Today, Explained - What women really want

Episode Date: April 2, 2019

To mark Equal Pay Day 2019, Vox’s Sarah Kliff reveals the very simple reason women earn less than men. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

I work in financial services and as sometimes happens, we were all out at a happy hour and one of the men on my team that I was supervising sort of let slip what he was making in base pay each year. And I remember just sort of stopping and kind of rewinding and like, what? He was making almost $20,000 more per year than I was. I remember just being completely floored. He wasn't more experienced. He wasn't older.

There wasn't any good reason, you know, especially considering that I was managing him and training him kind of in my footsteps. And I ended up going to the director of our department and I'll never forget, he looked at me and he said, unfortunately, that's just what the market demands that we pay you. If you can prove to me that the market would demand we pay you more, go for it. I remember having this glass shattering moment, realizing that the company had no interest in paying me what I was worth and that they were going to do whatever they could to pay me

the least amount that they could for as long as they could. That was a Today Explained listener who shared her story with us. And we asked for listener stories because today is Equal Pay Day. It is the day that women would have to work until to match what men earned in 2018. It changes a little bit every year. Which is to say that this year women would have had to have worked from January 2018 straight through today, April 2nd, 2019, to earn as much as men did in 2018. Yes. Which is to say things aren't getting that much better too quickly. It's to say the gender wage gap is alive and well. And it's not just

sexism behind it. Turns out there's a super specific reason we have a gender wage gap. Sarah Cliff, host of the Impact podcast here at Vox. How bad is the wage gap? Right now, women earn about 85% of what men earn. Why is it so alive and why is it so well in 2019? This is an answer that changes over time. You know, if we had been doing this interview, if podcasts existed in like the 1970s or so, we would have said that, well, women aren't in the labor force as much. And when they are, they don't have as good of an education. They don't get graduate degrees. Right. But a lot of those factors have actually faded away. Women get more graduate degrees than men at this point. Women's labor force participation has risen hugely over the past few decades. The one thing that really hasn't changed is this expectation that when

couples have children, it is the women who are going to step back and take care of them. And that expectation, it really seems to be at the heart of the wage gap that exists in 2019. Really? It's all about having children maternity leave? Yeah, there's one statistic I found that just really blew me away and drove this home. Women who don't have children,

they earn on average 96% of what men make. Almost closes the gap. Almost closes the gap. Damn. If you don't have children, they earn on average 96% of what men make. Almost closes the gap. Almost closes the gap. Damn. If you don't have kids, your earnings look a lot like your male counterparts. And that suggests a lot of what's going on with the wage gap is really a motherhood penalty. Is the larger problem that someone's got to care for the kids and workplaces aren't that flexible?

Is that the problem? I think that's certainly a chunk of what's going on, is that one of the things I think is really revealing about the gender wage gap is that it changes over the time of a career. I actually want to tell you about this University of Chicago study that helped me understand it. Please. So there were about 10,000 people who graduated with business degrees from the graduate school Please. There was a wage gap, but it was pretty tiny, that women earned $115,000 right out of graduate school, men earned $130,000. Nine years out of graduate school, women are earning an average of $250,000, while men are averaging out at $400,000. Wow. So men are earning 60% more than women nine years out. So that initial gap was like that pure, we just pay men more gap, and then it gets exponentially

worse because women have taken time to have kids. Yeah, so that first gap, you know, might be paying men more. Maybe, you know, you have some people who are looking down the future and thinking, I want a certain kind of job that's going to be more flexible. Okay. But something happens in that nine-year time period. And if you think of like the life events that happen between finishing a graduate degree and a decade later, one of those

big life events is kids. And you just see in study after study, the wage gap gets really, really big as women hit their 30s and 40s. This is essentially where you're at in life, right, Sarah? What was your experience with going through these life events while working? It is something I've thought a lot about. You know, when you are really pregnant, sometimes people act a little differently around you at work. Probably not consciously, but sometimes making assumptions. You know, maybe Sarah doesn't want to go on that really long reporting assignment. Or maybe she doesn't want to be away from her kid for that long.

And I don't think a lot of this is conscious. I don't think anyone's trying to cut me out. But I think it's just these assumptions we have and these assumptions that often bear on the careers of women more than they do of men about what changes when you're pregnant and when you have a baby. And, you know, sometimes they're right. Sometimes I do just want to be with my kid, but sometimes they're wrong. Sometimes I do want to go on that exciting assignment, especially if it's a really, really good one. And I think it is something that is just so baked into our culture

that women take care of children. It's hard for any of us to completely avoid making those kinds of assumptions. When a father takes time off for child care, do we see it affecting his earnings? We do. And this is like one of the most fascinating, I think, horrific parts of the wage gap literature is men actually get penalized more than women for taking significant time off. That's refreshing. So I guess it's like it is a little refreshing, but it's also disturbing to me because it is a totally rational decision. If you're like a couple having a baby,

you know, who are looking at all this research, you might say, well, you know, the world being what it is, it makes more sense for the woman to take the time off because she's going to get penalized less than if the man takes the time off. So it's kind of like a bummer. It makes it – I totally understand why it is hard for men to take time off because the wage gap research suggests they actually face a steeper economic penalty for taking that time off. So if the United States or employers in the United States help pay for more child care, would the gender wage gap sort of disappear or go back to the smaller gap that you said would happen just after college or something like that?

Not necessarily. And I think, you know, the Scandinavian countries are actually really instructive to look at here because they do have pretty heavily subsidized daycare. And there was this study that came out of Denmark's wage gap. It is startling to me how much the charts of Denmark's wage gap look like what you'd find in the United States, where a woman has a baby and her earnings just totally crater. And one of the things that's really interesting when you dig into, well, why is that happening? They have subsidized child care, is that in Denmark, they have very generous maternity leave or actually very generous parental leave. Men have the option to take it. But again, there's like that cultural norm that women are going to take the entirety of this really

generous leave. I think it's a full year of leave after you have a baby. So what would help then? Are there any policies in other countries that actually work? So in Iceland, for example, there's three months of leave that can only be used by the dad, three months of leave that can only be used by the mom, and the rest can be split up between the couple. So you kind of have this three months of use it or lose it paternity leave in Iceland. The rates of men taking paternity leave skyrocket in Iceland. All of a sudden, when it was like, well, I could get three months paid for free or just lose it and go to work. I was like, yeah, that seems like a pretty decent deal. I'll stay home and take care of my

kids for those three months. So, I mean, in the United States, that feels like it'd be kind of radical to say like, man, you're taking three months now, but is it like just something that we need to have a cultural awakening on? I mean, it'd be radical to say, hey, women, you get three months of paid leave at this point. You know, there's some fascinating international research that shows, you know, whether you're in the U.S., in Denmark, in the U.K., the vast majority of people who live in these developed countries do not think that women should work full time when they have kids who are not yet school aged. In all those countries I just listed, it's less than 20 percent of the people who live there agree with the statement, you know, women should work full time. You look at should men work full time and like the number skyrockets up to a big majority. So I don't think our cultural norms are quite there yet. How do we convince male father people that they can take time off to take care of their children. Yeah.

When I had my son, I took three months off from work before coming back here to Vox. And that just felt normal to me. It just felt like what all my friends did when they had babies. It was very accepted. It was just the cultural norm. And so I think there's been this shift where that's quite accepted for women in the workforce. But that shift hasn't happened for men. For men to take the same amount of leave that I took, all the data I've read suggests it's quite abnormal. And I almost feel

like you need some kind of PSA to tell people like, hey, this is a normal thing to do. When you have a baby, you take a few months off, whether you're a guy or a woman, that's just what you do to care for children. We should make the PSA. We're going to make a PSA? Well, let's do it. Hell yeah, we'll make a PSA. To all you men out there, what would you say in this PSA? What would my PSA say? Hello, men of America.

This is Sarah Cliff with a public service announcement on Equal Pay Day 2019. If you think it's wrong that women get paid less than men, there is a huge role for you to play. If you are going to be a more active caregiver, if you're going to tell your work, I'm having a baby and I want to take a certain amount of time off, that is the contribution you can make to help enclose the gender wage gap. Don't be afraid if you are someone who wants to take time off to push for that, even if it goes against the norms of your workplace culture. Tell your friends, show up with your baby when you hang out with your friends to show them that it's like a normal thing for men to take care of babies as well.

Perfect. And I'm just picturing the more you know star riding that rainbow. Yeah. Over like a baby sitting at like a bar in Brooklyn or something. Perfect, yeah. Is that where this ends? One of those things you carry your baby in, like on your front. The Bjorn.

Oh yeah, the Bjorn. So you got your baby Bjorn and like your beer and your brat. And you're just like dad and hard. By the way, this whole gender wage gap thing is way worse when you factor in race. That's next. Bye. Burton fans. You might know LeVar Burton from Reading Rainbow or Roots, but some people know him from LeVar Burton Reads. It's his own podcast of great short fiction. It's handpicked stories by LeVar Burton. In every episode, he invites you to take a break from your life and dive into one great story by Neil Gaiman or Octavia Butler or Ray Bradbury. And he provides you with these gorgeous soundscapes to bring them to life. LeVar Burton Reads is about to launch its fourth season.

New episodes drop every Tuesday on those apps that you use to listen to your podcasts. Go find it now. Equal payday for women is today, but we're talking mostly about white women. When you factor in race, that gap expands tremendously. Equal payday for black women in the United States is August 22nd. Native American women, September 23rd. Latinas don't come until November 20th. I asked Valerie Wilson if any of this was improving. She's the director of the Program on Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy at the Economic Policy Institute.

Most of the wage disadvantage that women of color experience is a gender pay disparity. So when the gender pay gap narrowed during the 1980s and about midway through the 90s, all women experienced that improvement in pay. But when that gender wage gap sort of flattened out and we started to see less positive progress, for African-American women, the gap expanded. And the expansion of the gap is sort of interesting because we see that educational attainment is increasing. It's increasing for all workers. The gap that's growing between black women and white women is largely because the rate of educational attainment for white women is growing faster than it is for black women.

So both groups are increasing education. It's just not increasing as quickly for African-American women. We have to factor in the impact of the wealth gap, the racial wealth gap, and the fact that it costs a lot of money to go to college and to get more education. That sort of slows the rate at which you're able to increase attainment. Do we assume that racism plays a role here, too? I absolutely assume that racism plays a role. And I say that, and I'm so confident, I say that in such a strong way, because, you know, we did a study a couple years ago where we looked at the trends in the racial wage gap.

And we cut the data almost any way you can think of trying to find some slice of the population where you get more parity or equality. It's not there. If we look within the same level of education, there's a pay gap. If we look in the same region of the country, there's a pay gap. If we consider how distribution across occupations has changed over time, that doesn't explain the widening of the pay gap. So there's really little left to explain the fact that there is a disparity by gender and by race other than racism and sexism and the role that those play in how people get paid, whether or not they get hired, whether or not they get promoted. And do you see that gap decreasing in size out of curiosity, the one that you can't explain through factors like education or work experience? No, in fact, that gap has widened. No.

So yeah, that- What? When we look at this trend in the expansion of the racial wage gap, more of that gap is unexplained, leaving that sort of gaping hole and big question mark of, is this something else we just haven't measured? Or is it really race? That's not what I wanted to hear, Valerie. Me either. What are we doing about that?

I think that there was some progress under the Obama administration to try to make some progress in addressing it in terms of greater pay transparency and requiring companies with 100 employees or more to report pay data by race, ethnicity, gender, and by job. But the current administration has decided not to move forward with that. What could you possibly object to about greater transparency in labor statistics? Your guess is as good as mine. But what it does say to me is that pay equity, gender pay equity, racial pay equity is not a priority for this administration because that was a simple thing to do. I wonder, you know, we asked Sarah Cliff, the reporter we spoke to in the first half about

her own personal experiences with this as a female person of color. Have you personally experienced the wage gap? Do you have a story you could share? So that's an interesting question because I will say that my answer is probably what you're going to get from most women. I don't know. And I think that that's a problem with why we have a gender pay gap. For the most part, we don't know what other people who work with us or who work in our profession doing similar types of work, we don't know what other people are making. But, you know, there are a number of websites out there, Glassdoor and others,

where you can search on job titles and I think even companies. I mean, the best you can do as an individual is be informed. Being informed isn't just pie in the sky. That Today Explained listener we heard from at the top of the show? I'll never forget. He looked at me and he said, unfortunately, that's just what the market demands that we pay you. If you can prove to me that the market would demand we pay you more, go for it.

This is how her wage gap story ends. It's kind of awful that I had to do this, but I ended up interviewing around, searching the internet and job boards for comparable job opportunities, and then actually going through that full interview process until I had an offer in hand from another firm. When I had a few legitimate offers to present, I made a meeting with my director and to the company's credit, they matched the best offer. But it sucks that I had to go through that process in the first

place. Being a woman in finance is already kind of hard, but on top, you have this pay gap to be addressed. To this day, I'm continuously interviewing elsewhere and being honest about that with my colleagues. Maybe one day, none of us will have to waste our time interviewing for jobs that we don't want to get paid fairly. Thanks to all the listeners who shared their stories with us. If you want to learn more about why dads don't take parental leave and how one country fixed that, check out the most recent episode of Sarah Cliff's show, The Impact.

You can find it wherever you're listening to Today Explained right now. Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher. We're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. I'm Sean Ramos-Firm. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi. Efim Shapiro is the engineer. Noam Hassenfeld produces and reports. Bridget McCarthy is our editor,

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