Not only do women make less than men, but a study of similarly positioned executives at similarly sized organizations showed that men make more and hold a greater share of the top jobs at larger organizations.
Data on U.S. incomes, poverty, pensions, and philanthropy all show a common economic reality: women are still getting shortchanged. Do men care?
Before Ms. magazine was a gleam in Gloria Steinem’s eye, men had quite a deal. Married middle-class men often controlled the purse while enjoying the pleasures of a full-time homemaker, who might work a few hours here and there for “pin money” they could spend on themselves. Mothers of small children seldom worked full-time.
When it comes to incomes from all sources, including investments, men still make out better than women. Men’s median income in 2010 was $1.54 for each dollar women received, my analysis of census data shows. The median income—half make more, half less—for men was $32,137, but for women just $20,831.
Ignoring investment income, the pattern still holds. In 2010, men averaged $1.29 to the dollar earned by women. Men averaged $47,715 a year, women $36,931, a difference of $10,784 for the year. That’s $207 per week less for women workers. A married opposite-sex couple with each partner at the average would make 12.4 percent more money—the equivalent of more than six weeks of extra pay—if both husband and wife earned the male average.
The pattern of more pay for men is not just because men may choose more lucrative occupations or not take time off to bear children. Data disclosed by nonprofit organizations in their annual reports to the Internal Revenue Service (on Form 990) show that among executives and managers men make much more than women.
Women run a majority of nonprofit organizations with budgets under $1 million. But as budgets grow, the ranks of women shrink. At nonprofits with budgets of $50 million or more, only one in six is run by a woman. The few women who run these biggest are paid 25 percent less than men, according to the eleventh annual nonprofit pay study by Guidestar, a salary survey I urged its founder to make a core part of its operations before the organization launched in the mid-1990s.
All of this raises a question: why do men, especially married men, put up with this? Why aren’t men in the vanguard of demanding equal pay for women?
It is unfair that the women they love work for less. Viewed in purely selfish terms, men should see gender pay discrimination as severe limits on a family’s resources. And what about fringe benefits? Many couples lose the value of a second health or other benefit plan because plans designed in a one-income era are often incompatible with one another. Men could agitate for more cafeteria-style fringe-benefit packages, so one spouse could get health care benefits and the other extra retirement money or longer vacations or some other benefit.
We have been through two generations since women began to break out of the narrow list of white-collar occupations readily open to them—teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary—all of them usually expected to be temporary until the job title became wife or wife and mother. Some women now work in better-paid blue-collar jobs, because what had been a 100 percent male quota is now history for such occupations as machinist, mechanic, and stevedore.
The first women who fought to become street cops are now retired, some with granddaughters patrolling the streets. Women today captain jetliners, while men serve coffee to passengers. My wife runs a quarter-billion-dollar charitable endowment, the kind of job she was bluntly told, three decades ago, that a woman would never hold. While the pay gap has narrowed some, the official data still show that whether they are sales clerks or CEOs, servers or surgeons, women overall make less than men doing the same work.
Women are still more likely than men to be poor, especially in old age, census data show. Among single women, one in nine lives in extreme poverty, which means annual income is less than half of the poverty line.
Married couples with children in 2009 worked 492 more hours than in 1979, a 15 percent increase, census data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute show. The extra money comes at a price: less time for the joys of parenting, coupling, and community engagement.
Why have men quietly given up all those perks, and the power that goes along with being sole breadwinner, for three-quarters of an extra paycheck? For fathers, that can mean half an extra paycheck or less once child-care costs are covered.
Since most men’s wages have been flat to falling, it takes two incomes to get by. IRS data show that average income in 2009 was back at the 1997 level when inflation was taken into account. In 2010 median household income fell again, new census data show. It fell again in 2011.
The women’s movement encouraged self-reliance—not being dependent on the goodwill and good health of a husband—as well as self-realization. Equal pay for equal work was central.
The price of pay discrimination stalks retirement, too, since less pay means a smaller check in old age. Among baby boomers, the youngest of whom turn fifty in 2014, single women have a retirement-savings shortfall nearly twice that of single men, the Employee Benefits Research Institute estimated.
Among men age sixty-five or older, median income in 2009 was $25,409, two-thirds more than the $15,209 median for women, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee reported in April. Retired men averaged nearly twice as much from pensions as women.
Married men and fathers can help close these economic chasms. Will self-interest motivate us to challenge enduring economic discrimination against our wives and sisters, our mothers and daughters? Or will the gender income and pay gaps still be around two generations from now?