May 2003 - VOLUME 24 - NUMBER 5
An Interview with Heidi Hartmann
Heidi Hartmann is the founder and president of the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Women's Policy Research, which conducts women-centered, policy-oriented research. She is the author of numerous reports and publications on the impacts of healthcare, wage and family leave policy on women's economic status and well-being, among many other topics. She is the recipient of a MacArthur fellowship award.
If we look at women and men who work full time, year round, women earn only 77 percent of what men earn. |
Multinational Monitor: To what extent is poverty in the United
States gender based? Single women-headed households are disproportionately poor as compared to two-parent families or even single-dad families. Married couples with children in the United States are 6.4 percent poor. Single women with children are 35.7 percent poor. Thats a super disparity. But single-mom families are only about 20 percent of all families with children. Most mothers live in married couple families, and there is typically a higher-earning man. Women earn less than men, and the single-earning mom doesnt have a higher-earner to share income with. The disparity among all women over 65 and all men over 65 is also substantial. Women live longer than men, and the older you are, the more likely you are to live alone. The disparity among older men and women is largely a difference between marital poverty rates and single poverty rates. But even if we look at the poverty rate for single women and single men, the poverty rate is almost twice as high for older women as it is for older single men. The disparities among older people has something to do with your household living arrangement, but also with income differences. Womens social security income is lower than mens, their pensions are less than mens, and women are much less likely to have a pension at all. MM: How do mens and womens earnings compare? MM: How much earnings disparity is there within the category of
women? MM: How do disparities with race overlay with disparities by gender?
MM: Are the earnings disparities between men and women due to discrimination?
Some of the disparity is due to experience differences, differences economists regard as legitimate in accounting for wage differentials since they constitute workers human capital. Despite the tremendous increase in women working, women and men still have different amounts of accumulated labor market experience. Educational attainment for women and men in the labor market now is about equal, though they still do have somewhat different majors, with more men in science, and more women in social work, for example. According to the Council for Economic Advisers, about one-third of the gross wage gap is accounted for by these differences in skill and experience. Some of the disparity is due to different occupational and industry distributions. We dont know how much of that is choice, and how much of that is discrimination. Do women look and see that most nurses are women and say, I want to be a nurse? Is that a free choice? Or if it happened that they saw just as many engineers to be women, would they say, Id like to be an engineer? It is hard to know whether those kinds of institutional and cultural patterns really represent free choice. MM: So the portion of earnings disparity attributed to discrimination
does not include job segmentation? The second major way is promotion and assignment. When you are brought in and hired, are you brought in to a job that is stereotypically female or one that is stereotypically male, or an integrated one? They tend to have different wages. Jobs that are predominantly female tend to pay less. In a big corporation, the human resources office has a lot of discretion as to where to assign you. When you look at a large corporation, you will typically see different jobs for different groups. Front office workers will often be white women. Back office workers will often be women of color. The blue collar jobs, which often pay better, tend to be male. These workers may all be high school graduates with similar skills, and they could have been placed anywhere. Yet they do seem to get placed in the different jobs that are stereotypically held by different groups and have different wage rates. Another way is through promotion possibilities. You could be in an integrated work occupation, but find that women and men are promoted at different rates. Yet another way is the comparable worth, or pay equity, issue. An entire occupation may have a lower pay rate simply because women or minorities do them, not because of the skill level in the job. MM: How do different burdens for childcare and household work affect
the relative economic status of men and women? Other things are more debatable: Does it mean that women are less good workers, that they are more distracted and less productive? Because women have this disproportionate responsibility, do they want to be closer to home and spend less travel time, so they have fewer options and wind up with lower paying jobs? Another way that it can affect them is the employer thinks: Oh, this is a young woman, she is going to have a child, therefore, she wont stick with me, therefore, I better not give her any training or promote her. The stereotypes based on womens usual family responsibilities are also an important source of discrimination against women. In fact, when you compare women and men on the same job with the same job tenure, women are not more likely to leave, and they dont take more time off for illness. For the same level of job and the same seniority, women and men tend to be very similar in their behavior on the job. But this stereotype is strong: Oh, a woman, shell quit. One thing Im concerned about is the idea that because you have family responsibilities, you are doomed to not do as well on the job, or youll never get ahead I think that is not true. Many men and women who take their family responsibilities seriously are very successful at work, and do get promoted and do get raises. Ive always been uncomfortable with this topic, because I think people almost believe there is nothing a woman can do about this. There are things that people can do to make this better, not the least of which is sharing household tasks better and sharing child-rearing responsibilities between men and women better. It helps also to be in a union, it helps to be in a workplace that does pay people fairly, it helps to speak up and say you want more money. MM: The trend is for the earnings disparity between women and men
to be closing. Why is that taking place? An important part of the progress in equal opportunity is attributable to our laws. Title IX affects higher education and it requires colleges and universities to make all of their programs equally available to men and women. We think of Title IX as relating to sports, but it also helped to open programs in law, medicine, science, engineering, so on. Along with the laws and those new opportunities, attitudes and culture are changing. Women are working more, and I think a lot of that is voluntary in the sense that women are saying, I am going to be working all of my life, Im going to organize my life so that I can make sure that I do have an income. Im going to train, get an education. Im going to plan to work. Women are dropping out of the workforce much less often when they have children, working more consistently through the lifecycle than they used to. A lot of it is women choosing to become more economically independent. Some of it also is basic economics. If womens wages are rising relative to mens, that is a signal to go into the market. The price signal is: work more. MM: In broad outlines, what are a handful of your preferred policy
prescriptions to close the earnings disparity between men and women? I think stronger enforcement of equal employment opportunity laws is also important. We are spending much less per capita enforcing those laws than we did when they got on the books. The population has grown, the workforce has grown, and we havent even restored the real dollars we had in those programs before 1980. We need improvements in family friendly benefits. Child care should be made pretty much universally available. It should be very publicly subsidized, maybe as much as public schools are subsidized, so that the child care barrier the restriction of not being able to find child care, or having to earn enough to be able to pay for quality child care would not restrict women from working. There are dozens of others. Particularly important would be increased unionization. Weve done a study that shows unions tend to help all women and minority males more than white males, on average. It brings up their wages more. Again, I think that is because unions are based on equal treatment. More bureaucratic workplaces, like public sector or unionized workplaces, will be workplaces where typically there will be a smaller wage gap. |
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There are so many women still at the bottom of the labor market, if we could have a really decent minimum wage, it would help women disproportionately. |
Most people would like to believe that women now receive equal pay for the same job, because of internal labor market rules and procedures requiring equal treatment, but I don't think that is quite true. | |