Men’s earnings have fallen since 1970s, Census says

The gender pay gap has begun narrowing over the last four decades — and women’s earnings are now closer to men’s. But that is not only because women are doing better.

The trend is also in part because men are earning less. Earnings for men have fallen in the decade since the recession, and are even below levels for much of the 1970s and 1980s.

Men are still paid about $10,000 more on average than women, according to Census Bureau figures released earlier this month, but the gender earnings gap has grown smaller.

From 1973 to 2017, men’s earnings fell by about $3,200, or about 5 percent, in numbers adjusted for inflation. Earnings for Africanamerican men fell even more steeply than those of white men, according to experts.

“We’re talking about a 40year period of people working fulltime who are not doing better than their fathers and grandfathers did, and are basically doing worse,” said Mark Rank, an inequality expert at Washington University in St. Louis.

Census data show that average earnings for men fell again in 2017, the first year of the Trump administration. They fell for this same group in four of the eight years of the Obama administration as well: 2011, 2013, 2014 and 2016.

Women still face enormous barriers in the labor market, including gender discrimination in hiring and pay, as well as sexual harassment. Women’s earnings are still only 81 percent that of men, essentially unchanged from last year, as inflationadjusted earnings fell slightly for both genders, according to the Census.

Since 2010, average earnings have fallen by about $2,000 for men. They have risen by about $500 for women over the same period.

The Census figures did show an increase in median household income, which jumped to an alltime high of $61,372. But that increase appears to have been driven by an addition of workers to the labor force, which drives up overall median income even though it does not mean median earnings rise for those who are working, according to Rank.

Experts disagree about the cause of the decline in men’s earnings, with some pointing to the decline in manufacturing jobs and others citing the long decline of organized labor in America.

In the early 1980s, close to one in every four men was in a union. Now, only about 11 percent of men are in a union, while 10 percent of women are unionized. Several studies have pointed to a link between higher wages and union membership, which allows workers to bargain for higher wages.

“The deterioration of unions has had a rougher effect on men’s incomes because men had been much more a part of organized labor,” said Lawrence Mishel, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a leftleaning thinktank.