{"id":1797,"date":"2009-12-28T13:37:57","date_gmt":"2009-12-28T18:37:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/girlwpen.com\/?p=1797"},"modified":"2009-12-28T13:37:57","modified_gmt":"2009-12-28T18:37:57","slug":"nice-work-men-with-pens","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/2009\/12\/28\/nice-work-men-with-pens\/","title":{"rendered":"NICE WORK: Men with Pens"},"content":{"rendered":"

You may have seen this<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>: a little story about a girl-with-pen who was able to make a lot more money as men with pens<\/em><\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>. “James Chartrand” is the pen name for a woman blogger who reports she earned two or three times more under a man’s name than a woman’s.<\/p>\n

In the year of the Shriver Report<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>–you know, women hold up half the economy, make up half the work force, oh and also make up nearly half of union membership<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>–we’re still struggling to get a host of humane work policies (uh, health care and “good jobs”<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span> with benefits) that isn’t just about material benefits.<\/p>\n

The tougher part is the social psychological (and hard to measure) aspect of how “men’s work” and “women’s work” are still remarkably differentiated. As I’ve written here before, gender inequality is sneaky<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>!<\/p>\n

So is a lot of other inequality. James Chartrand isn’t just<\/em> a man’s name. It is a white<\/em> man’s name. The New York Times<\/em> reminded us last month that “In Job Hunt, College Degree Doesn’t Close Racial Gap.<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>” At 8.4 percent, the unemployment rate in 2009 for black college graduates has been nearly twice that of white college graduates (4.4 percent). An American Economics Review<\/em> article highlighted how this works in their paper “Are Emily and Greg More Employable than Lakisha and Jamal?<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>” In a field study, job applicants with “white sounding” names got twice as many call-backs as those with “black sounding” names. So, James Chartrand probably had more than just the advantage of gender.<\/p>\n

An even newer American Sociological Review<\/em> study makes the case even more clearly. In “Discrimination in a Low-Wage Labor Market: A Field Experiment<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span>,” <\/em>Devah Pager, Bruce Western, and Bart Bonikowski report on sending out matched sets of job applicants–white, black, and Latino men, similarly well-spoken, well-dressed, and credentialed–for low wage jobs in the New York area.<\/p>\n

The results? Whites received positive responses 31 percent of the time–twice as many as blacks (at 15.2 percent). Latinos, with a 25.1 percent call-back rate, did worse than whites but better than blacks.<\/p>\n

The descriptions of the job applicants’ encounters that are enumerated in the article highlight what we keep hearing: there were few if any episodes of overt racism or bias. The job applicants in the study, for example, didn’t sense a pattern themselves as they went through the application process.<\/p>\n

A lot of inequality is sneaky. And where there is gender inequality, I’m going to keep checking for other forms of inequality that are sneaked in along with it–especially class and race–because I don’t think we’re going to do much about any of it until we do something about all of it.<\/p>\n

-Virginia Rutter<\/a><\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You may have seen this: a little story about a girl-with-pen who was able to make a lot more money as men with pens. “James Chartrand” is the pen name for a woman blogger who reports she earned two or three times more under a man’s name than a woman’s. In the year of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1903,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21108],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1797","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nice-work"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1903"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1797"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1797\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1797"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1797"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/girlwpen\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1797"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}