Gender gap in wages may be over-stated
It’s assumed that men generally do well in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics, collectively known as STEM.
In light of this, high-profile efforts are usually aimed at encouraging more girls and women to move into STEM.
But there’s a big kicker to men’s success in STEM: Young males aren’t doing at all well in other fields.
New Canadian research says high-school girls are, on average, doing as well as boys in STEM — plus they’re outperforming boys in almost every other sphere.
A large study by David Card and Abigail Payne has found that girls and boys in Grade 12 end up roughly equally prepared to go into science, technology, engineering and mathematics programs.
But girls also excel in the languages, humanities and other subjects, while boys do not.
“The conventional wisdom is that the gender gap is about women and the forces — discrimination, sexism, parenting, aptitudes and choices — that make women less likely to study in STEM fields,” says Alex Tabarrok, a high-profile Canadian-American economist who has reviewed the study.
But the real reason more males complete STEM degrees, says Tabarrok, of George Mason University, is that, to put it too bluntly, “the only men who are good enough to get into university are men who are good at STEM. Women are good enough to go into non-STEM and STEM fields.”
The findings of Card, of the University of California, Berkeley, and Payne, of McMaster University, are consistent with wider concerns about the under-representation of men in higher education and in many sectors of the labour market, says Tabarrok.
“If we accept the results (of Card and Payne), the genderindustry gap is focused on the wrong thing. The real gender gap is that men are having trouble competing everywhere except in STEM,” Tabarrok says.
The economist’s counterintuitive analysis of males and STEM comes on the heels of other recent gender surprises in education and the workplace.
One powerful decades-old gender narrative is finally undergoing closer scrutiny in North America and Europe: The one that says women earn about 80 cents for every dollar made by men. It turns out the average gap in pay between men and women who do the same jobs is tiny or non-existent, according to the business consulting firm, Korn Ferry.
A Korn Ferry study, which obtained data on 20 million employees in 100 nations, explored whether women should be seething at the thought their male friend in the same office makes more money because he’s a guy.
“After all, the headlines proclaim there’s a gender pay gap where women typically earn 20 per cent less than men, right? Not exactly,” writes Peggy Hazard, lead researcher.
Korn Ferry found, in fact, the wage gap is “remarkably small” in France (2.7 per cent), Australia (1.4 per cent) and Britain (0.8 per cent) for like positions.
Wage differences across nations were narrow in each of the 16 job levels analyzed in the database created by Korn Ferry, which didn’t release information on Canada.
The only significant gender gap Korn Ferry found was in salaries for the highestlevel positions — CEOs, for instance.
The Korn Ferry results tie into my experience in journalism, because since the 1980s I have almost always reported directly, or indirectly, to female bosses, including an editor in chief.
My Vancouver Sun senior editors — Ann Barling, Shelley Fralic, Daphne GrayGrant, Patricia Graham, Bev Wake, Adrienne Tanner and Valerie Casselton — all earned larger salaries than me. Which is only fitting, since they were joining with males in taking on the headaches of managing staff.
All of which goes to suggest a key reason that labour statistics often show women on average earning roughly 20 per cent less than men is not necessarily sexism — it’s that men and women make different choices about working outside the home. Western labour markets, for instance, are dramatically “segregated” — with men tending to work in the private sector and women in the public.
Statistics Canada’s labour surveys reveal women are four times more likely than men to be employed in the health and social assistance sector — 1.6 million women compared with only 349,000 men.
Women are also more than twice as likely as men to have jobs in the taxpayersupported realm of education — 876,000 females compared with 424,000 males.
These female-majority jobs are also often unionized, with such employees generally enjoying superior benefits and pensions, things that are not always measured as wages.
Meanwhile, Canadian men are far more likely than women to work in the private sector, in, to put it broadly, outdoor jobs.
They’re seven times more likely than women to be in construction, four times more likely to labour in mines and oilfields. And men are a whopping 14 times more inclined to make a living driving trucks and plying various trades.
In addition, men are so far the majority in STEM jobs.
But how do you compare the monetary value of work across such diverse fields?
It is not easy to juxtapose a teacher of Grade 4 children to someone who prepares algorithms for Amazon or a ministry of finance.
How do we equate providing personal care to a senior or working in an art gallery with toiling 1,000 metres underground in a nickel-cadmium mine?
Rather than arguing about a gender wage gap that doesn’t exist among rank-and-file workers who perform the same jobs, a better way forward is to encourage more women and men to go into fields that aren’t traditional for their gender.
That’s happening big time when it comes to luring more girls and women into STEM. It’s also happening with elevating women into the highest-paying executive jobs.
Korn Ferry is among many bent on advancing more women into Fortune 500 boardrooms, including by advocating changes in women’s career choices and child-raising preferences and combating the lack of universal daycare and executive mentorship.
But it’s rare to hear of programs aimed at understanding why many young men are under-performing, and now account for only 40 per cent of university undergraduates.
Efforts to get more males into fields that have become predominantly female are almost unheard of. Would it not be fair to try to shift more males into the humanities, nursing, office administration, psychology and other femalemajority fields?
It seems particularly important to encourage more males to become teachers of kindergarten to Grade 12 classes, since public education is where the problems are now starting for too many underachieving and insecure boys.