http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/16/why-girly-jobs-dont-pay/?emc=eta1
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"Sometimes it's not how hard you row the boat. It's how fast the stream is going."
(Warren Buffet)
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Nancy Folbre is an economics professor at UMASS and writes for the "Economix" blog at the NY Times. Her 8/16 post, "Why Girly Jobs Don't Pay Well," ponders the issue of lower pay for women from the point of view of the occupations that they choose and the real worth of those occupations. So, a kindergarten teacher would be worth $320,000 annually, reflecting the present value of the additional money that a really good kindergarten class can expect to earn over their careers.
Whether or not those of us who know a little something about "pay" think that Folbre's position on the "value" of a job is reasonable, it is interesting to see the reactions of some of her readers. One of them occupies a girly job now but only feels she's been able to do that because she's been married to someone for 35 years who occupies a non-girly job. This same person feels that, with divorce on the rise, these kinds of choices may not be there in the future.
Folbre goes on to point out that, though women now average higher levels of educational attainment than men, many continue to enter occupations dominated by women where wages are relatively low. Again, Folbre: "As one online discussion of girly jobs explains, some women may just like these jobs despite the low pay ... And sometimes women don't choose girly jobs, but end up in them because they face discrimination or harassment in other jobs."
Further, in an observation that it would be difficult to refute, Folbre points out that many of the best paying girly jobs - the professional jobs in health care and education that highly educated women are rapidly moving into - are heavily subsidized by the public sector.
She concludes with a classic statement: "We need to figure out how to honor girly values while earning manly pay."
That's well put but, overall, much of pay is a supply/demand equation. It's hard to change that.
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Thanks for this blog! I liked the comment by Folbre that "...sometimes women don't choose girly jobs, but end up in them because they face discrimination or harassment in other jobs." I also know that women end up in girly jobs, not because of overt discrimination but because there was no way to continue in their organization and have any balance. I have many female friends who were in the corporate world and after exiting the workplace due to unfriendly family policies (i.e. only 6 weeks of maternity leave) they found they could only go back to work in jobs like teaching or retail.
ReplyDeleteI find this to be a problem for all parties - the companies are losing well-educated, trained employees (Charlie - you probably know what are the costs of this?) and women are losing careers, often in fields that they enjoyed. With the increase of women in the workforce (it is something like 52% now) this is not something we can ignore.
Those companies probably have bad HR.
ReplyDeleteThe amount of women in executive positions says quite a bit too.
Maybe researchers should go deeper into this subject. They might find companies earning more with family friendly policies. That's all I can think of to expedite change.
Tracey: thanks so much for your insightful comments, as always. The problem in Top 500 companies then and now is that women need a champion in senior management and on the board. In my company, that was me. And, in many cases, I had to dictate to operating group heads that they were going to put a woman into a GM job, or it wouldn't happen. That's because those who occupied "manly jobs" felt threatened by girly job people moving up.
ReplyDeleteJosh: thank you for your input. The "bad HR" comes from top management not supporting the right policies for advancement based on talent and contribution.