The Myth of the Wage Gap

Tenure and experience are two of the most important factors in explaining the wage gap. According to the U.S. Bureau of the Census, women on average spend a far higher percentage of their working years out of the workforce than men. As demonstrated by economists such as Francine Blau, Andrea Beller, David Macpherson and Barry Hirsch, this means that upon returning to the workplace, women will not earn as much as their male or female counterparts who have more uninterrupted experience.

There are reasonable explanations for the differences in average wages between men and women. First, in the 1960s and 1970s women received fewer undergraduate, graduate, and professional degrees than men. It was only in 1982 that women began to earn more than half of B.A. and M.A. degrees, as they continue to do today. In 1970 women earned about 5 percent of all law and business degrees awarded, compared with about 40 percent today. These 1970 graduates are now highly paid professionals at the peak of their earning potential, and many more of them are men than women.

Second, many women still choose to major in specialties which pay less. Women get more degrees in public administration and communications and fewer degrees in math and engineering.

Third, many women choose jobs that enable them to better combine work and family, and these pay less than those with rigid or extensive hours. Even in higher-paying professions such as medicine, many women choose to go into pediatrics, psychiatry, and family practice, all lower-paying fields than surgery, which is more demanding in terms of hours.

Many studies link increased numbers of children with decreased earnings. Professor Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University compared the gap in wages between men and women with the same education for two groups, mothers and women without children. She found that in 1991, women without children made 95 percent of men's wages, but mothers made 75 percent of men's wages. The difference can be explained by choices of occupations and hours worked, two variables which were not included in her study.

Naturally, there are different explanations for these data. One is that children take time away from women's careers, both in terms of time out of the workforce to bear the children and in terms of time put into work effort afterwards.

A second explanation is that women who qualify for high-paying jobs--who major in business or math, or who go to the trouble of getting professional training, for example--quite naturally choose to work more. With a high-paying career, it is more tempting to delay having children, or have fewer of them, or none at all.

Of course, many people would say that there is a third explanation: employers discriminate against married women. So wives are paid less for the same work or are forced into positions of low pay. But data show that employers do not pay unmarried women less: why should the employer care if a woman is married? If employers were against marriage, they would pay married men less. But data show that married men are paid more than unmarried men.