GENDER WAGE GAP HARMS WOMEN
“Over your lifetime, you will lose $1.2 million in wages as a female college graduate in comparison to your male graduate peers.”
These words shown on a lecture slide in my 8:30 a.m. political science class jolted me awake. I looked around the classroom, and even face masks couldn’t hide my peers’ similarly dumbfounded reactions.
My professor looked out to the classroom and said, “Y’all look depressed.”
Her observation was correct. In the days after that lecture, the pit in my stomach gradually grew, as did the questions neither I nor my textbooks could answer.
Since that day, I took it upon myself to unearth the truth. According to economist Evelyn Murphy in an article from the National Committee on Pay Equality, over a lifetime (47 years of full-time work), the gender wage gap amounts to a significant loss in wages for women: $700,000 for high school graduates, $1.2 million for college graduates and $2 million for professional school graduates.
I remembered thinking in class, “You’re telling me that as I work to repay college loans, I’ll simultaneously be losing $1.2 million over several decades? How can that be possible?”
New York University sociology professor Paula England has an answer.
England’s research shows systemic discrimination seen through the wage gap is founded on the devaluation of women’s labor. As women enter a sector that becomes increasingly female-dominated, wages decrease and their labor is devalued. Numbers from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics support these findings: In 2021, the median weekly pay for a male janitor was $675 while a female in the same position made $561. Male janitor wages were 20 percent higher. Likewise, male medical assistants made a median of $980 weekly and female medical assistants $668; that’s a 47 percent difference.
Society likes to tell women to reach for the stars, break the glass ceiling and defy expectations. But what’s the point if on the other side of the glass ceiling stand iron bars deterring women’s financial freedom?
This atmosphere of oppression, or “birdcage,” in the words of feminist theorist Marilynn Frye, manifests in systems we least expect like Social Security. I’m a sophomore in college and I haven’t entered the working field yet, but I’m already worrying about what my retirement benefit from Social Security will look like given devaluation and the wage gap. This was an issue I first learned about in my class, The Politics of Race, Class, and Gender. Here, is a quick summary of what I learned:
Eligibility for baseline retirement benefits generally requires 10 years (40 quarters) of gainful employment, with at least $1,300 earned per quarter to count as a credit.
The Social Security calculation emphasizes wages earned during a worker’s 35 highest paid years. This means working for 40 years, Social Security would calculate the highest paid 35 years, ignoring the other five. For those who work only 25 years, Social Security would consider those 25 years and factor in an additional 10 years as zeros.
The final calculation of the benefit is an average, so the more zeros in the equation, the lower the benefit. This is the root of the issue.
Many women within their married years leave the workforce at some point to become stay-at-home mothers, meaning zeros in Social Security.
And there is a new factor in this equation. Many more women took on the title of a stay-at-home mom in 2020 as a result of COVID-19.
According to 2020 research by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis, most fathers had returned to the labor force toward the end of 2020 while mothers remained 2.8 percentage points below their November 2019 participation rate. To put this loss in perspective, this same research noted the decade-long decline in labor force participation among 25- to 54-year-olds after the Great Recession was 2.5 percentage points. However, there are glimmers of hope. In February, state Sen. Monique Limón, D-Goleta, introduced Senate Bill 1162, the Pay Transparency for Pay Equity Act, which would require companies to disclose salary ranges. It expands upon Senate Bill 973, a 2020 law requiring employers of 100 or more workers to submit pay data reports broken down by sex, race and ethnicity to the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing. Pay data is essential to addressing the wage gap.
If you identify as a woman, are dating one or simply interact with one (I’ll answer that for you: You do), gendered oppression is something you should learn and discern — not only as a good human being but as a good friend, sibling or partner. That’s the first step in chipping away at the cage and affirming mothers, daughters, sisters, wives, girlfriends and friends that we’re valued in this society.