Pay gap between men and women: according to a new report, it is much worse than what you heard

Every year, on Equal Pay Day, we learn that American women earn about 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. For many women of color, the number is lower – Black women earn about 63 cents per dollar compared to men, while Latin women earn 54 cents.

However, according to a report released Wednesday by the Institute for Policy Research on Women (IWPR), things are worse than these numbers suggest, a think tank that looks at public policy from a gender perspective. Wage gap measures generally compare the wages of men and women working full time in a given year, as noted by Emily Peck at HuffPost. But women are more likely to leave their full-time jobs to care for children or other family members.

To take this into account, the report's authors examined women's earnings over a 15-year period and compared them to men's. What they discovered was a pay gap almost twice as large as traditionally said: on average over 15 years, women earned only 49 cents for every dollar earned by men.

Men have of course lost their income after leaving the labor market. But women were much more likely to drop out – and when they did, the wage was more severe. According to the report, these inequities are essential to understanding the wage gap – and, ultimately, to closing it.

Traditional measures of the pay gap are missing the picture at a glance

"The figure commonly used to describe the wage ratio between men and women, namely that a woman earns 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man, minimizes the problem of unequal wages by leaving many workers excluded from the scene, "writers Stephen J. Rose, author. Economist and member of the Urban Institute, and Heidi I. Hartmann, founder of IWPR and economist-in-residence at American University, say in their report entitled "The job market remains a man" . More specifically, it excludes women who have fallen temporarily on the labor market, often to take care of the family.

To include these women, Rose and Hartmann tracked the individual earnings of women and men over three 15-year periods: 1968-82, 1983-97, and 2001-15. They used data from the Panel Study on Income Dynamics, which follows a nationally representative sample of Americans for many years. For the badysis, Rose and Hartmann included all the people who earned money in at least one of the three periods.

The discrepancies were blatant: between 1968 and 1982, women's earnings were 19% of those of men. Between 1983 and 1997, they rose to 38%. Between 2001 and 2015, they increased again, but not as much: during this 15-year period, women made 49% of what men earned.

The gaps are so important largely because women were much more likely to be absent from work. Between 2001 and 2015, 43% of women had one year without income, compared to only 23% of men.

Women also tend to be subject to a more severe wage penalty for leaving the labor market. The effect did not start right away: women and men who took a year off earned about 39% less during the years they worked than their counterparts who never took a break. But women who took 4 or more years of work earned 65% less than women who never took time. meanwhile, men who took the same time earned 57% less than men who worked without a shot.

The pay gap is also a "chasm"

One of the main reasons why women leave the labor force at a higher rate than men is that they are much more likely to be primary caregivers of children or sick parents. In a Pew survey conducted in 2013, 27% of mothers reported having already left their jobs to take care of a family member. Only 10% of fathers said the same thing. In a Pew survey conducted in 2016, women and men were about as likely to say that they had recently taken time off to care for a sick family member, but that women had taken a little more time than men. And women who took a leave were much more likely than men to say that they were the primary caregivers of their sick parent.

Another way to look at these gender differences is to compare men and women who leave the labor market. In a study conducted in 2004, only 2.4% of men aged 20 to 64 who were not working cited the care provided to their family members, compared to almost 39% of women who were not working, Nicholas Eberstadt, economist at the American Enterprise Institute. written earlier this year – and the numbers have changed little since. Eberstadt calls this gap the "gulf of care".

The work of Rose and Hartmann shows that, as Sarah Kliff de Vox writes, the pay gap between men and women is actually a child custody penalty – or maybe being just a custody penalty, women being more likely to badume the primary responsibility of all family members, not just children.

Some women, just like some men, choose to stay away from work to care for their children or other family members, and some find this care very rewarding. But whether they want it or not, women are more likely than men to have the hope of committing to providing needed care to a new or sick baby – in the 2016 Pew survey, 59 % of women said that taking care of their families was mainly the responsibility of women (it is interesting to note that only 29% of men agreed).

Meanwhile, paid family leave for many American workers is infinitesimal or non-existent, meaning that those who have to take care of a family member often have no choice but to leave their jobs. . And the fact that women incur a more severe penalty than men for taking a meaningful leave suggests that the 15-year pay gap is not limited to women's work.

As noted by Rose and Hartmann, paid family leaves, available and used by men and women, would probably help reduce the gap. The same is true of subsidies for the care of children and the elderly. As Peck points out in HuffPost, there are also less intuitive solutions, such as raising wages to get more people to work.

Whatever the solutions, Rose and Hartmann's report points out, however, that when we think about policies to close the wage gap, we can not just look at what men and women workers are earning in a given year. We need to look at men and women who are not working, why they are not working and how it affects their career in the long run.