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Weiye Loh

Women Earn Less Than Men, Especially at the Top - NYTimes.com - 0 views

economix.blogs.nytimes.com/...rsists-especially-for-the-rich

Pay Gender Equality Income

shared by Weiye Loh on 26 Sep 11 - No Cached

  • even though the gap narrows when you control for these factors, it is still large when you look at a subset of the careers PayScale examined: the high earners. In jobs that pay more than $100,000, women earn just 87 percent of what men receive, even after adjusting for outside factors. You can see this in the second chart above — around the $100,000 mark, many more dots start to fall beneath the equal-wage line.

  • jobs in which quality is easier to measure are more likely to be compensated based on merit, so equally qualified men and women are likely to receive equal pay. On the other hand, in jobs where quality measures are more subjective, meritocracy may not rule, and men may be better compensated for reasons other than their qualifications. For example, perhaps men are subconsciously viewed as more competent than women, or are more adept at negotiating for raises.

  • After controlling for outside factors, some of the biggest gender pay gaps are in jobs like chief executive (in which, after PayScale adjusted the data, women earn 71 percent of what men earn), hospital administrator (women earn 77 percent of what equally qualified men earn) and chief operating officer (women earn 80 percent of what equally qualified men earn).

    In each of these jobs, performance quality is a relatively subjective measure. Compare those jobs to positions like engineers, actuaries or electricians, where the criteria for a job well done might be relatively more concrete or measurable — and where the salaries earned by men and women are roughly equal.

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  • There are certainly alternative explanations, including factors that PayScale did not control for. For example, Mr. Lee and his team were not able to control for hours worked each week, since they didn’t have that data.
  • Weiye Loh on 26 Sep 11
     
    for most careers the company studied, PayScale found that the pay gap is largely the result of outside factors. Within a specific job, before controlling for outside factors the typical female worker earns pay that is only 90 percent of the typical male worker's pay; after controlling for these variables, she earns 94 percent of the typical male worker's pay. For jobs paying below $100,000, the gap narrows further.

    The implication is that in most jobs where a wage gap exists, it is probably not due to overt discrimination, with bosses deciding, Mad-Men-style, that women should receive unequal pay for equal work. Rather, in most jobs, the different career choices that men and women make - or perhaps the different career opportunities men and women have available to them - account for big differences in pay, says  Al Lee, PayScale's director of quantitative analysis.
Weiye Loh

How working long hours affects the wage gap | Women at the Top Blog | Blog on women's a... - 0 views

blogs.ft.com/...ong-hours-affects-the-wage-gap

Gender Equality Work Pay

shared by Weiye Loh on 13 Sep 11 - No Cached

  • According to a new study by sociologists from Indiana University and Cornell University, one of the biggest contributing factors to the wage gap is the phenomenon of “overworking” – which means working 50 hours a week or more.

    The study, using data collected by the US Census Bureau, found the relative hourly wage of overworkers compared with that of full-time workers had increased substantially over the past three decades, but because a greater percentage of male workers were overworking, this change benefited men much more than women. Today, women earn an estimated 81 per cent of what men are paid.

    According to Youngjoo Cha, a sociologist at Indiana University who contributed to the study, even women who are employed full-time typically have more family obligations than men, which limit their capacity for putting in gruelling hours at the office.

  • In the so-called greedy occupations – doctors, lawyers and upper-level managers, for instance – workers are evaluated based on their face time at the office, according to Cha, who specialises in gender and labour markets. It is no coincidence that these jobs tend to come with the fattest pay cheques, too.

    “In our culture, ideal workers are those who put in long hours and completely devote their time and emotions to their jobs,” she says. “In these top-end occupations, this phenomenon is most pronounced. Workers are bound by stronger norms, and if they don’t live up to those norms, they are penalised. Lawyers who don’t bill enough hours, for example, don’t progress and don’t make partner.”

  • “When we talk about greedy occupations, it’s important to recognise that family is a greedy institution that requires [time, energy and devotion]. We need to attack this problem structurally and recognise that both parties are in the workforce and have responsibilities at home.”
Weiye Loh

Male CEOs With Daughters Treat Women Better - Ideas Market - WSJ - 0 views

blogs.wsj.com/...h-daughters-treat-women-better

Gender Equality Wage Pay Salary Inequality

shared by Weiye Loh on 03 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • When a male CEO has a daughter, he moves to close the gender pay gap at his company, a new study finds.
  • Three economists drew on remarkably thorough data kept on employees in Denmark’s private sector, examining the salaries of 734,200 workers at 6,320 firms, from 1995 through 2006. The database also included information on CEOs, including the sexes and birth dates of their children.

  • Overall in Denmark, there is a gender wage gap of 21.5%, not adjusting for rank or hours worked, the authors said.

    But the birth of a daughter to a male CEO caused that gap to close, in his company, that same year, by 0.5 percentage points.  Breaking the data down further, the birth of a first daughter caused the gap to close by 0.8 percentage points. If the first daughter was also a first child, the gap closed by 2.8 percentage points (representing 13% of the gap).

  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Had the authors been able to adjust for hours worked and rank, where men tend to outpace women, the effects would have been even stronger
  • There was no detectable change in the relative wages of men and women when female CEOs had children.
  • Women with college degrees benefited from the births more than women with high-school or primary educations. The authors of the study speculated that this was because the CEOs imagined that this was the class their daughters would belong to.
Weiye Loh

Salaries top out at age 40 | Penelope Trunk's Brazen Careerist - 0 views

blog.penelopetrunk.com/...salaries-top-out-at-age-40

Pay Salary Gender Equality Employment Career

shared by Weiye Loh on 14 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • Whatever you earn at age 40 is likely to be the top of your earning potential. This is one of a gazillion things I’ve learned from talking with Al Lee, the director of quantitative analysis at PayScale.
  • Al's data, which is based on the careers of college graduates, is basically that the salary curve for most people in their 20s is very steep. Then it starts to flatten in the 30s, and then you get into the land of the 3% raise. In real dollars, those 3% raises are not actually raises, they are just keeping up with inflation.
  • 1. Go where the men are. To be precise, pay tops out at age 38 for women ($61K) and age 45 for men ($95K). But the difference, according to PayScale data, is not due to unequal pay for equal work. Rather, the difference is that women choose lower paying careers, and women are more likely to take time out of the workforce for kids. So the first thing you can do to prevent your salary from flat-lining is choose a career that men dominate. But it’s not just about industry—it is also about influence. Stick to line-management positions rather than support roles. For example, skip human resources and go to supply chain management.
  • ...7 more annotations...
  • 2. Rewrite your resume. If you’re at the beginning of your career, focus on accomplishments rather than responsibilities. This makes you look like you’re in a higher pay bracket so you will get larger salary increases. If you’ve been in the workforce for a while, cut anything that is more than 15 years old, including the date of your college graduation. Al says that there is no premium paid for two decades of experience because jobs change so quickly that long-gone experience is not particularly relevant.  And because age discrimination creates a sort of penalty for more than 15 years of experience. So just leave it off. (Good resume editing tips here, at Quint Careers.)
  • 3. Be a lawyer. Have I ever given this advice before? I don’t think so. Even the American Bar Association reports that law school is a ripoff. But I’m open to counter-arguments—Al says that the only profession where your pay increases after 20 years is in law. Because laws change very slowly, especially procedural law, and so much of being a good lawyer is your on-the-job training.
  • 4. Specialize. By your mid 30s, if you don’t have a specialty, it’s hard to get your salary into the next bracket. You earn more money if your talents are more scarce. (Here’s some information about how to specialize.) Also, don’t give up hope if you have no idea what you’re doing in your mid-20s. As long as you figure things out by the time you’re 30, you will get a premium for 15 years of experience before your salary stops rising.
  • 5. Buy a house assuming you won’t get a raise. Ever. When it comes to houses in the U.S., the average age of a first-time buyer is 33. So people go through their 20s gaining super-high raises, and then people buy a house in their mid-30s with the assumption that the raises will continue. In fact, though, you should buy a house preparing for your real income to remain unchanged until age 55, when it is likely to go down.
  • 6. Recognize your limitations. People eventually start to realize that they are not going to get to the very top.
  • people see that chasing the increasingly smaller raises is not as fulfilling as doing a wide range of other things with their time.
  • 7. Focus on maintenance. Most people in their 40s have a lot going on. Taking care of aging parents, young kids, community organizations—all these jobs are falling on people in their 40s, which means it’s not a good time to be trying also to leverage one’s highest earning power. So instead of killing yourself trying to earn more and more, be realistic and go into maintenance mode.
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