Here’s a piece that appeared in the Wonkblog at the Washington Post last week, “Closing the gender wage gap could pull half of working single moms out of poverty.”
My first reaction: bad math.
Some time ago, I had played around with census figures, and learned that, at the lower end of the pay scale, women’s earnings are much closer to men’s than at the top.
Here’s my table:
Women’s pay as % of men’s, 2013
1st decile 0.899
1st quartile 0.880
median 0.821
3rd quartile 0.781
9th decile 0.758
Hence, the finding that the Post touted, that
The country’s number of working single mothers who live in poverty would drop from about 30 percent to 15 percent, researchers estimate, if they earned on average as much as comparably skilled men.
seemed pretty suspect. If low-earning women earned as much as low-earning men, the needle would move some, but it’s not possible for it to make that dramatic a difference unless vast numbers of single moms were just a smidge below the poverty line and only small increases were required to bump them up.
What’s more, the source they site, a link to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, provides no additional information, just the same graph as the WaPo reproduces, with no source data or methodology. So I thought I was at a dead end, until today, in the Chicago Tribune, the same article was reprinted and I saw something I hadn’t seen before:
But jobs more often held by female workers without college degrees (child care, retail, administrative work) tend to pay much less than roles dominated by men with the same level of education (plumbing, electricity, contract work).
If the study’s methodology was indeed to compare pay rates of female-dominated no-college-degree-required jobs to pay rates for male-dominated no-college-degree jobs, well, then, their results are explainable, but meaningless. Plumbers and electricians are skilled trades which require, though not a college degree, a significant degree of training via an apprenticeship. I’m not sure what “contract work” means, but perhaps this is construction work? And, in contrast, retail work requires no specialized skills, child care may only require a class or two in child development, and secretarial work varies greatly in the level of training and experience required. (My employer wants its “admins” to be college educated, but expects them to do more than just typing and pays them accordingly — they, not the actuaries, are responsible for ensuring that everything that goes to a client follows the prescribed format, even including color scheme.)
I’m not even going to address the issue that male-dominated jobs require a lot more physical work, and often are riskier as well. Let’s just file this one, instead, under “Higher Education Bubble” by observing that the study’s author and/or the Post simply treated all non-college-degree jobs as equivalent, without acknowledging the real skill involved in many of these occupations, and then seemingly made the leap to “on average, they should all pay the same.”
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In