49 Years After Kennedy Signed The Equal Pay Act, Women Still Earn 77 Cents To A Man’s Dollar

[Igel]

10. Let's take some women I know.

They're professors, Tier 1 university.

N was in the private sector. She fell 5 years behind her husband when he worked and she quit to stay at home with children. I know women who put their kids in daycare at 6 weeks. She didn't. Her choice. She decided to go back to work so she could divorce her husband.

N had her PhD, so decided to get a job as a professor. She has 10 years' seniority now. Her 9-month salary is average for faculty with 10 years' service in her college. She's got her obligatory steps (salary increases for service), she's got the average or slightly above average merit increases. Yet her average annual salary is below the average annual male salary. She'd have to have about 10 years' more seniority to hit the average for a male with 10 years' service.

If you're in engineering and hard sciences--rarely in other fields--you get extramural grants. They pay for your summer 3 months' salary. The university doesn't. Those depts are mostly staffed by men. One of the two males in her dept, adding salt to the wound, applied for and got a multi-year extramural grant. His salary includes the summer 9ths.

Where I teach high school the women's average salary is slightly below the average man's salary. The men are concentrated in coaching, in physical sciences, in math. Rare in language, life sciences, English. (A fair number in history.) Physical sciences, math, coaching have stipends. Biology doesn't. SpEd is mostly female--and they have a stipend, but it's smaller than the other stipends. This is based on availability of teachers in those fields. Not enough SpEd teachers, but more of those than math or physical science. (Coaching just requires longer hours, so they get additional pay.)

Educational attainment isn't enough. It matters what field it's in. How long is taken off for maternity leave, if any. How aggressively other opportunities are pursued.

Choices matter, even if the consequences aren't known. I've made a lot of choices that reduced my earnings over the years and my income as a male my age with my education is many $1000s lower than it should be. But it's because of my choices. I didn't know what the effects would be 20 years later, but there you have it.