Pay equity: the bosses know exactly what they’re doing
by digby
Remember last week when Republicans tanked the Paycheck Fairness Act? The conservatives gave lots of reasons, from the specious claim that motherhood accounts for the differences to the absurd notion that women don’t want more money (After I wrote about it, my twitter feed went nuts for a while with conservatives insisting that the bill was all about paying uneducated women more money than men with better educations — obviously a talking point from somewhere.)
Anyway, today we have this:
Female physician researchers make less money than their male counterparts, researchers found.
Among recipients of National Institutes of Health (NIH) career development awards, the average reported annual salary was $167,669 for women and $200,433 for men, according to Reshma Jagsi, MD, DPhil, of the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and colleagues.
Even after adjustment for differences in specialty, academic rank, leadership positions, publications, and research time, there remained an absolute difference of $13,399 per year between the sexes (P=0.001), the researchers reported in the June 13 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
The study, which is consistent with a previous study of life sciences researchers, “provides evidence that gender differences in compensation continue to exist in academic medicine, even among a select cohort of physician researchers whose job content is far more similar than in cohorts previously studied, and even after controlling extensively for specialization and productivity,” they wrote.
They controlled for everything including parenthood and there was still a discrepancy. The only way to account for it was bias or some unknown factor (like women turning down raises?)
Our culture both celebrates money and makes salaries the biggest secret in the workplace. I knew much more about my co-worker’s sex lives than I ever did about their incomes. It’s the one great taboo — talking about your salary can even get you fired in some places.
As I’ve mentioned before, it’s considered a truism among many male executives that you don’t have to pay women the same as men because they’re happy to take status (titles and offices) over salary. It’s not true, it’s just that nobody knows what anyone else is making so women don’t know they’re being bought off with something that costs the company nothing — and keeps them underpaid and endowed with less power because of it. (They are often laughed at by the bosses for being such fools, I’m sorry to say.)
Underpaying women is not always a case of subconscious or “institutional” bias. Often it’s a conscious decision to pay them less because they know they can get away with it. That’s why we need the Lily Ledbetter act and the Paycheck Fairness Act. You won’t change these practices without giving women the tools they need to fight for equal pay for equal work.
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