Blame the gender tax – not women – for unequal pay

It’s January 2013, and Canada’s gender wage gap stands at 19 per cent. This means that women are paid on average 81 cents to every $1 earned by men. Looked at another way, it also means that men will be paid straight through to the end of December this year, while women will start working for free from mid-October on. Call it the gender tax, a variation on the point at which most workers start paying themselves after paying off their share of income tax.

Discrimination against women in the workplace is an expensive proposition — globally, nationally and for women. In the Asia-Pacific region, bias against women was estimated several years ago to cost the economies of the region upwards of $47 billion annually. In the European Union, a Goldman Sachs researcher showed five years ago that the economy would grow by as much as 13 per cent if women could join the workplace in the same numbers as men.

At the time, there was a lot of surprise at the extent of the damage. But somehow it’s always easier to blame women themselves for not overcoming obstacles like lack of childcare and discriminatory pay on their own. This general air of reproach is accompanied by a constant flow of research pointing out that if only women would play the game the way it was set up to be played — by men — they would do fine.

An article in the London Daily Telegraph last month was headlined “Pay gap is fault of women, who do not ask for a raise without being told to.” If the headline made women seem pretty dim, the piece itself went on to say that women would bargain only when the rules explicitly stated salaries were negotiable, and then they negotiated as hard as any man. It is quite possible that women were just being realistic, having read all sorts of other research on assertive women and how they’re not appreciated in the office.

But if there’s some ambiguity around the question of bargaining, there is little around picking the wrong field. That’s always held against women. The theory is that if they don’t follow men into the money fields, they can’t blame anyone else if their pay lags. And it’s true, they don’t pick traditionally well-paid professions in any numbers. In Canada in 2010, women accounted for only 18 per cent of graduates in computer sciences and 24 per cent in engineering, according to research by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development.

But as attractive as that might seem as an explanation for a persistent and substantial pay gap, it’s not the most compelling one. A revealing study was published last fall in the U.S. Edited by Toronto-born Shirley Tilghman, until last month president of Princeton University, the study carried out a randomized double-blind study in which science faculty from top research universities were asked to rate applications from students applying for the job of laboratory manager. The applications, which were randomly assigned to professors, were identical in every respect except for the job seeker’s first name, John or Jennifer.

The scientists rated the “female” applicants — who were in reality identical to the “male” applicants — as being less competent, less worthy of hiring and mentoring and worth less money. Men were offered as much as $50,000 for the position and women as little as $15,000. The average difference was around $4,000 less a year for a woman, roughly $26,000, as opposed to $30,000 for the men.

This was not a matter of men preferring men. Female faculty members, the study showed, were just as likely as male scientists to choose the male student. The researchers wrote, “The fact that faculty members’ bias was independent of their gender, scientific discipline, age, and tenure status suggests that it is likely unintentional, generated from widespread cultural stereotypes rather than a conscious intention to harm women.” The faculty members even reported liking the “female” applicants more than the male, but they still went on to undervalue their worth.

Another very important issue centred on what kind of CV was put forward. The CVs were deliberately designed to reflect the norm among the majority of aspiring scientists. Their accomplishments were solid, but not “irrefutably excellent.” This meant the applicants were representative of exactly the kind of student likely to be motivated — or discouraged — by how their professors viewed them. Women, facing less encouragement, no mentoring and fewer rewards than men who are in no way superior to them, could easily decide to try another more welcoming field, said researchers.

And no one could blame them.