received more than twice as
many interview requests than moms with equal skills.
 Fathers and childless men, meanwhile, received
the same amount of callbacks.
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Differences in Disadvantage: Variation in the
Motherhood Penalty across White Women’s
Earnings Distribution
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Budig and Hodges sought to understand “whether
motherhood penalizes all women equally, and
whether the mechanisms generating the penalty
operate in the same way for all women.”
Conclusion #1: “There is a penalty for motherhood
across the earnings distribution that persists after
inclusion of all variables.”
Conclusion #2: “Women with the least to lose are
proportionately losing the most – the motherhood
penalty is significantly larger among women in the
lowest .05 and .10 quantiles of the earnings
distribution.”
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Conclusion #3: “Reduced hours and weeks of
employment among the lowest earners account
for a significant portion of this penalty.”
Conclusion #4: “Lost experience accounts for
almost half or more of the penalty among
women in the upper 50 percent of the wage
distribution.”
Conclusion #5: “Job characteristics account for
more than 30 percent of the motherhood
penalties at the lowest two quantiles but do little
to explain the penalty for the majority of
earners.”
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Breastfeeding
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Experts (and some feminists) agree: Breast was
‘best’ for babies.
Poor, less educated and nonprofessional
working women are less likely to breastfeed
compared to non-poor, more educated,
professional or non-employed women.
 Why
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might this be?
Literature shows consensus: working negatively
related to breastfeeding duration, although
working has less of an impact on whether a
woman initiates breastfeeding.
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More on Breastfeeding
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Until passage of the “reasonable break time”
provision of the Patient Protection and
Affordable Care Act of 2010, there were no
federal legal protections for mothers to
breastfeed at work.
Even still, mothers who do often face:
Unsupportive co-workers, lack of a private
place to express milk, or no place to store
expressed milk
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Breastfeeding Mothers
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Research indicates that:
 Mothers find it difficult to breastfeed while
engaging in paid work
 Women feel pressure to breastfeed
 Many women who face work-family conflicts opt
out of work when they have the financial ability to
do so
 Short-term breast-feeders and formula-feeders
face similar earning penalties
 Long-term breast-feeders (those who comply with
guidelines) experience a steeper income decline
over the first 5 years of their children’s lives.
 Breastfeeding, in short, is not free
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Women CEOs in the Fortune 500
The 2012 ranking of
the 500 largest
corporations in the
United States includes
a record 18 firms
helmed by female
CEOs, up from 12
companies in 2011.
Fortune 500 in 2009:
15 firms run by female
executives. Fortune
500 female CEOs in
2002 and 2003: 7.
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More female bosses mean more
profits

Companies whose boards are made up of
at least a third women make 42 % more.
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Occupational
Sex
Segregation
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Gender Discrimination at Wal-Mart
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Wal-Mart
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Unpaid Work Through the Life
Cycle
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Women do more housework than men even when
comparing employed women to non-employed men.
In the household, men and women do different kinds of
tasks. Women are more likely to do cooking, washing
dishes, indoor cleanup, laundry, shopping, and childcare.
Men are more likely to do repairs and maintenance,
gardening, and pet care.
The unpaid work of women is estimated be worth about
$138,095 a year for stay-at-home mothers and $85,876
annually for employed women.
Despite the obvious importance of this unpaid work, it is
often invisible.
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Children and Housework
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Research projects on children’s time use find
that boys do 43 to 46 minutes of housework for
every hour that girls do.
When asked to list the chores they do, girls list
42 percent more chores than boys.
Girls are as likely as boys to participate in
outside chores and more likely to clean their
own rooms, help prepare meals, and care for
sibling and pets; the only thing boys report doing
more often than girls is basic housecleaning.
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Another study by the children’s
magazine Highlights confirmed
the finding: 73 percent of their
girl readers reported being
assigned routine chores,
compared to 65 percent of
their boy readers.
Girls spend more time on
chores than they do playing;
the opposite is true for boys.
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Gender Gap in Pay Starts Early
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Not only are girls more likely to be asked to help out
around the house, they are less likely to get paid.
The Michigan study found that boys are 15 percent
more likely than girls to get an allowance for the
chores they do.
And when they do get paid, they get a lower wage
than their brothers. Male babysitters get paid $0.50
more an hour than females. Girls do 35 percent
more work than boys, but bring home only $0.73
cents on boys’ dollar.
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What’s Behind the Way People
Divide up Housework?
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Three theories try to explain the division of
labor in housework:
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(1) Socialization theorists say boys and girls
learn lessons about what they should feel
and do when faced with a dirty kitchen.
 From
this point of view the solution is to teach
boys and girls the skills they will need to take
care of households and the people in them.
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What’s Behind the Way People
Divide up Housework?
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(2) Rational choice theorists argue that
women and men rationally divide the
housework based on which partner
knows how to do the work and which
partner brings home a larger paycheck.
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What’s Behind the Way People
Divide up Housework?

(3) Feminists point out, however, that the way
housework is divided cannot represent two
people of equal status negotiating rationally
because women do not have as much power as
men.
 Housework is a “gender factory”.
 When women do more housework
and when women
and men do different kinds of housework, they are
reproducing gender.
 Feminists also assert that we need to pay attention to
the connection between paid work and unpaid work.
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