The Declining Significance of Gender?

5. How Much Progress in Closing the Long-Term Earnings Gap?

Chapter 5 How Much Progress in Closing the Long-Term Earnings Gap? Heidi Hartmann, Stephen J. Rose, and Vicky Lovell I n this era of economic progress for women, when women are narrowing the wage gap with men, working more years and more hours per year, and entering previously male-dominated occupations, some argue that women now have all the equality they want—that any remaining differences between women and men in their economic behavior are a matter of personal preferences—some argue that further progress to achieve full equality is proceeding apace and is, indeed , inevitable, and some argue that women still have a long way to go, facing difficult barriers, with the timing or scale of the outcome by no means clear. The goal of this chapter is to shed light on these issues, to map where we are in the achievement of economic equality for women, identify the barriers that remain , and assess what factors or forces help or hinder the goal of full equality. In our view, until full equality is reached, gender will remain significant in limiting women’s opportunities and privileging men’s. In this chapter, we present findings from a new analysis of the Panel Study of Income Dynamics (PSID) on the hours of work, earnings, and occupations of men and women across a thirty-year period. Using a new measure of the “long-term earnings gap,” we show that women still earn a very small proportion of what men earn. In essence, despite a substantially increased work effort by women, most women work substantially fewer years and hours per year than men, work in lower-paying occupations, earn less than men even when they get into maledominated occupations, and remain financially dependent on men for income during the child-rearing years and indeed throughout much of their adult lives. The sweeping effects of the wage gap are largely unacknowledged because its typical measurement is limited to a single year and restricted to only the higher-earning portion of the workforce. When accumulated over many years for all men and women workers, the losses to women and their families due to the wage gap are large and can be devastating. / 125 MEASURING THE LONG-TERM EARNINGS GAP The most common way of measuring the wage gap restricts the comparison to women and men who work full-time on a weekly or annual basis in a single year. Especially when the comparison is restricted to full-time, full-year workers, such a wage gap calculation leaves out the approximately two-fifths of women workers who work less than full-time or full-year, most of whom earn much less than those who work full-time.1 The wage gap has been narrowing for full-time workers, whether calculated on a weekly or annual basis, so that in 2003, the Census Bureau reported a ratio of women’s to men’s median earnings of 75.5 percent for full-time year-round workers, while the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported a ratio of 79.4 percent for the median weekly earnings of full-time female and male workers.2 These ratios have moved up nearly 20 percentage points in the several decades since they were first calculated and give a pleasing, if somewhat slow, measure of the progress that women are making. The gap, by these measures, has fallen from about 40 percentage points to about 21 to 24 percentage points. Such a small gap may actually overstate the progress women have made. Given that more women than men work part-time and that women take more time out of the labor market than men do, such comparisons leave out a large proportion of low-earning women who do not meet the full-time, full-year standard. Such comparisons also tacitly accept the constraints of current gender relationships. All of the women who make the constrained “choice” to work part-time or to take time off for family care are excluded from the comparisons, and their low- or zero-earnings years are excluded as well. The concept of the long-term earnings gap is designed to serve as a measure of women’s relative economic self-sufficiency, in that it captures women’s lifetime earnings relative to men’s and averages all earnings across a given number of years. It is also a measure of the relative access women and men have to economic resources through working, given their family circumstances .3...