Canadian Association for Equality

It’s high time the science and statistics behind the supposed gender pay gap were re-examined objectively, rather then simply assuming the data fit preconceived dogma. Pseudoscience and grandiose generalizations without the smallest attempt at evidentiary support can crop up in many areas, not only in religion, alternative medicine and claims of the paranormal. Wherever it does it ought to be dealt with critically and swiftly.

I’m talking about the sort of claims made by the likes of the Ontario’s Equal Pay Coalition and its Chair Mary Cornish. In an editorial from just a few months ago, Cornish writes

for every dollar a male employee earns, a woman takes home a measly 71 cents…female high school graduates earn 27 per cent less than male graduates. Female university graduates earn 16 per cent less than male graduates.

As generally happens, these statics treat working men and working women as two separate but homogenous groups, steamrolling over the specific job characteristics and actual work duties of individual people. Cornish showers praise on the Pay Equity Act which:

required employers to evaluate, without bias, jobs done mainly by women and men and to pay equal wages and benefits for comparable worth.

Well that makes sense, right? Except who decides what work is to be considered equal worth? Let’s dig a little deeper and move from the Editorial to the website of the Equal Pay Coalition, where we read

The [Pay Equity] Act requires employers to take positive steps to pay “women’s work” on the same basis as “men’s work.” The legislation has had a very visible effect: Ontario’s wage gap between male and female full-time annual earnings has narrowed significantly since 1987 when the Ontario government first passed a proactive pay equity law.

So much for treating men and women as individuals. Instead, female workers are lumped into a “women’s work” category while male workers are lumped into a “men’s work” category. The goal is then to throw economics to the wind and socially engineer pay rates in whatever fashion can have the math works out at the end of the day with the average employee performing “women’s work” making the same as one performing “men’s work.”

But as we’ll explore in the upcoming parts of this post series, workers make conscientious choices to trade in power, satisfaction, fulfillment and family for higher salaries. The result is that females – choosing lower paying jobs on average – have been shown to display a much higher level of overall career and life satisfaction by several different metrics.

167 offshore workers - all men - died in the Piper Alpha tragedy on July 6 1988 due to a gas leak

Here is Job Economics 101. What do the following jobs have in common? Jobs that no one wants (think garbage men), that are most likely to kill you (think police men, fire men, cab drivers and those working oil riggers), that have high anxiety (think corporate lawyers), that expose you to the elements (think delivery men), that involve unpleasant environments (think security guards), that are risky (think venture capitalists) and that take you routinely away from the people you love (think fishermen). 1. These jobs generally pay higher, even if they otherwise involve similar skills and education to lower paying jobs, and 2. These jobs generally have “men” in the title and are overwhelmingly “dominated” by men.

As we’ll see, most statistics supporting the pay gap fail to control for any of these factors, usually averaging all employees in broad industries like “professional occupations in health” or “teachers and professors” or my favourite “judges, lawyers, psychologists, social workers, ministers of religion, and policy and program affiliates” and never getting more specific then “dentists” (general dentist, pediatric dentist, endodontist or prosthodontist?) or “university professor” (assistant, associate, full, tenured, cross-appointed, department head, or emeritus?)

After the posts are done in this short series, we’ll conclude with a very basic point: if controlled for all the same conditions women and men are making less there is a problem to be addressed. But if we’re re-engineering our economy so that the average woman can have her cake and eat it to that would be truly sexist.

We’ll discuss the statistics and sources on the gender pay gap but also on the rarely considered job satisfaction gap in the coming days. Meanwhile, chew over the above while watching a great video of Warren Farrell, author of The Myth of Male Power and Why Men Earn More, lecturing on the latter book and learn why, as Farrell so eloquently puts it: “getting higher pay meant giving up power for men.”

(the full 8 parts can be found starting here http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb_6v-JQ13Q)