Can someone explain why the myth that women make 65 cents on the dollar is still being perpetrated? It seems very deliberate.
A recent Government Accountability Office (GAO) study requested by Chair Maloney and Representative John Dingell examined the pay gap amongst women and men employed in management occupations, and found that full-time female managers earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by their male manager peers. This figure accounts for many observable differences between male and female managers, so the remaining 19 cent gap between men and women may be attributable to discriminatory practices. The gender pay gap amongst managers remained persistent between 2000 and 2007, the most recent year of available data.
The pay gap is not limited to the private sector. Even within the federal government, which ought to be a model employer, a substantial unexplained pay gap persists. In response to a request by Chair Maloney and Representative Dingell, the GAO examined the gender pay gap in the federal government and found that women federal employees earn 89 cents for every dollar earned by their male peers.
After accounting for observable differences between men and women (including education, experience, and occupation), that gap narrows to 93 cents on the dollar. The remaining 7 cent pay gap may be attributable to discriminatory practices."
From Page 9 of this report performed in 2010 (PDF): http://www.jec.senate.gov/public/?a=Files.Serve&File_id=...
Women are making 7% in a way we can't explain, and is possibly still discriminatory for the federal government.
Women are making 19% in a way we can't explain, and is possibly still discriminatory for the private sector.
And to bonaldi: Discrimination is NOT one of the listed causes fo the distance.
Don't take everyone who says your numbers as wrong as not on your side. Sometimes its someone on your side who wants you to not sound like a misinformed ranter when you're talking with an informed person on the other side.
I dislike the fact there is probably discrimination in the works there, but in no way, is it "65c on the dollar" anymore and people who parrot that are just wrong at best and disingenuous liars at worse. Liars on your side, (which is the side of equality, which is my side too), makes it an easy target for ridicule and hard to engage those on the other side of the issue.
2. Is it, entirely, a myth? When I was in college we discovered that, being a state run institution, we could find out the pay of all the faculty members. The female faculty members were being paid consistently less than equivalently experienced male faculty members. After college, a good friend of mine was being paid significantly less than me (not 35% less, more like 15-20%), for essentially the same job, despite her having an MS to my undergrad degree. These are anecdotal, but outside of organizations with fixed pay bands (read: federal gov't in the US), these pay disparities do still seem to exist, though perhaps not to the same extremes.
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Even if you identify the remaining 7%, the pay gap will not be "fixed" until women are earning the same as men in actual dollars. And then we can start on ownership of wealth and seniority.
We have more than places to go, especially if we're still in a place where the treatment of women in software can be equated to the treatment of men in nursing.