How would you like to work for free from today until the end of the year?
Sure, Equal Pay Day is celebrated in April here stateside, but today’s the day, with its “depressing inevitability,” in Europe, as the Guardian reports here. There’s no better time to take a look at what’s going on in the United States.
Forbes covered the pay gap last week using PayScale’s latest report on the gender pay gap. And they found some eye-opening, gut-churning, downright depressing statistics if you’re a working woman.
As PayScale writes, there are several other factors going on that also determine what you make, including “job type, leadership positions, marital and family status and industry.”
Women, on average, earn 25.6 percent less than men — about 74 cents on the dollar. See the above chart.
To calculate the findings, PayScale looked at two groups: “controlled” and “uncontrolled.” The 74 cents on the dollar figure comes from the “uncontrolled” group — comparing all working men to all working women.
For the “controlled,” salaries, the true “apples-to-apples” comparison, PayScale says it reviewed “more than 1.4 million salary profiles to compare men and women working the same jobs and controlling for factors such as experience, location, hours worked, education, and more.”
But the “controlled” figures, a.k.a., comparing women working in STEM or executive roles to their male peers, still don’t put women on top. Or, in many cases, even close.
In fact, the PayScale report found that in tech the pay gap becomes worse as employees climb the ladder:
“Both the uncontrolled (20.7 percent) and controlled (1.4 percent) gender pay gaps in the tech industry are smaller than the pay gaps in other industries,” they state in a release. “This holds true for the controlled pay gap at all job levels except at the executive level, where the controlled gender pay gap for the tech industry is slightly larger than in non-tech industries.”
See in the below chart the much smaller numbers of women working in tech at different levels than men — only 21 percent are at the executive level. How women advance directly affects their earnings potentials.
In the uncontrolled group in tech fields, women’s median pay in tech is 22.4 percent less than men at the executive level. In the “controlled” group, that difference slides to 6 percent. And while 6 percent doesn’t sound like much, it comes down to a significant figure of about $10,000:
Want even more disturbing news? Women’s salaries plateau off much earlier than men’s, and stagnate for the rest of their working lives:
Sure, that’s the uncontrolled group, but men often work jobs that tend to pay higher (including many in STEM), which is even more reason to rally women into these types of jobs. Take a look at the stats below.
In Washington state, the most common job for women? Social worker with a median salary of $49,600. Men? Computer software engineer with a median salary of $108,300. See below:
PayScale examines a whole slew of other factors that impact people’s working lives — especially how having a family takes a greater toll on women’s career earnings. Women who are married with kids, earn on average, 31 percent less than married men with children.
In no category, controlled or otherwise, do women equal men’s pay. Sure, some come close. In the controlled sample, PayScale found that women earn only 2.7 percent less than men. However, they write “Yes, that margin is much smaller than the uncontrolled figure, but it’s equally disturbing.”
“Even more disturbing is that when we run the numbers to find out how things like marital and family status, job level, job type, industry, location, education and more affect gender pay equity, we see that the pay gap widens as you climb the corporate ladder, that men get promoted faster than women, and that women report more negative feelings about job satisfaction, job stress, and communication with their employers.”
“Unconscious bias could be at the root of the disparity,” PayScale’s Lydia Frank, senior editorial director, told Forbes’ Ruchika Tulshyan, who is also the author of The Diversity Advantage: Fixing Gender Inequality in the Workplace. (Learn more about Tulshyan’s book here). “Biases determine all choices we make at work, including how we advocate for ourselves or others, hiring decisions and certainly, who we grant raises to.”
All told, PayScale’s full report is incredibly sobering look at today’s workplace inequality when it comes to pay and gender, but a highly necessary one. Take a look.
