More fun with the BLS.gov data — in this case, looking at the pay changes by decile and quartile, for men and women. Unfortunately, the data publicly available on the site was limited to the years 2000 – 2013 for the top and bottom decile and the 1st and 3rd quartile — presumably the deeper historical data is available offline if I were an economist by profession rather than an armchair economist. But it’s still instructive to look at the data set that is available:
Percent change in income, 2000 – 2013
| All | Men | Women | Women’s pay as % of men’s, 2013 | |
| 1st decile | 0.979 | 0.956 | 0.996 | 0.899 |
| 1st quartile | 0.994 | 0.971 | 1.056 | 0.880 |
| median | 0.996 | 0.992 | 1.059 | 0.821 |
| 3rd quartile | 1.067 | 1.058 | 1.110 | 0.781 |
| 9th decile | 1.108 | 1.074 | 1.148 | 0.758 |
(I’ve copied this over from my calculations in excel, and the formatting was lost in the process, but there are few enough numbers that this is still easy to read.)
Note that the splits in men and women show the pay of women in the top decile of women, for instance, not the top earners overall. And that women at all earnings levels stayed steady or increased, where the same is not true for men. It’s also interesting to see that at the very lowest earnings levels, women’s earnings are much closer to men’s.
Now, I’d really love to see this over several decades, and perhaps if I look a bit harder later, I might be able to find studies that provide this data.
Margaret Thatcher had a famous quote (at least as shown in The Iron Lady) in which she railed that her opponents, in spewing about “income inequality,” would rather that everyone be poor, than that everyone’s standard of living improve, but some not as much as others. And we’ve got our notion of “a rising tide lifts all boats” — but since the year 2000, this hasn’t been the case. Has this been true over a longer period? Inquiring minds want to know.
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