This has to be one of the most interesting studies on the gender differential in salaried employment that I have ever seen.
As a younger attorney, the lawyer had been Susan; now he was Thomas. He told Schilt that after he transitioned from female to male, another lawyer mistakenly believed that Susan had been fired and replaced by Thomas. The other lawyer commended the firm's boss for the replacement. He said Susan had been incompetent; "the new guy," he added, was "just delightful."
The gist: women employed full time earn on average 79% of the average salary of full-time employed men, in spite of being generally better educated; FTMs tend to get a 1.5% pay hike, however, while MTFs take a 39% cut.
No study is perfect, but this is the first time I've seen anything that could even approach such a direct comparison -- not just women versus men in the labour force, but the same individual (and thus the same work, theoretically) as both a woman and a man.
0 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: A New Perspective on the Wage Gap.
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/9697
That 79% number varies on who's doing the quoting.
The fact is women make less not because of discrimination but because of the choices they make.
If you want to end the wage gap then you would have more success in telling women to be just as disposable as men rather than claiming discrimination.
Frankly, discrimination is far too expensive for any company to engage in. And even if a company could hire and pay women 79% of what a man makes wouldn't you think they'd have 100% female employees? After all the bottom line is profit.
Technically your link to the "study" is actually an article on an abstract of a study which I still haven't found.
Be that as it may. Have you considered that there is another reason more substantive than gender as to why there is a pay difference?
Could it be the MTF no longer needs to be a breadwinner and so cutback her hours? I mean it's not like the company can just tell you one day you will only make $20 and hour rather than $30.
And could it be the FTM now feels the weight of being a man and realizes that he will only have value to society if he can make money and so increased his hours or responsibilities?
There is more to human beings than the dichotomy of male and female. Perhaps if you looked beyond gender and into the roles and responsibilities of men and women you might find a greater understanding.
But that would require empathizing with men.
The only thing I'll say in response to Jean_valjean: it's funny how our trolls manage to NEVER be grammatically correct or spell things properly.
That's fascinating! The exact same person gets paid less once they're a female... it's very interesting that males take a very slight pay hike (showing that companies aren't automatically fond of them) but women take a HUGE (almost 60%) cut (showing that women are less valued, no matter how well the job was done). This is an essential survey, and I'm thrilled that you posted it!
http://www.bepress.com/bejeap/vol8/iss1/art39/
Abstract for study; and you can download it for free if you register. Took a total of 7 seconds from soup to nuts.
Because I'm waaay nerdy like that.
Hey!!!Jeans an MRA! #1 argument any MRA always uses:....if it would be cheaper to hire women because they get paid less, than wouldnt they all just hire women? No, cuz its called discrimination, not an economic system. They want men to have the privilege and women to back off as a way of reinforcing the erroneous belief of male superiority.
Fascinating! Thanks for posting this.
Jeans logic misses the fact that companies often do strive to pay the lowest salary possible--it's called globalization and moving labor to "cheaper" countries altogether. But even that doesn't last forever. Wages inevitably rise and the company must either become leaner or move on to some other untapped labor market.
The mechanism underlying the gender gap on the other hand is operating under a different logic; and the causes are multi-faceted as the article suggests.
Why on Earth would an MTF cut back on her hours?
A pre-transition transwoman who felt that men are under enormous pressure to work long hours would *probably* be more willing than the average man to say "Fuck this noise, I'm really a woman so I'm going to work the hours I want. I'm not scared of being called unmanly, because I'm not a man." They were also unlikely to get into relationships with extremely traditional women who demanded that they be super-breadwinners in the first place.
After having transitioned, the transwoman can't bear children, so one of the primary reasons usually cited for why women work fewer hours -- they have more responsibilities to their children -- seems invalid. Either the transwoman already has kids, in which case it seems unlikely that she would massively change the amount of time she spends with them just because she has transitioned (maybe a *little* more time to make them more comfortable with Dad suddenly becoming Mom, but a transman who transitions after having kids would do the same), or she adopts kids, but unless she's the sort of transwoman who's really bought into patriarchy and feels like now that she's physically a woman she has to be super "womanly", she's not likely to spend more time caring for her adopted kids than her partner does. She wasn't raised to think she has to do it; in fact she was raised to think she's supposed to put her job first, and unless she's actually *conscious* that that's part of male indoctrination and she's deliberately rejected it, she's likely to behave the same way toward her job after transition as before.
In fact this is a *great* microcosm of the divide because a transwoman is mentally the same person before and after transition. If she was driven to be a workaholic because she was raised as a man, she will be a workaholic after she's a woman. If she pushed back against the culture of overdemanding work while she was physically a man, she's not going to start working *less* just because she's now visibly female. The only thing different about her is how people *look* at her -- she has known she was a woman for years before anyone else sees her as a woman, else she wouldn't have transitioned. The only difference between the pre- and post-transition MTF is whether or not everyone *else* knows she's a woman.
So unless she's totally bought into patriarchy and traditional gender roles and thinks that now that she's a woman she has to bake cookies all day (and for obvious reasons, transpeople are *less* likely to buy gender-role bullshit than cispeople are), she probably didn't voluntarily cut back her hours.