{"id":3155,"date":"2013-01-06T19:25:43","date_gmt":"2013-01-06T19:25:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/?p=3155"},"modified":"2013-05-25T18:24:13","modified_gmt":"2013-05-25T18:24:13","slug":"is-removal-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-utilitarian-dream","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/2013\/01\/06\/is-removal-of-the-gender-pay-gap-a-utilitarian-dream\/","title":{"rendered":"Is Removal of the Gender Pay Gap a Utilitarian Dream?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Last month the University of Cambridge published its latest Equal Pay Review<\/a>, something it is now doing biennially (rather than annually) since things don\u2019t change that drastically year on year. As in previous years, if you look at the average or median salaries for men and women there are substantial differences, reflecting the tendency towards grade segregation. However what, to my mind, matters far more are the differences within the grades; here the gap is much smaller \u2013 although certainly not negligible. Nevertheless, even our local newspaper couldn\u2019t make a particularly horrendous story<\/a> out of the statistics.<\/p>\n

We can and must do better, but actions in place are bringing the gender gap down year on year; we have clear action plans and this year introduced a couple of new recommendations which we hope will continue to improve the situation. These include a programme of support for returners (piloted this year in the Physical Sciences) and a specific charge upon Boards of Electors and Appointments Committees to ensure that any pool of candidates is appropriately diverse, through new guidelines\/recommendations. Time will tell if this makes a substantial difference, but nothing is going to change things overnight, albeit the direction of travel is right.<\/p>\n

However, amongst my Christmas reading I came across a couple of papers in the social sciences which highlight issues indicating it may be unable to achieve parity by institutional actions alone. The first of these papers involved Cambridge and Canadian researchers looking in more detail at gender segregation in 30 industrialised nations around the world (the full paper can be found here<\/a> and a brief analysis on the University of Cambridge website here<\/a>).<\/p>\n

What this paper shows is that grade segregation in itself is by no means the whole story about the gender pay gap.\u00a0 For instance, Scandinavian countries, which rank very highly on measures of gender equality, actually have very substantial job segregation and any such segregation implicitly indicates that occupational choice for both men and women is constrained to some degree. \u00a0The findings demonstrate that an egalitarian society is not necessarily incompatible with job segregation. A corollary of the findings in the paper is that the greater the degree of segregation \u2013 implying that women are in less direct competition with men \u2013 the greater the degree of seniority women on average reach and so the gender pay gap may actually be reduced by the segregation. \u00a0However I am not entirely convinced that this amounts to a healthy situation for anyone. \u00a0The authors also point out that where there is substantial segregation, the women typically occupy the more \u2018attractive\u2019 roles such as non-manual ones with a concomitant reduced risk of injury and death, again demonstrating that segregation in itself is not all negative.<\/p>\n

The second paper is even more concerning to those who want strict parity, because it suggests the substantial role societal expectations play on both men and women, in colouring how women progress. This paper<\/a> also has a \u2018lay summary\u2019, this time in the Economist<\/a>. Carried out in the US, the study looked at the relative earning power within couples. Where the woman in a couple was likely to earn more than the man (based on demographics) she was more<\/span> likely to leave the workforce completely or work at a lower level than might have been anticipated in order, it would seem, to fulfil the cultural norm that the man earns more than the woman. \u00a0The Economist states dryly \u2018That\u2019s bad news for the Economy.\u2019<\/p>\n

The findings also suggested that where couples did exhibit \u2018role reversal\u2019 (in other words the woman was earning more than the man), they were likely to state that their relationship was less happy than a \u2018normal\u2019 couple or that it actually ended in divorce. It didn\u2019t seem to matter whether the woman earned just a little more than her husband or a lot, the outcome was the same. This obviously suggests that the purely utilitarian, rational arguments (in other words those which economists traditionally apply) fail because of our psychological responses and internal beliefs. As part of a role reversal couple myself, whose marriage has so far happily survived for 36 years, I can attest that role reversal is undoubtedly societally unpleasant for the male, but also we are \u2018proof\u2019 that it doesn\u2019t inevitably lead to rapid divorce!<\/p>\n

At the risk of using a sociological term inappropriately, this appears to me to be another form of \u2018choicism<\/a>\u2019, where women will take a course of action \u2013 in this case restricting their salary and career aspirations \u2013 in order to comply with a cultural norm, whether they consciously know they are doing this or not. This may indeed contribute to the decisions of some of the women who become the \u2018stay-at-home-mom\u2019, justifying their decisions to themselves and the world that this is what they really want to do, a topic I wrote about at more length before<\/a>.<\/p>\n

I fear that these established norms are going to be very hard to eradicate, which in turn implies \u2013 if this study is applicable around the world \u2013 that the gender pay gap is not going to disappear in a hurry. It may be that institutions such as my own university can only go so far in successfully eradicating pay differentials by the introduction of new policies, if some women are actually self-selecting not to aim as high as their intrinsic skills might support and suggest. No doubt some readers will feel in essence let the women do what they want, why make an issue out of it, but if, deep down, this is not the choice that women would make if society were different \u00a0we should<\/span> make an issue out of it. It is perhaps unsurprising that the US study shows that where a woman\u2019s mother-in-law had herself worked, women were more likely to be the higher earning member of a couple. So maybe in another generation or two, when more and more mother-in-laws have themselves worked, these cultural norms will be modified. And perhaps only then will the gender pay gap really disappear. Not a comforting thought.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Last month the University of Cambridge published its latest Equal Pay Review, something it is now doing biennially (rather than annually) since things don\u2019t change that drastically year on year. As in previous years, if you look at the average … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":18,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4],"tags":[616,79,617],"class_list":["post-3155","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-equality","tag-choicism","tag-equal-pay","tag-job-segregation"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/18"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3155"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3155\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3155"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3155"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occamstypewriter.org\/athenedonald\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3155"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}