General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 49 Years After Kennedy Signed The Equal Pay Act, Women Still Earn 77 Cents To A Man’s Dollar [View all]HiPointDem
(20,729 posts)female earnings.
she concludes that american women probably experience *less* discrimination than women in comparable countries, but since income is more unequally divided in the us (& more women than men are found in lower-income jobs in every country), the male-female wage gap is wider in the us than in those countries -- an artifact of the greater inequality in the distribution of income in the us.
"We conclude that, compared to women in the other
countries, U.S. women are better qualified relative to men and/or encounter less discrimination.
The mediocre ranking of the U.S. gender ratio in the face of these favorable gender specific
factors is a consequence of the higher level of wage inequality in the United States, which places
a much higher penalty on being below average in the wage distribution."
she also says:
"In addition, at least some of the remaining pay gap is surely tied to the gender division of
labor in the home, both directly through its effect on women's labor force attachment and
indirectly through its impact on the strength of statistical discrimination against women."
which is what the people critiquing the "77%" and "23%" figures have been saying as well, to boos & hisses from the supposed feminists.
maybe the critiquers know the research better than you think.
here's another of doctor blau's papers (1988): she's talking about the narrowing of the gender gap among low & middle wage workers that occurred 1979-1988:
Further decompositions of the wage effects of changes in characteristics
over the period for each skill group separately by sex (results not shown)
show that the reduction in gender differences in industry and union status
at the bottom and middle was largely due to a deterioration in men's
status rather than an improvement in women's status.
In the low-skill group, the largest effect was for deunionization, which lowered men's
wages by 0.051 log points compared to a drop of 0.029 points for women.
Men's industrial distribution also changed adversely, lowering their wages
by 0.028 log points, while women's changed by less, decreasing their
wages by 0.016.
Trends were similar in the middle-skill group, although
there deunionization played the major role, lowering men's wages by
0.046 log points compared to a decrease of only 0.019 log points for
women.
In contrast, men at the top actually upgraded their industrial
distribution, raising their wages by 0.023 log points, while changes in
women's industrial distribution raised their wages only very slightly
(0.004 log points).
http://aysps.gsu.edu/isp/files/ISP_SUMMER_SCHOOL_2008_CURRIE_Swimming_Upstream.pdf
"industrial distribution" refers to whether people tend to be broadly spread out among various industries (e.g. education, hospitality, finance, manufacturing, etc.) or concentrated in only a few (often low wage).