Gender & Sexuality

February 6, 2014

CCF Civil Rights Symposium: Dilemmas Facing High-Achieving Career Women

By Joan C. Williams
University of California, Hastings College of the Law

Fifty years after discrimination on the basis of sex was outlawed, women have made tremendous progress moving into high-level careers, but the glass ceiling still exists, only it rests on different support mechanisms than the past.

Prior to 1964, newspapers listed men’s and women’s jobs separately, and it was legal to exclude women from high-paying jobs, promotions, and pay raises. Since then, women have increased their representation in high-level jobs, yet relatively few women make it to the very top. Women comprise only 15 percent of law firm equity partners and 23 percent of full professors. At the current rate of hiring, it would take 278 years for equal numbers of men and women to be CEOs.

While outright discrimination is illegal, office politics are still shaped by subtle biases, forcing women to be more accomplished—and savvier—than men to survive and thrive in high-level jobs. A new collection of interviews published last month with highly successful women in business, science and law confirm the large body of research suggesting that getting ahead involves more than “leaning in.” It requires women to navigate four distinct patterns of bias.

Prove-It-Again! The default image of a hard-driving banker, litigator or engineer is of a man. To be rated as equally capable, women need to show more evidence of competence than men. Nearly two-thirds of the 127 female leaders we interviewed reported seeing this pattern, with men hired on their “potential” and women required to have a much more extensive track record.
The Tightrope. Women in high status jobs can be penalized either for being too feminine or too masculine. Even in powerful and responsible positions, women reported feeling pressure to take notes, bake cupcakes, and fill helpmeet roles (e.g. servicing other partners’ clients instead of developing their own). When they engaged in such activities, this not only took up valuable time. They also undercut their credibility. Yet women who refused were often regarded as hostile or were seen as “not team players.” This pattern was reported more than any other—nearly all of those interviewed experienced it.
The Maternal Wall. Motherhood triggers the strongest form of gender bias, with both supervisors and co-workers assuming that women’s commitment and productivity falls off when they become mothers. Said one lawyer, “I traveled all the time, I was in the court all the time. [But] I missed one meeting because I had to take my child to the emergency room, and that kept getting highlighted in my evaluations…year after year.”
Tug of War Loyalty Conflicts. Some observers deny that these problems are real issues of gender discrimination since female business leaders may be even tougher on their own sex than their male colleagues. This is often attributed to the personality problems of “Queen Bees.” But new studies and our interviews show that tugs of war originate in workplaces where aligning with men against other women represents the best – and sometimes the only – chance for one individual woman to move up. Here are some of the ways this works:
- Zero Sum Tugs of War. When women receive the message that there’s room for only one woman at the top, this breeds a destructive competition where some women target other women to ensure that they receive the one “woman’s” position.
- Pass-It-Along Tugs of War. Some women who have made sacrifices to prove themselves resent the idea that other women may not have to work as hard. “I’m going 900 mph, and if you can’t keep up with me, the hell with you,” remarked one highly accomplished woman, describing her harsh judgment of women who could not solve the prove-it-again problem by continuously exceeding expectations.
- Tightrope Tugs of War. Women who embrace their feminine side often criticize women who fit in by being “one of the boys.” But other colleagues sometimes feel that women who emphasize their femininity are perpetuating stereotypes that should be challenged. These differences often fuel conflict among women.

Our research included 71 interviews with women of color, and their answers revealed some of the ways the experience of gender bias differs by race.

Some black women interviewed reported they could not afford to make a single mistake, a fear validated by a lab study documenting that black women are penalized more harshly for failure than are white women, white men, and black men. Yet others found that stereotypes about angry black women could work in their favor, giving them more space to behave in dominant ways than white women are allowed—another finding confirmed by a lab study.
Latinas faced both strong negative assumptions about their competence along with pressure to play subordinate mothering roles.
Asian-American women’s situation was complicated. “I’m more acceptable as an Asian woman scientist than as a woman scientist,” one woman observed, suggesting that Asian-Americans may have an easier time proving their intellectual competence than other women. Yet Asian-American women who contradict the stereotypes of pliability and submissiveness often encounter virulent stereotypes of Asians as crafty or become seen as “dragon ladies.”

For Further Information

For further information on these patterns and accounts of the strategies successful women use to navigate through them, see What Works for Women at Work: Four Patterns Working Women Need to Know, which Williams co-wrote with her daughter Rachel Dempsey. Contact: Joan C. Williams, Distinguished Professor, Hastings Foundation Chair, Director, Center for WorkLife Law, University of California, Hastings College of the Law; Williams@uchastings.edu; cell: 202-365-8013 or Rachel Dempsey, Yale Law Student; Rachel.W.Dempsey@gmail.com; cell: 202-250-1053.

February 6, 2014

CCF Civil Rights Symposium: Civil Rights for Women, 1964-2014

By Max Coleman, Research Intern
Council on Contemporary Families

Fifty years ago, the United States adopted the Civil Rights Act, prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, ethnic origin, religion, and gender. Women were a last-minute addition to the bill, and some legislators actually hoped that adding women would mobilize enough opposition to kill the entire act. But the court cases and public demonstrations that the Civil Rights Act enabled women to organize dramatically changed their status in the United States. We can assess the tremendous progress that has been made by comparing current figures to those collected the year before the passage of the act and published in the 1963 report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women.

Leadership and occupations. In the 87^th Congress, elected in 1960, women’s place was not in the House—or the Senate—but in the home. There were only two female senators and 17 female representatives, which meant that women constituted only two percent of the Senate and less than four percent of the House. Today, in the 113^th Congress, women hold almost 20 percent of the total positions, including 20 seats in the Senate and 78 in the House of Representatives. This represents a tenfold increase in the Senate and a nearly fivefold increase in the House. And while we have not yet had a female president, attitudes have improved significantly: in 1963, a Gallup poll found that only 55 percent of Americans would vote for a woman for president. By 2011, that number had jumped to 95 percent.

In 1963, less than three percent of all attorneys were women, and out of 422 federal judges in the country, just three (0.7 percent) were women (Coontz 2011: 14). By 2010, women held almost a quarter of all federal judgeships and more than a quarter of state judgeships.

The law itself was grossly unfair to women 50 years ago. Sexual harassment was not forbidden anywhere. In only eight states did a female homemaker have any claim on the income earned by her husband (Mead & Kaplan 1965: 152). It was also perfectly legal for a man to force his wife to have sex against her will. According to the 1962 United States Model Penal Code, “A man who has sexual intercourse with a female not his wife is guilty of rape if . . . he compels her to submit by force or threat of force or threat of imminent death, serious bodily injury, extreme pain, or kidnapping.” Before the Civil Rights Act it was also legal to exclude women from many occupations, pay them less for doing the same work as men, and give men raises and promotions that were denied to equally qualified women. In the 1960s the Harvard Business Review was forced to cancel a report on female managers because “In the case of women the barriers are so great that there is scarcely anything to study” (Collins 2009: 22). Today, women occupy the majority (51.5 percent) of managerial, professional, and related positions. In 1963, not a single woman had served as CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Today, women run 23 of the Fortune 500 (4.6 percent) and almost 20 percent of Financial Post 500 Senior/Corporate officers are women.

In 1960, women constituted less than one percent of all engineers in the country. Only six percent of physicians were women (Collins 2009: 20). By 2007, women held 27 percent of science and engineering jobs, and by 2012, more than a third of physicians and surgeons were women.

Income. All this occupational upward mobility has improved women’s financial status relative to men. In 1963, full-time working women earned only 59 cents for every dollar men earned. In 2012, such women earned 77 cents on the dollar, a 30 percent increase. When we count part-time workers and control for hours worked, the progress looks even better. According to a recent Pew report on all working men and women ages 16 and older, women’s hourly wages are now 84 percent of men’s. The gains have been especially dramatic for younger women. Among workers aged 25 to 34, women’s hourly earnings are 93 percent of men’s.

A majority of wives now earn income of their own, something that has been shown to increase equality of decision-making in the family (Coontz 2011: 132). And growing numbers of women make as much or more than their male partners. In 1960, only 3.5 percent of all households with children had a mother who earned more than her husband. By 2011, over four times as many households (15 percent) belonged to this group. And as of 2009, more than 20 percent of all wives—and nearly 40 percent of working wives—earned more than their husbands.

Education. If educational trends continue, we can expect to see more breadwinner wives in the future. In 1962, only 42 percent of female high school graduates went on to college, compared to 58 percent of male graduates, and a larger percentage of female than male college students dropped out before completing their degrees (Mead & Kaplan: 1965). Today, not only do women enroll in college at a higher rate than men, but once enrolled they are less likely to drop out.

A 1970 survey of women under 45 who had been or were currently married found that 80 percent felt “it is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family” (Collins 2009: 17). As late as 1977, two-thirds of all Americans believed that it was the woman’s job to take care of the home. Today, that opinion has reversed: a 2007 study found that 62 percent of Americans believe sharing household chores is “very important” to marital success.

Among the recommendations of the 1963 President’s Commission were access to continuing education, better employment opportunities, and “equal pay for comparable work” (Mead & Kaplan 1965: 212). The gains made in each of these spheres have been tremendous. But there is, as ever, still work to be done.

Women have now outpaced men in educational attainment, and today—unlike 50 years ago—a woman with a college degree earns more than a man without one. Yet at every educational level, women still earn less than men with the same credentials.

Gender gaps in more detail. Overall, women still earn only 84 cents for every dollar a man earns. (This Pew estimate is based on hourly earnings; the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which uses weekly earnings, reports 81 cents.) Part of this inequity is due to gendered employment differences: women are more likely to work in lower-paying occupations and to leave the workforce when they have children. But even controlling for these and other factors, women still earn only 91 cents for every dollar earned by men. In other words, nine cents are entirely unaccounted for, and likely due to discriminatory pay practices.

According to research prepared for The Shriver Report, released in January 2014, women remain more likely to be poor than men, and much more likely to experience extreme poverty—living on incomes less than 50 percent of the poverty level. And when gender interacts with race, women’s economic disadvantages mount, even though there is a lower gender pay gap among African Americans and Hispanics than among whites. On average, black women earn 90 percent of what black men earn, while Latinas net 88 percent of Latinos’ earnings. But black and Hispanic men earn so much less than white men that the lower gender gap for black woman and Latinas does not produce economic security. African-American women earn just 64 cents for every dollar earned by white, non-Hispanic men. And Hispanic women earn just 55 cents.

Conclusions. Many of the gains that women have made are not as impressive as they seem at first sight. More than a quarter of women’s progress in catching up with men is a result of men’s wage losses over the past three decades rather than women’s wage gains, notes Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute. This is especially true for black Americans, as low-income black men in impoverished communities have not only experienced dramatic losses in real wages and job security but tremendous increases in incarceration rates. Between 1970 and 2005 the U.S. prison population rose 700 percent, and much of that increase was accounted for by growing disparities in the sentencing of black men.

Gender segregation in employment also continues to be a problem. After lessening in the 1970s and 1980s, some working-class occupations have become more segregated since 1990. Segregation has also worsened in STEM fields: in 1985, 37 percent of computer and information science degrees were earned by women, but by 2008, that had dropped to 18 percent.

In government, academia, finances, medicine, law, and many other realms, issues of access and unequal treatment still prevail. And pay inequities increase after women become parents, largely because the lack of parental-leave policies and affordable child care forces many women to leave jobs or cut back on work hours, even when they want or need to continue working. The Civil Rights Act has helped women make many impressive gains, but further changes in policy and attitudes are needed to address these remaining inequalities.

For Further Information

For further information, contact Max Coleman, Oberlin College, Sociology Honors Candidate and Research Intern, Council on Contemporary Families; max.coleman@oberlin.edu,
(925)-787-1191.

Online References

Bls.gov, Catalyst.org, Cawp.rutgers.edu, Census.gov, Contemporaryfamilies.org, Familyinequality.wordpress.com, Gallup.com, Musc.edu, Nber.org, Nsf.gov, Pay-equity.org, Pewresearch.org, Pewsocialtrends.org, Pewtrusts.org, Shriverreport.org, Stanford.edu, Time.com, Trustwomenpac.org, Vanneman.umd.edu, Washingtonpost.com.

Print References

Gail Collins, When Everything Changed: The Amazing Journey of American Women from 1960 to the Present (New York: Back Bay Books, 2009).

Stephanie Coontz, A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (New York: Basic Books, 2011).

Margaret Mead and Frances B. Kaplan (Eds.), American Women: The Report of the President’s Commission on the Status of Women and Other Publications of the Commission (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965).

January 28, 2014

“Can I watch?” Sometimes women kissing women isn’t about you

Expert Contact: Paula England, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, New York University
pengland@nyu.edu

Release Contact: Virginia Rutter, Ph.D.
Professor of Sociology, Framingham State University
206 375 4139; vrutter@gmail.com

Is there more going on in the hookup scene than meets (men’s) eyes? The college hookup scene is typically understood as a male-dominated environment-where men are mainly in charge of sexual initiation, parties are often centered around fraternity houses, treating women as sex objects is common, and women engage in sexual displays, including kissing each other, in order to arouse male interest.

Yet, in the forthcoming April 2014 issue of Gender & Society, a team of researchers observes that for some women the super-straight environment of college hookups is also a setting “to explore and to later verify bisexual, lesbian, or queer sexual identities.” Turns out public kissing and threesomes play an important role – and that not all of that sex play is about performing for men’s pleasure.

In a recent survey of college students about hooking up,

40 percent of women who called themselves lesbians had had oral sex or intercourse with men;
Two percent of women who identify as straight report having had oral sex with a woman;
Compared to straight women, more women who indicated they were not sure about their sexual identities had same-sex sexual experience: 15 percent have given and 18 percent have received oral sex from a woman.

A novel study on same-sex hooking up. The Gender & Society study, “Queer Women in the Hookup Scene: Beyond the Closet?” took a novel approach to investigating bisexuality and sexual fluidity. Researchers Leila Rupp and Verta Taylor (University of California-Santa Barbara), Shiri Regev-Messalem (Bar Ilan University, Israel), Alison Fogarty (Stanford University), and Paula England (New York University) used the Online College and Social Life Survey (OCSLS) of over 24,000 college students from 21 four-year colleges and universities that was designed to study how college students approach hooking up, dating, and relationships. To this large data set, the researchers added 55 in-depth interviews with women students at Stanford University and the University of California, Santa Barbara who had had some romantic or sexual experience with other women, to learn more about same-sex activity occurring in hook-up settings that are mainly understood to be heterosexual.

Study co-author Paula England-who developed the OCSLS study-explained, “‘Hooking up’ was defined in our survey as ‘whatever definition of a hookup you and your friends use,’ but we know from talking to students that what they usually mean by a hookup is some sexual activity-ranging from kissing to intercourse-outside of a committed relationship.”

Hooking up, women with women, and a puzzle. The investigators reported that of the 14,128 women surveyed in the OCSLS, 94 percent identify as heterosexual. Though identifying as “straight,” these women’s behavior did not always line up with that-instead, women had more sexual fluidity.

Because of this sexual fluidity that the women surveyed ended up revealing, the investigators conducted in-depth interviews. In particular, the interviews focused on women who identified as queer, lesbian, gay, bisexual, or some other non-heterosexual identity in order to learn more about how encounters in the hookup scene played a role in developing their current sexual identities. They learned that, since women making out with other women and threesomes between two women and a man are acceptable as a turn-on for men, this allowed women to expand and explore their sexual identities.

As study coauthor Verta Taylor points out, “Some students are embracing fluid identities and calling themselves ‘queer,’ ‘pansexual,’ ‘fluid,’ ‘bi-curious’ or simply refusing any kind of label. The old label bisexual no longer fits because even that term implies that there are only two options: lesbian/gay or straight.”

Women kissing women. In tune with the Katy Perry song, “I Kissed a Girl”, the interviews revealed that for some women, public kissing-typically seen as for the enjoyment of men onlookers-is a key opportunity for exploring same-sex attractions.

Often alcohol played a role in women’s opportunities to explore same-sex attraction, just as it plays a significant role in hooking up in general. While some women who make out with other women in public had a previous same-sex attraction, others told interviewers about experimenting when they had had no previous sexual attraction to women. In sum, the authors note that “Kissing can result from or lead to emotional connections with women. It doesn’t always-but sometimes it leads to more exploration.” The interviews confirmed that public same-sex kissing in the hook up scene is one pathway into same-sex desire and behavior.

Threesomes. About 20 percent of women interviewed for this study reported participating in threesomes. “Threesomes allow same-sex pleasure without the stigma of non-heterosexual identity,” the authors explained. In some cases, women said that threesomes were a way to reduce their anxiety about approaching women on their own. One woman noted, “It’s not clear how you would initiate a relationship with a woman…I’m really inexperienced chasing women, rather more experienced at chasing men.” In other cases, women explained that threesomes were instigated by male partners, but that it led to women following up-solo-with the other woman in the encounter. The authors explain, “Although threesomes may begin with men’s desires, they introduce women to new sexual pleasures or allow them to act on same-sex or bisexual desires.”

What’s it mean? Joya Misra, editor of Gender & Society and Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at University of Massachusetts, notes that the study is a valuable contribution to the expanding literature on sexuality. “Rupp and colleagues’ article shows us that women’s sexual fluidity can be expressed in a variety of environments, and that the ‘hook-up’ culture does not simply support heterosexuality and male dominance. It is important to recognize the way women consider and act upon their desires, rather than assuming that they cannot escape meeting dominant ideals regarding heterosexuality.”

Coauthor and historian Leila Rupp explains that this may not be so new: She points to intimate sexual relationships between co-wives in polygynous households in China and the Middle East, romantic friends in heterosexual marriages in the Euro-American world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and “girlfriends” in avant-garde cultural environments such as Greenwich Village and Weimar Berlin in the 1920s. “Bisexual behavior between women has flourished in a variety of societies where women’s same-sex desires and sexual behavior did not pose a threat to the gender order,” explains Rupp. Whether in these historical settings or in the setting of collegiate hook-up culture, women’s same-sex sexuality can flourish in tight conjunction with heterosexuality. What is new in the 21^st century setting, however, are the ways in which women can go on to have the opportunity to affirm new identities.

About the Study

Rupp, Leila, Verta Taylor, Shiri Regev-Messalem, Alison Fogarty, and Paula England. 2014. “Queer Women in the Hookup Scene: Beyond the Closet?” forthcoming in April Gender & Society.

About the Study Authors

Leila Rupp, Professor of Feminist Studies, University of California, Santa Barbara, can be reached at lrupp@femst.ucsb.edu.

Verta Taylor, Professor of Sociology, University of California, Santa Barbara, can be reached at vtaylor@soc.ucsb.edu.

Alison Fogarty, Stanford University, can be reached at afogarty@stanford.edu.

Paula England, Professor of Sociology, New York University, can be reached at pengland@nyu.edu.

About Gender and Society

Gender & Society is a peer-reviewed journal, focused on the study of gender. It is the official journal of Sociologists for Women in Society, and was founded in 1987 as an outlet for feminist social science. Currently, it is a top-ranked journal in both sociology and women’s studies. Gender & Society, a journal of Sage Publications, publishes less than 10 percent of all papers submitted to it. For additional commentary, you can also read the Gender & Society blog and follow the journal on twitter: @Gend_Soc.

For more information, contact Gender & Society editor Joya Misra, Professor of Sociology and Public Policy at the University of Massachusetts. Misra is also affiliated with Women, Gender, Sexuality Studies and Labor Studies. Her research and teaching focus primarily on inequality. She can be reached at misra@soc.umass.edu.

Sociologists for Women in Society (SWS), currently headquartered at the University of Kansas, works to improve women’s lives through advancing and supporting feminist sociological research, activism and scholars. Founded in 1969, SWS is a nonprofit, scientific and educational organization with more than 1,000 members in the United States and overseas. For more information, contact Dr. Joey Sprague, Professor of Sociology at the University of Kansas and SWS Executive Officer, at jsprague@ku.edu.

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families, based at the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, is a nonprofit, nonpartisan organization of family researchers and practitioners that seeks to further a national understanding of how America’s families are changing and what is known about the strengths and weaknesses of different family forms and various family interventions. For more information on CCF researchers, contact Stephanie Coontz, Co-Chair and Director of Research and Public Education, coontzs@msn.com.

December 3, 2013

You’ve come a long way baby? Seeing men as more than sperm donors

CONTACT: Virginia Rutter / Framingham State University Sociology
206 375 4139 / vrutter@gmail.com

Recent headlines such as “Men, Who Needs Them?” and “Why Fathers Really Matter” showcase a growing debate about the importance of including men in discussions of gender inequality.

Two new studies from Gender & Society turn attention to areas in which men have long been ignored: at home, in the study of conception, pregnancy and childbirth, and at work, in the caregiving professions-particularly nursing. New research demonstrates under what conditions men’s contributions are slowly becoming more visible and what the benefits of that are (and can be).

Reproduction: Let’s start at the beginning

June 7, 2013

CCF Equal Pay Symposium: 50 Years Since the Equal Pay Act of 1963

Release Contact: Virginia Rutter
vrutter@gmail.com / 206 375 4139

Fifty years ago this week, on June 10, 1963, President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, amending the earlier Fair Labor Standards Act of 1938, to “prohibit discrimination on account of sex in the payment of wages by employers.” So, how’s that going? The Council on Contemporary Families has convened an online symposium representing the latest thinking from pre-eminent work-family scholars, top female executive Sheryl Sandberg, and advocates for low-wage workers and unions.

The good news: Gains in pay and education, and opportunity

Women’s pay in the United States has gone from 59 percent of men’s in 1962 to almost 80 percent today. Less than 14 percent of women were managers then; three times as many are now. Seven percent of wives out earned their spouses then; 28 percent do now (See Cohen).
Today, women in the U.S. make up nearly half of the paid workforce (See Milkman)—something not true even in gender-egalitarian Scandinavian countries: Norway and Finland are at 44 percent (See Seguino).
In education, U.S. women now earn nearly half of all law and medical degrees and a majority of BAs. The good news extends internationally, even to countries with very traditional gender mores: Over the past 35 years, the Arab region saw a remarkable rise in the ratio of female to male secondary enrollment rates, from 59 to 98 percent; in the same time, Africa rose from 54 to 85 percent (See Seguino).
Women’s earnings influence life at home. Each thousand dollars of earnings for women is associated with a 14-minute reduction in daily housework—and working wives’ proportion of housework has dropped significantly since the early 1960s (See Cohen).

The semi-good news

University of Maryland’s Philip Cohen reports that in 1962 wives did six times more housework as husbands. Today they do only 1.7 times as much. You’d think that if this rate of change continued, before 2023 men and women would be doing exactly the same. But, according to Cohen, that is not how it has worked. There hasn’t been any appreciable change in shares of housework since the early 1990s, and he shows that the stall in housework equity is related to a stall in pay equity.

Looks like a victory, sounds like a victory, but is it really a victory?

The rise in women’s educational attainment has not been accompanied by a proportionate expansion of their political voice. Women hold 18.3 percent of seats in the U.S. Congress. University of Vermont’s Stephanie Seguino profiles representation around the world: “The global average in 2010 was 19 percent, ranging from a low regional average of 8 percent in Arab countries to a high of 26 percent in rich countries. (Sweden stands out amongst rich countries at 45 percent, surpassed only by Rwanda at 56 percent).”

Bias against women continues. Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg reports, “Even in the U.S., a recent study found that when faculty evaluated identical lab manager applications, the one with a man’s name on it received a higher starting salary.”

And some of the relative gains for women do not represent actual improvement in their wages but declines in men’s wages. “In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains,” reports Heidi Shierholz from the Economic Policy Institute. Similarly, Seguino reports that in 96 of the 135 countries where gender employment gaps have narrowed since 1991, the convergence is partly accounted for by declines in men’s employment rates.

With women as with men, elites are taking a greater share of growth in income. In 2010, high earning women made more than 1.5 times as much as the typical man, reports Northwestern’s Leslie McCall, more than in previous decades. But in a new development earnings have been flat for the typical woman over the last decade. This means that women’s success continues to be concentrated at the top of the ladder. Women in the middle and the bottom have been losing relative ground along with men during this period of growing inequality. (Keep in mind, Catalyst reports, women’s gains at the very top have been modest: four percent of the Fortune 500 CEOs are women.)

The interaction of gender and race inequality produces an optical illusion about the progress of minority women. At first glance it may appear that there is more gender equality among minority men and women than among whites. Jane Farrell and Sarah Jane Glynn, from the Center for American Progress, report that Hispanic or Latina women make 88 percent of what Latinos do and African American women make 90 percent of what their male counterparts make, whereas white women earn just 81 percent of what white men make.

But when we add race to gender, these pay gaps become a veritable chasm. African American women earn 36 percent less than white men and Latinas a mere 45 percent. The gap between the earnings of Asian women and white men is smaller, just 12 percent, but Asian American women earn just 73 percent of what Asian American men make.

Trouble spots: What public sector unions have to do with women’s equality

CUNY’s Ruth Milkman reports how unions—and women in them—spearheaded the campaign for the Equal Pay Act, even though they made up only 18.3 percent of members. Today, women make up 45 percent of all union members, but unions have declined: In 1960 one in four workers was in a union; today, that is down to one in ten. The historic decline hit private sector unions, where male unions used to be strong, first and hardest, says Milkman. But “starting in 2011, a wave of state-level legislation weakening collective bargaining rights for public sector workers has directly targeted teachers and other unionized female-dominated occupations.” This attack is a real problem since women union workers earn an average of more than $5 an hour more than nonunion ones and have more benefits and job security as well—and nonunion workers in unionized fields benefit from this advantage.

More trouble spots: bias against caregivers

University of Massachusetts’ Joya Misra reports that penalties facing working mothers – but not working fathers — are now the major source of gender pay differences. Stanford’s Shelley Correll explains: “When we compare the earnings of mothers and childless women who work in the same types of jobs, have the same level of education, have the same amount of experience and are equal on a host of other dimensions, mothers still earn five percent lower hourly wages per child.”

Mothers also face difficulties getting hired in the first place. On average, Correll’s studies show, when employers compare a childless woman and a mother with the same qualifications, the mother is rated as less committed to her job, despite the absence of any evidence supporting this perception, and this substantially reduces her chances of getting the job.

University of California, Hastings School of Law’s Joan Williams reports on a number of remarkable cases that highlight a legal strategy for addressing such bias: “One vitally important and fast-developing area of law is family responsibilities discrimination (FRD), which involves pregnant women or mothers, fathers who seek an active role in family care, or adults caring for elders or ill family members.” FRD suits grew 400 percent in the decade before 2008.

What else can we do? Change policy and attitudes

“Motherhood penalties vary substantially cross-nationally, suggesting that social policies can reduce or exacerbate them,” explains Joya Misra. For example, Misra explains, “The per-child wage penalty is 9.5 percent in countries with minimal public childcare for infants and toddlers, but shrinks to 4.3 percent in countries with more expansive public childcare programs.” Availability of leave matters—too little is harmful to women’s opportunities, but so is too much. Misra reports, “Employment and wages also may suffer when mothers are offered very long, unpaid/poorly paid leaves, such as three-year ‘care leaves.’ Here mothers lose valuable job experience, and may find themselves in jobs with little prospect for career advancement.”

Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg—who just recently started LeanIn.org–reminds us that women have internalized some of the social prejudices against them, starting with lower salary expectations, for instance, which provides employers with an excuse for offering them less. She argues that women must cooperate to improve their own self-confidence as well as to change the attitudes of others.

Browse the Equal Pay Symposium

Follow the links on the top right menu.

Download Full Symposium

[button link=”http://sites.utexas.edu/contemporaryfamilies/files/2014/06/2013_Symposium_Equal-Pay.pdf” color=”red” target=”new” size=”default” icon_before=”pdf”]Download as a PDF [/button] [button link=”https://contemporaryfamilies.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/2013_Symposium_Equal-Pay.docx” color=”primary” target=”_self” size=”default” title=”Download DOC” icon_before=”doc”]Download as a Word Document[/button] [divider style=”shadow”]

About CCF

The Council on Contemporary Families is a non-profit, non-partisan organization dedicated to providing the press and public with the latest research and best-practice findings about American families. Our members include demographers, economists, family therapists, historians, political scientists, psychologists, social workers, sociologists, as well as other family social scientists and practitioners.

Founded in 1996 and now based in the School of Education and Human Development at the University of Miami, the Council’s mission is to enhance the national understanding of how and why contemporary families are changing, what needs and challenges they face, and how these needs can best be met. To fulfill that mission, the Council holds annual conferences, open to the public, and issues periodic briefing papers and fact sheets.

June 5, 2013

The Gender Pay Gap by Race and Ethnicity

By Jane Farrell, Research Assistant for Economic Policy and
Sarah Jane Glynn, Associate Director of Women’s Economic Policy
Center for American Progress
jfarrell@americanprogress.org; 202-481-8113
sglynn@americanprogress.org; 202-481-8109

On average, white women earn 81 percent of what white men make. At first glance it may appear that there is more gender equality among minority men and women than among whites. Hispanic or Latina women make 88 percent of what Latinos do and African American women make 90 percent of what their male counterparts make.
But when we add race to gender, these pay gaps become a veritable chasm. African American women earn 36 percent less than white men and Latinas a mere 45 percent. Interestingly, the gap between the earnings of Asian women and white men is smaller, just 12 percent, but that mounts up over a lifetime, and Asian American women earn just 73 percent of what Asian American men make.

Men lost jobs especially rapidly during the first phases of the Great Recession, but the ripple effects have led to lays offs of hundreds of thousands of state and local government workers, about 70 percent of whom were women and 20 percent of whom were African Americans.

And things are not likely to get better for women as the economy continues to pick up speed. While the majority of jobs lost in the recession were mid-range jobs, the majority of new jobs that have been created in the recovery are low-wage. Many of the occupations with the largest projected job growth are minority and female-dominated, but they are jobs such as home health aides and personal care aides, with earnings of only about 20,000 dollars per year.

Today, in spite of increasing educational gains, women of color are especially likely to work in minimum-wage jobs, where even a full-time, year-round worker will earn just 14,500 dollars a year, scarcely enough to keep one person – let alone a family – afloat. In 2011, nearly 360,000 black and Latina women were paid hourly rates that were less than the minimum wage. Since Social Security benefits are based upon an individual’s lifetime earnings, these low wages hurt women well into retirement, leaving many elderly women in poverty or on the brink.

Because gender, racial, and ethnic wage gaps are caused by multiple factors, multiple strategies are needed to ensure equity. Legislation like the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act was an important first step, but additional policies like the Paycheck Fairness Act, the Healthy Families Act, paid family and medical leave legislation, and raising the minimum wage would also go a long way in helping to combat the problem.