Dads for Daughters by Michelle Travis

Author:Michelle Travis [Travis, Michelle]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781642501339
Publisher: Mango Media
Published: 2019-12-08T00:20:23+00:00

Chapter 9

Drinking the Daughter Water

The gender pay gap in the US is stunningly large and painfully persistent. For full-time employees, women earn an average of eighty cents for every dollar earned by similarly-educated men doing similar work. The gap is even larger for women of color, with African American women earning sixty-two cents and Latinas earning fifty-three cents for every dollar earned by men. The overall gender wage gap has hardly changed in the last fifteen years. At the current rate of progress, most working women will never experience wage equality during their lifetime.

The wage gap exists even in the gig economy, which supposedly removes gender bias through online platforms. A study of over a million Uber drivers found that the hourly earnings of male drivers exceed female drivers by seven percent. In other non-traditional work relationships, the numbers are even worse. Among independent contractors, men earn nearly twenty-two percent more than women. Among the self-employed, men out-earn women by twenty percent. Even among temp workers, the gender wage gap is fifteen percent.

If we throw parenthood into the equation, the gender gap becomes a chasm. Among full-time, year-round workers, moms make an average of seventy-one cents for every dollar earned by dads. This is the result of both a “motherhood penalty” and a “fatherhood bonus.” When women become moms, their incomes decrease, but when men become dads, their salaries actually go up. This differential treatment can’t be explained by real performance differences. Pay gaps between moms and dads exist even after controlling for qualifications, experience, education, types of jobs, and number of hours worked. Over time, the gap really adds up. The average working mom misses out on $16,000 each year, with an average lifetime loss of over $400,000.

While the parenthood wage gap crosses education levels, ages, races, locations, and occupations, that doesn’t mean it affects all women equally. The gap is wider for moms of color, and it’s most extreme for women who can least afford the loss. Men with the highest incomes get the biggest pay increases when they become dads, while women with the lowest incomes face the biggest pay losses when they become moms. White men receive the highest fatherhood bonuses, while women of color face the largest motherhood penalties. Perhaps most disturbing is that while the overall gender wage gap is decreasing—although at a glacial pace—the gap between moms and dads is growing.

All of this depressing news exists despite the fact that gender pay discrimination has been illegal for most workers since Congress enacted the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. But lawsuits are an expensive and inefficient way to solve the problem. Many women don’t even know that their male colleagues are getting paid more for doing the same job because many employers keep their pay data a tightly-held secret.

The gender pay gap has also persisted in part due to the insidious myth that women are responsible for their own low pay because they don’t negotiate as well as men.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.