Stuff You Should Know - How the Gender Pay Gap Works

Episode Date: April 12, 2016

The gender pay gap is the amount of time into the next year a woman must work to earn as much as a man did the previous year. And it's narrowing at a snail's pace. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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from HowStuffWorks.com. Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W. Chuck Bryant and Jerry. So it's Stuff You Should Know. Oh, is this coming out on Equal Pay Day? I don't think so. Well, Equal Pay Day may have come and gone by now,

but it was April 12th, 2016. That's right. And do you remember when we did our This Day in History Weirdo series, our video series? That was pretty great. It was a little odd. It was lynch-y-in. It was.

But one of the ones that we did was on Lily Ledbetter. Yeah. And I think it was on Equal Pay Day. I think I remember it. But we mentioned Lily Ledbetter. For sure. But Equal Pay Day, for those of you not in the know, is a day in the United States where working women who work full-time year-round would

have to work until to get the equal amount of pay that their male counterparts got for the year before. Right. So it is 2016. So take our pay for 2015, and well, don't take our pay. We want to keep that. But take a man's pay, a real man's pay from 2015, and a woman in the same position would have to work.

I mean, it changes every year, right? The date? If the amount of pay changes or the pay disparity changes. Right. But the significance of that date would be like a woman has to work until April, whatever, the following year to make as much as the man made in the previous year. Right. I think I just basically said the same thing you said.

Sure. Just in a weird way. And this is nothing new, actually, this idea that there is a disparity, a pay gap, if you will, between men and women in the United States. And actually, it's around the world. And the idea behind it is that women's work is just inherently less valued than men's work. And there's a lot of debate over this.

Yeah. Barack Obama in the State of the Union Address in Don't Remember the Year said, it might have been his last one, where he said women make 79% of what men make. And that's not okay. We need to do something about that. That kind of sounded like Obama. Thanks. Man, look at you.

I looked up for a minute and I was like, is President Obama in the room? You really did look up. You guys couldn't see it, but Chuck really did look up. That was good. The National Committee on Pay Equity is who began holding Equal Pay Day in 1996. But apparently was it in 1950, is when they started kind of gathering data on this? Yeah. I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics really started looking at it hard in the 50s.

But the pay disparity goes back way further than that. Yeah. Basically, to the beginning of the country. Yeah. So when people started working and earning money. Sure. And when women were even allowed to work. We need to do an episode just on wage labor and the origin of it and the history of it.

It's super fascinating, interesting. So go back in time, some things used to be a lot worse, believe it or not. Women earned 30 cents on the dollar in the early at the dawn of America when we were farming mainly during the Industrial Revolution. Things got a little bit better about 50% up to 50%. But here's the distressing thing. In 1963, Congress passed the Equal Pay Act. And since then, it was about 60% for a little while.

But in the 80s, it climbed up to 75%. And then 30 years later, it's only climbed up 4%. Yeah. It's basically stagnated. Yeah. It's very much leveled off. And the sad thing is, is what you're seeing then is as men's wages grow, women's wages aren't growing then.

And it's a big deal. It's a big problem because women are losing out on a tremendous amount of money over their lifetimes just for what seems to be gender discrimination. And I want to say now, before anybody just loses their mind, there are a lot of theories behind this. Yes. And gender discrimination is one of them. But none of them are actually proven necessarily.

No. And like most things, I think it's probably a combination of many, many things. Most likely. But as I was saying, whatever the cause, women are losing out on a lot of money. So for example, Chuck, in 2011, a 25-year-old woman earned about $5,000 less per year than her male counterpart. And this is just woman who worked full-time year-round, man who worked full-time year-round at age 25.

And in $5,000, you're like, yeah, that's a lot. You can see a lot of movies with $5,000. You can. You can set it up over the woman's career, and by the time she makes it to 65, she will have lost out on $430,000 in wages compared to her male counterpart. Yeah. That remains consistent throughout her career. That's a lot of dough.

That's a lot of movies. And these are white women. It gets much worse if you go across the races. An African-American woman, the figure dips to 60%, 60.5%. Hispanic female is even worse. And by the way, we're going to say male and female because we're talking about studies here. Yeah.

Layoff. 54%. 54.6% for Hispanic women. And only Asian women did better than white women with 83.5% of what their white male counterparts made. Yeah. And eye-openingly, if you look at the earners in the United States, white men are not the top.

Asian men are actually the top earners, they earn, on average, in 2014, 113.5% more than white men. Really? Uh-huh. Interesting. And there's, I want to say something too also, the equal payday where a woman would have to work to to make the wages, that's a white woman, would have to work to April 12th. If you are an African-American woman, you would have to work until June to make what

the average, or the median pay of a white man for the year before. Yeah. A Latina woman all the way into October. Yeah. So it's like, it almost, I mean, it's almost like twice as long. Right. All right. So here is, here's how it's determined, and this is one of the problems with trying to

get behind the reasons, because it's one thing to talk about this stuff, but what, unless you can make change and help this out, then it's just talking about it, like, to make a difference, you need to really understand the underlying problems. Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. But I think step one is what's being done now, and has been done since 1996, shining a spotlight on it.

Sure. Absolutely. And I think step one is being undertaken still, that we're trying to understand it. But yeah, it's definitely, it's definitely not settled, like, here's the problem. Right. Yeah. So one of the problems in trying to, is data and getting really good data, the way they get the pay gap figure, is they take all the women working full-time year-round, find their

median salary, it's not an average, median is in the middle, and then they take that same calculation for men, and they say, well, subtract those two, and this is the wage gap. Okay. So that's actually the earnings ratio, right? So when you see something like, women make 79% of what men make, that's very frequently in this article, does it all over the place, it's called the wage gap. That's not the wage gap. That's the earnings ratio.

Okay. The wage gap would be 21%. Yeah. Yeah. You know what I mean? Yeah. But it's confusing, like, because if you think about it, you're like, wow, the wage gap is 79%.

And the wage gap is 21%. The earnings ratio is 79%. Yes. But people tend to use that bigger number because it's more eye-popping when you're a media mogul. Right. You know what I mean? Yeah, absolutely.

So a lot of people say that just that calculation is too broad to draw a conclusion, and it probably is. Oh, yeah. You need better data for sure. Yeah. And this article even points out that you can't take that one statistic and say, this is all you need to know about pay inequality. Like, I don't think anyone's saying that.

No. Well, dummies. So but the one thing that does though, unfortunately, is it gives critics a chance to poke holes in it and dismiss it outright. You know? Yeah, because they're saying, okay, let's take a step back here. You're taking the median salary for all of the men who worked in the United States full time in 2014.

Yeah, for all professions, all jobs. Yeah. And then you're taking the median salary for all the women who worked full time in the United States throughout the entirety of 2014. Right. And that's comparing apples to oranges, they say. Right. And there's a number of reasons why they say, you're actually comparing apples to oranges.

There's a lot of different jobs that are being done. There's a lot of varying educational backgrounds. There's a lot of different experience backgrounds. And you just can't compare the two. So let's not talk about this again. Okay. Right. Now, what this, the follow up should be, so let's drill down further and get better

data and talk about it even in a more detailed way. That's nice. Which some people are doing, which we'll get to. This was fascinating to me about job clustering or occupational clustering. I know about job clustering, you know what I mean? Forty-five percent of all working women are employed in just 20 fields. That's crazy. It is crazy.

If you look at men, about 30 to 35 percent work in the top 20 occupations for males. Right. Which are, you know, we're talking a lot of times managerial and supervision roles. But also roles that are more physically demanding too and may pay more. Yeah. Or more dangerous sometimes. Yeah. Like they make the point that you'll probably find a man working as like a long haul trucker,

although we've heard from quite a few women who are doing it. Large march. Have you not seen Peewee's big adventure? Have you seen the new one yet? Not yet. Is it good? I haven't seen it yet. I can't wait.

I'm kind of afraid to. I did see stitches the clown though. And it's got like a one star rating. And usually on Netflix that means like stay away for real. But for you it means dig in. Well, I read about it online too. It made me kind of interested. I don't think I know what that is.

It's an Irish black comedy horror movie about a clown that was murdered that comes back from the dead to take his revenge in the most gruesome and gory ways possible. They might as well call that tailor made for Josh Clark. But it's hilarious too. Yeah. Like it's meant to be tongue in cheek. We'll have to check that out. Yeah.

We were talking about how some women are in the trucking industry. That's right. But the cluster of occupations for women generally speaking pay less than the cluster of occupations that men prefer. Yeah. Here's the thing. When you take a woman in the trucking industry salary and compare it to a man in the trucking industry salary, it's still going to be less.

And then conversely, when you look at a man who has entered a female dominated field say like nursing, they're still going to probably make more than their female counterparts. Yeah. Elementary school teachers, human resources administrators, the pay gap is only 1%. But it's still there. No. Exactly. It's still there.

Like literally if they compared same experience, same job, working the same amount of hours. Just always across the board, men will still make more even like you said, if it's nursing, which historically people might think is a job that more women prefer. What you're talking about the truck is called occupational gender segregation. And that in and of itself is a big problem here. It's saying we here in the United States really tend to value the work that women do less than the work that men do just by saying these jobs that are traditionally women, women staffed are just traditionally paid less.

That whole field is. Yeah. And it's not like the 1930s and 40s and 50s where it's like, you just go be a secretary now and we'll take care of the business. But it's still there to a certain degree. I mean, there are more women who work as secretaries than men. But I just want to get back to that stat real quick when you were talking about the even when you compared apples to apples, men still made more.

I mean, it's like, you know, two to four percent, five hundred and thirty four occupations tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics and seven out of the five hundred and thirty four paid women more than men. Yeah. Seven. Seven. And apparently the most lucrative if you're a woman, you want to make more than a man. You should be a respiratory therapist because their salaries are six point four percent

higher than men's in their field. Right. Should we take a break? Yes. Let's work with more staggering stats. On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and

dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal?

No, it was hair. Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friends beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy, blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast, Frosted Tips with Lance Bass. The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay, I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh, God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh, man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep, we know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide you through life step by step.

Oh, not another one. Kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking, this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen. So we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

So Chuck, you said, um, if you compare apples to apples, it's a few percent. The Bureau of Labor Statistics, um, they like to throw a little wrench in the works. They surveyed like 534 occupations, you said. And when they do their statistics, they use weekly salaries rather than, um, annual salaries and they actually come up with less of a pay gap. But one of the things that internet has given us, one of the great things is crowdsourcing. And there are a lot of companies that accrue data as almost like a byproduct or maybe the real under the table product of what they're doing.

One of those companies is Glassdoor, where you can go look for job listings, but also rate your employer rate the company. And it's basically the masses, um, reviewing employers, you know, it's a pretty cool idea. And Glassdoor did a study in 2016, just came out this month as a matter of fact. And they surveyed 505,000 employees. The last Bureau of Labor Statistics thing I saw was like 50,000 people. This is like half a million employees and their salary reports and found that if you compared women who were equally qualified in the same position at the same company as

a man, they still made on average 5% less. And among computer scientists, which I guess is developers and stuff, the pay gap was the worst 28%. For a woman in the same position, equally qualified at the same company as a man. And this is like brand new data that just came out. Well, one of the reasons they say, um, this is ongoing is that, uh, maybe women don't know that they're not making as much as their male counterparts. Because we still are in a, in a, I guess society or at least a work environment most times

where you're not only not encouraged to talk about your pay, but some companies like prohibit it. Yeah. So you can't talk about your pay exactly with your fellow employees. Right. And I mean, I guess as draconian as it is, you can kind of understand where the company's coming from because they want to get away paying their workforce as little as possible. So they don't want their workforce comparing salaries and realizing that people are being

paid substantially different stuff. Right? True. Still, it's mean to say like, no, you can't talk about your salary that we pay you to this other person, be quiet, you know? Yeah. And there's been a lot of reform that we'll talk about it as far as that's concerned. But that's a big thing is there appears to be among a lot of women, this idea, and I'm

sure a lot of men too don't realize this as well, that there is a gender pay disparity. Yeah. And part of the reason why is because of a lack of transparency. Yeah. Last year, last May, those women named Lauren Voswinkle got on Twitter and said, here's a new hashtag, talk pay, T-A-L-K-P-A-Y. And said, tweet out your job titles, how experienced you are, where you've been in life and what your salary is, and then at talk pay, Anand came out, which is probably smarter way,

it's just anonymous, and about, well, there were a lot of tweets, but most of them were, of course, people just, you know, complaining, and I'm sure there were plenty of trolls too, but just, you know, complaining about the situation, which is fine. But about 1300 actually tweeted their actual salary, and a lot of people say this is kind of one of the first steps is at least getting the information out there. So a woman might say, wait a minute, you make $4,000 more than me for no reason at all. That's right. And there are websites too, where you can compare things.

There's one called PayScale, and one called Comparably, it's a little awkward title. It's beautiful. It's like seller door. It makes sense. I believe you mentioned some of the things that are doing, that the government is doing. President Obama signed an executive order in 2014. So that's when, as you say, the union address must come? Oh, was it?

Probably. He barred federal contractors from punishing an employee for comparing their salary, and a memorandum on those same contractors to submit data, compensation data, if there was any, to see if there was any wage discrimination going on. Right. So if you worked at a company that was a government contractor, and you're a woman who suddenly got an unexpected raise in pay, you may have had something to do with that, maybe so. California actually also is leaning the way on this.

What is his name? Jerry Brown, the governor, the second time around. He signed into law this act that prevents companies from punishing employees for talking about their pay, their salaries, and it first mandated same pay for the same work, which is actually the language in the Civil Rights Act, Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, says you have to pay people the same pay for the same work, regardless of their gender, of their race, of their religion, any of that. They still have to get the same pay, and women are protected by that as well.

But you know, that was 1963, I think, and the specificity of the language, same work for same pay, it's so specific that it's just easy to get around, you just say, well, it's not the same work. Right. I'm not going to give these people the same title or whatever. With the California legislation kind of opened that and said, you have the same pay for the substantially same work. Right.

Yeah, and the Equal Pay Act of 1963 specifically says employers may not pay unequal wages to men and women who perform jobs that require substantially equal skill, effort, and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working conditions within the same establishment. And then it goes down to breakdown what is defined as skill, effort, responsibilities, working conditions, and establishment. So it definitely gets way more specific, which is good. And apparently, the reason why California is leading the way on this is because Silicon Valley is one of the worst offenders out of all of them.

Oh, yeah? Yeah. That's where that gets. And just California. Sure. They also signed a $15 minimum wage into law recently too. Yeah. Should we talk more about Lilly Ledbetter?

Yeah, because I mean, if you want to talk wage equality law, you've got to talk Lilly Ledbetter. So she worked for Goodyear Tire and over the years, I think she worked there for 19 years, she was given low rankings and annual performance in salary reviews pretty consistently in low raises compared to her fellow employees. So she sued them and a jury initially said, you win $3.5 million. And then a district court... Goodyear was like, what?

We can't afford that. Goodyear, I'm sorry, a district judge later said, let's reduce that from $3.5 million to $360,000. And Goodyear was like, still? Well, they did because they appealed. Basically what they did was they cited a Title VII provision that said, any discrimination complaint needs to be made within 180 days of the bad deed, basically, of the conduct. Yes, they give you your first paycheck and it's discriminatory pay, then you have 180

days. So this lady worked for 18.5 years longer than she could have submitted a Title VII complaint, which is BS. That's right. And they basically eventually said, well, what you can do is you can only sue for the last 180 days worth of discriminatory conduct. And then it went to the Supreme Court of the United States and she lost by a 5-4 vote basically holding to that claim that it was time sensitive.

Yeah, it's just... I mean, the idea that you get your first paycheck and you just immediately go, well, this is discriminatory. Well, yeah, you don't even know that. I've got to sit right. This woman worked for 19 years without realizing it. And the reason why she finally did come to understand it was because a coworker passed her an anonymous note telling her so at a retirement basically.

So she had been played for a sat basically by Goodyear as far as the lower courts are concerned for 19 years. But because 19 years earlier in 1979, she didn't immediately recognize that she was getting less pay. So like you have to basically be Inspector Clouseau the first time you get paid to get a successful Title VII complaint cleared by the courts. It's just ridiculous. In dissent, I love reading the Supreme Court like when they actually write why they find

it in favor or not. Yeah. It's really interesting stuff. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg in her dissent called it out of tune with the realities of wage discrimination in quote, a cramped interpretation of Title VII incompatible with the statute's broad remedial purpose in quote. So basically like the whole purpose of this, like you're just shirking the whole purpose of this thing to begin with.

Yeah. The purpose isn't to protect corporations from lawsuits. Right. It's so that you keep employees from getting screwed over by their employers. So again, Obama came in with another thing and he signed into law the Lilly Ledbetter Act which said, let's take the 180 days thing, but that's from the last discriminatory paycheck. So she could have found out at her retirement and gotten her last paycheck and had six months to sue for the whole shebang, her whole career basically and probably would

have won had that law been in effect at the time. All right. Well, let's take another break and we'll talk a little bit more about this right after this. On the podcast, Hey Dude the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show Hey Dude bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s.

We lived it and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. It's a podcast packed with interviews, co-stars, friends and nonstop references to the best decade ever. Do you remember going to blockbuster? Do you remember Nintendo 64? Do you remember getting frosted tips? Was that a cereal? No, it was hair.

Do you remember AOL instant messenger and the dial up sound like poltergeist? So leave a code on your best friend's beeper because you'll want to be there when the nostalgia starts flowing. Each episode will rival the feeling of taking out the cartridge from your Game Boy blowing on it and popping it back in as we take you back to the 90s. Listen to Hey Dude the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Lance Bass, host of the new iHeart podcast Frosted Tips with Lance Bass.

The hardest thing can be knowing who to turn to when questions arise or times get tough or you're at the end of the road. Ah, okay. I see what you're doing. Do you ever think to yourself, what advice would Lance Bass and my favorite boy bands give me in this situation? If you do, you've come to the right place because I'm here to help. This I promise you.

Oh God. Seriously, I swear. And you won't have to send an SOS because I'll be there for you. Oh man. And so my husband, Michael. Um, hey, that's me. Yep. We know that Michael and a different hot sexy teen crush boy band are each week to guide

you through life step by step, not another one, kids, relationships, life in general can get messy. You may be thinking this is the story of my life. Just stop now. If so, tell everybody, yeah, everybody about my new podcast and make sure to listen so we'll never, ever have to say bye, bye, bye. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts.

All right. So, uh, what are the reasons behind this? Tell me now. They're myriad. They are myriad. They're myriad. The thing is, critics of the gender pay gap say, this is not discrimination. Like employers are not saying like, you're a woman, I'm going to just, you know, treat

you poorly compared to your male counterparts. That doesn't happen. It may happen, but it's not happening on a systemic scale. But if you look at the explanations for this and economists have investigated this and thought long and hard about it and argued over it and really drilled down into it rather than stop talking about it, right? It would be, what's still going on is still ultimately gender discrimination. It's just not this nefarious handlebar mustache version of it that people look for because

everyone wants a smoking gun or a gotcha moment, you know what I mean? But when you look at the explanations and the reasons behind purportedly the gender discrimination gap or the gender pay gap, it is still discrimination based on gender most likely and race too. We shouldn't, we don't mean to undermine that or diminish that at all. It's even worse based on race, you know? For sure. There was a Freakonomics podcast episode.

Mr. Dubner did a great episode in January of this year that I listened to and he got, and you know, Freakonomics, it seems like they kind of get to the real reasons behind things. This was called The True Story of the Gender Pay Gap and he sat down with a few people. One of them was Claudia Golden. She's an econ professor at Harvard. So the long and short of it is after reading and listening to this was that Claudia Golden and others economists have tried to compare apples to apples more and found that there

are many, many reasons why there is a pay gap but they can't prove that discrimination is the leading cause and they think that it's probably one of the minor causes. Well, yeah, it's most likely not a major cause at all. Like when you look at that, that mind boggling 21% gap, 79% ratio, when you start comparing apples to apples, most of it vanishes. But there is a mysterious like 3, 4, 5% that can't be accounted for by things like experience or educational background or what have you. Well, yeah, and that's 3 to 5%, I mean, that's too much, you know.

Any percent is too much. Like if there is gender discrimination going on. Zero percent. Exactly. Exactly. Thank you. You just said it so succinctly. So one of the theories that people say is that men are better at bargaining for their

salary and asking for raises and getting tough in that room and demanding the raise. And valuing their work more. Yeah, and valuing their work. And there may be some truth to that, but this economist from Harvard says, well, if that were true, then you would be able to look at men and women right out of college with the same degree, getting the same job. The men should be making more money. And she said, when you look at that, they actually make almost the same thing.

Right. The gender pay gap is less earlier on in the career. Right. And even if there is that small bit right there at the beginning, if you start out lower, your raises over time and your promotions over time are going to be lower too. And that can actually accrue and make the gap wider by the end of the career, which is what you see. Right?

Yeah. And what she contends in this other woman, Ann Marie Slaughter, who is a public policy scholar who wrote a book called Unfinished Business. And Mr. Dudner sat down with her too. And they kind of peg it down to, it seems like two things. Ann Marie Slaughter calls one of them the care penalty. Yeah. And it's not just having a baby and staying home with a baby.

It's women are more likely to care for their parents when they get old, a sibling that needs help, like, you know, they have cancer and they need to come live with you. And I need to take time off work to care for my brother's sister. Yeah. And when you have children, when you have kids, there is most assuredly a care penalty because they found that men sometimes work even harder after they have a baby. Right. They're staying away from home.

Maybe staying away from home or maybe it hits them like, I need to work harder to make more money now, whereas women fall to more like, you know, I want to care for this child. So I'm going to select a job that will pay less because it's either part time or it offers more flexibility. And then I saw another interview with Golden, right? Is her name? Yeah. And she pointed out that if women are more likely to get a job that's closer to home,

that's more fulfilling, say, than something a man's looking for, then there's going to be more competition for those jobs, which is going to drive wages down just from supply and demand theory. Yeah. She calls it temporal flexibility. Yeah. Because men tend to favor income growth way more than women do, whereas women tend to favor temporal flexibility more.

Right. I want to be near the house. Yeah. So I'm not stuck in my car, so I can be around my family more, so I can be a better family member basically overall, which is, you know, it seems like men don't care as much about that. Right. So the most overt example of this is childcare, where especially in the U.S., you're lucky

to get X number of days off as a father. As a woman, you get a guaranteed three months off, 12 weeks off by federal law. Men there's no guarantee whatsoever. So you may get zero off, and that reflects this, again, this gender bias, if not outright gender discrimination that does tend to set some women back, because even if they're just out for three months or something, they're missing out of the flow of their career. Right. You couldn't go on that work trip, so we're going to send, you know, Josh.

Right. Exactly. Yeah. So they're missing out on future promotions, future raises, and future experience, and all of those things count for future income wages. Yeah. I want to rephrase what I just said, that men don't care as much about being a good family member.

What I meant to say is men might have a different outlook on what is being a better family member, and in that case, it's going out and working harder to make more money. Oh, yeah. Does that make sense? Sure. Because I get roughed up for being too hard on white men. Right. I do.

We get emails all the time. No, I know. Chuck, why do you hate white men? I don't know. I don't hate white men. And it's not self-loathing. No, I love myself. Yeah.

And I love you. Thanks, man. Man, it's just got warm in here. It did. So temporal flexibility is one of the big things. And actually, Golden says that if women were allowed to work flexible hours of their choosing, then she believes that the gender pay gap might actually vanish. Right.

Well, and Anne-Marie Slaughter said, if you take the other big one as the care penalty, if you take that off the table and you don't have any caregiving obligations at all, it climbs to about 95%. But there's still that 5%. Right. You know? Well, where is that coming from? I think it's got to be discrimination.

I can't remember her name, but I was reading an interview in the Atlantic with a Cornell economist who studies this. And she was saying that if you look at Europe, they're much more even or equal with their paternity leave and their maternity leave, actually. And I don't know that it's old enough to have had a demonstrable effect. But I wonder if having something like that here in the US, where I don't remember the countries she cited, some Scandinavian country, obviously. But the men are given, like a family, is given an allotted amount of paternity or maternity

time. And X amount of it has to be paternity. And the dad can either use it or not. But the mom can't take that on. So it's kind of like, you're going to spend some time with your kids or not. Right. It's up to you. And so there's a lot more guys taking that than there was before, and so there's a lot

more equality and caregiving. If it's going to be, which way is America going to go? Is it going to be women need to spend less time at home and get into the workforce more or men need to spend more time at home caring for the kids and make the whole thing more of an equal thing? And then maybe that'll erase some of the pay gap. For sure, in that same Freakonomics episode, they kind of closed with asking Ms. Golden what kind of legislation, how can you fix this?

More laws, more laws. And she had a pretty good idea. She was like, you need to start at the school level, because you send your kids off to school. What happens is they get out at two or three o'clock, and unless you want your kid to be a latchkey kid, someone's going to need to be home with them. And then they're a lot of times out for a couple of months during the summer. So someone needs to be there then. So she argues for extending school days and school, the school year, such that it doesn't

require one of the family members to have to take off work or take a part-time job. For months. Yeah, instead of a full-time job. Well, I remember when I was a little kid, my mom was home until I entered, I guess, kindergarten. Yeah, my mom quit teaching to raise all three of her kids up until I was like 15, and then she went back to work as a teacher. And then so, I mean, how much further back in their careers were our moms from staying

home? Hugely. You should not be penalized for raising two stellar sons. Yeah, and I have to say, and a stellar daughter, is kind of personal, but like, my parents got divorced. And so, divorce proceedings can get ugly, and a woman in a divorce court says, well, I took off like 18 years to raise my children, and now I'm going back to school at a much lower wage than I would have, because like, that needs to be valued.

And it's tough, man, you know? It is. It is tough. Like we said, if there's any percentage that's based on gender discrimination or race discrimination, that's too much. I agree. Yeah, I don't know what to do. What the answer is.

And I guess the reason why we can't say here's the answer, because we don't fully understand which of these factors it is or what combination, you know? Yeah, we should just go sit down with all our fellow podcasters and talk about what we all make. Right, we should. There's something else I noticed too, Chuck. If we keep going at the same rate, so there's actually a huge jump from 1980 to 1994, 35 percent of the pay gap that had been there before vanished.

And it was because women that had entered the workforce starting in the 60s gained the kind of experience to where like their wages were reflecting those of men. That's one theory behind it. But then after that, it stagnated. It's been stagnant pretty much the last decade or so. And apparently at the pace that it's going now, 2058 is when parity for white women will be reached. It's very frequently called like women won't reach gender parity until 2058.

That's white women. If you are African-American, it'd be sometime toward the end of the next century for an African-American woman to reach parity with white men. And around the world, this is an issue as well. Apparently women around the world make on average half of what men do. Around the world, half. Half, Eddie. Yeah.

Half. Yeah. And so the average woman in the world by 2133 would reach pay parity. Well, I have one final stat here just depending on what state you live in. It's going to make a big difference. Washington, D.C. leads the way as far as the smallest gender pay gap. Their earnings ratio, women are at 90 percent of men. Okay.

Georgia, our own state of Georgia is 15th on the list at 82 percent. And if you are a woman living in Louisiana, you have the distinction of living in the worst state in the United States at a scant 65 percent earnings ratio. Wow. Pretty low. So 35 percent pay gap there. Yeah. Wow.

First thanks to, I was able to lean on that Freakonomics episode so heavily to Steven Dubner. That was a really good episode. Yeah. That was nice of him to send you a gold thumb drive with it on. That was very nice. You guys got it. S-dubs.

Yeah. Well, if you want to learn more about this kind of stuff, you know, gender pay gaps and pay disparity and wages, that kind of thing that tickles economists' fantasies, you can type those words into the search bar at howstuffworks.com, since I said search bar, it's time for listener mail. I think it was a little clumsy in that one. So apologies, people. What?

I just felt it was a little clumsy in that episode. That's how I felt in the tornadoes episode. Really? There was a lot of points I wanted to get across the right way, and that's usually when I find myself saying things exactly the wrong way. Yeah. Well, you corrected yourself on that one thing, right? Well, I tried.

All right, I'm going to call this nostalgia, immediate nostalgia from Jason Tardy. Don't be late. Hey, guys. I was recently listening to the nostalgia show while going on a trail run. I didn't get a chance to finish it, and later I went to listen to the podcast again. I started over from the beginning, and I skipped ahead to find where I left off, and I was hit with instant nostalgia of that trail run. Certain phrases I heard, you say, during my run were tied with images of the beautiful

trail. Every time I skipped ahead, I saw a different image and could remember exactly where I was when I'd previously heard you say that phrase. It brought up warm feelings of happiness of the trail while listening to you guys. I don't know if that's nostalgia. It's a kashi. Thanks for everything you do. I wish you all the best.

You've been a great distraction. While training for my marathon, driving long hours on the road as a performance artist and keeping me sane during the craziness of having my wife go through breast cancer while still keeping the house clean with two kids. So Jason Tardy of Auburn, Maine, hats off to you, sir, and best of luck to your wife, and good luck, Karen, for those kids. Yeah, best wishes, guys. Tardy family.

Yeah. We'll instantly nostalgicize you whenever you want. Nice job. If you want to get in touch with us like Jason did, you can tweet to us at S-Y-S-K podcast. You can join us on facebook.com slash stuff you should know. You can send us an email to stuffpodcast.howstuffworks.com and as always join us at our home on the web, stuffyoushouldknow.com. For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit howstuffworks.com.

On the podcast, Hey Dude, the 90s called David Lasher and Christine Taylor, stars of the cult classic show, Hey Dude, bring you back to the days of slip dresses and choker necklaces. We're going to use Hey Dude as our jumping off point, but we are going to unpack and dive back into the decade of the 90s. We lived it, and now we're calling on all of our friends to come back and relive it. Listen to Hey Dude, the 90s called on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Listen to Frosted Tips with Lance Bass on the iHeart radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever

you listen to podcasts.