Enduring Bonds: Inequality, Marriage, Parenting, and Everything Else that Makes Families Great and Terrible by Philip N. Cohen

Author:Philip N. Cohen
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520292383
Publisher: University of California Press

2. THE GENDER GAP GETS IT FROM ALL SIDES

The “gender gap” is a regular feature of public debate over gender inequality. This hardworking statistic is as often abused and attacked by antifeminists as it is misused and misunderstood by those sympathetic to feminism. But it is good for one thing: information.

The statistic is released each year with the US Census Bureau’s income and poverty report. The Current Population Survey (CPS) reports annual incomes from 2015: the median earnings of full-time, year-round working women ($40,742) was 80 percent of men’s ($51,212).10 That is the source of (accurate, at the time) statements such as Barack Obama’s “Women still earn only 79 cents to every dollar that men make.”11

This statistic has the undeniable advantage of being relatively easy to calculate and comparable over time, so we can use it to assess one trend in gender inequality. The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), for example, informs us that “if change continues at the same slow pace as it has done for the past 50 years, it will take 44 years—or until 2059—for women to finally reach pay parity.”12 The trend that forms the basis for that prediction is shown in figure 28.

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