Search results for Gender wage gap

Going on 500 of you “liked” our recent post summarizing the statistical case against Walmart for gender discrimination.  A new Catalyst report, sent along by Washburn University Professor Sangyoub Park, reveals that Walmart isn’t alone in failing to promote women.  The study of Fortune 500 companies found that the percent of board seats and corporate officer positions held by women have been increasing, but not particularly quickly (source):

As of 2010, 18% of senior officers and 6% of their top earners were women (source):

136 of the 500 companies had exactly zero female executives.

The data, however, actually varies quite tremendously by type of company (in a way that dovetails with general job segregation by sex):

Data from the Deloitte Global Center for Corporate Governance, covered by NPR, reveal how the United States compares to other similar countries.  It shows that Europe is also struggling to achieve parity in the boardroom:

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

Via Colorlines I discovered an Applied Research Center report titled The Color of Food.  The report found that Blacks, Latinos, and Asians were overrepresented in food service work:

The report also discovered a wage gap between White workers and non-White workers at every level of food production:

Race intersected with gender, such that women earned less than men of their same race for each group studied:

The authors go on to break down the data further by each part of the commodity food chain — production, processing, distribution and service — and by racial group.  For example, they show that the average wage of Latinos and Asians differs by ethnic background (always a good reminder that racial categories obscure variability):

Lots more at The Color of Food.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.

One thing we’ve been interested in, and posted various images about, here at Soc Images is the different ways people experience the current economic crisis. Obviously people will suffer more or less depending on their personal situations — if they had any savings, if they lose their jobs or not, if there are other wage-earners in the household, and so on. While we’re all affected by the recession at least indirectly, for some it’s a much more immediate personal problem than for others. And demographic factors outside our control, such as race/ethnicity, gender, and so on, play a large role in the distribution of the negative impacts (or, for some, the positive ones) of the recession.

Dmitriy T.M. sent in a story from the NYT that looks at the particular hardships faced by older workers. I’m interested in the graph on the left below, which shows historic jobless rates for those over age 55:

On the one hand, the unemployment rate for that group (7.3%) is certainly higher than at any point since the mid-’70s. On the other hand, the jobless rate for 55+ -year-old workers is lower than the overall unemployment rate right now, which is still hovering at about 9.6% (Bureau of Labor Statistics). It’s a case of the decontextualized graph: one that isn’t technically misleading, and that presents data in a straightforward manner, but that, without providing comparisons to other groups, makes it hard to know what to think about the data.

That’s not to discount the difficulties experienced by workers over age 55; it’s surely not comforting to know that the unemployment rate for your age group is below the national average if you, yourself, lose your job. And the graph on the right presents another aspect of joblessness: how long it lasts. When workers over 55 lose their jobs, it tends to take them quite a bit longer to find a new one. As the NYT article points out, with the overall higher rates of unemployment for all age groups, that gap becomes increasingly important: “because it will take years to absorb the giant pool of unemployed at the economy’s recent pace, many of these older people may simply age out of the labor force before their luck changes.” At the same time, the hits many retirement accounts have taken is pushing more people over age 65 to look for work, while others are forced into early retirement simply because they can’t find jobs.

More on race, age, gender, and the recession here.

Cross-posted at Ms. magazine.

Full-time women workers earn 80.2% of what full-time men workers earn.  One of the primary reasons that women earn less is job segregation by sex.  Jobs themselves are gendered, such that women have a tendency to enter feminized occupations and men have a tendency to enter masculinized occupations.  How severe is job segregation by sex?  A new report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, newly updated for 2009, reports that about four in ten women and men work in jobs that are 75% female and male respectively.

Overall, masculinized occupations pay more.  (This is a different kind of sexism, a sexism against feminine-coded things instead of against women, but sexism nonetheless… for example.)  Job segregation, then, contributes to the pay gap between men and women.

The figure below shows how this has changed over time.  The y axis is an “Index of Dissimilarity.”  Basically, a score of one indicates complete segregation and a score of zero means that the job is 50/50 male and female.

The white line, labeled “civilian labor force” shows that, overall, sex segregation has been going down over time.  It also shows, however, that most of the decrease occurred in the ’70s and ’80s.  It has changed little since then.

The lines above and below the white line show that sex segregation correlates with education level.  People who have at least a bachelors degree are in less sex segregated jobs, while people who did not attend or finish college tend to be in more segregated jobs.  This means that, insofar as sex segregation at work contributes to a wage gap, it is more extreme for working class people than for others.

Via Family Inequality.

Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.