Warren Farrell On The Wage Gap
All things being equal, women make more money than men, Warren Farrell finds. Well, that is, women who value and risk what men do. He writes about it on MSNBC.com:
When I was on the board of directors for the National Organization for Women in New York City during the 1970s, I led protests against the pay gap. I wore a "59 Cents" pin to reflect my objection to the discrimination I felt was the cause of women earning only 59 cents to each dollar earned by men. Now, since I'm a husband and father, discrimination against women isn't just political, it's personal.But one question haunted me through the years: If an employer has to pay a man one dollar for the same work a woman would do for 59 cents, why would anyone hire a man? If women do produce more for less, I thought, women who own their own businesses should earn more than male business owners. So I checked. I found t hat women entrepreneurs earn 50% less than their male counterparts.
It's not that women are less effective or productive — they just have different priorities. A 2001 survey of business owners with MBAs conducted by the Rochester Institute of Technology found that money was the primary motivator for only 29% of women, versus 76% of men. Women prioritized flexibility, fulfillment, autonomy and safety.
After more than a decade of research for my book, Why Men Earn More, I discovered that men and women make 25 work-life choices that actually create a wage gap. Men make decisions that result in their making more money. On the other hand, women make decisions that earn them better lives (e.g., more family and friend time).
But what happens when women make the same lucrative decisions typically made by men? The good news — for women, at least: Women actually earn more. For example, when a male and a female civil engineer both stay with their respective companies for ten years, travel and relocate equally and take the same career risks, the woman ends up making more. And among workers who have never been married and never had children, women earn 117% of what men do. (This factors in education, hours worked and age.)
Without husbands, women have to focus on earning more. They work longer hours, they're willing to relocate and they're more likely to choose higher-paying fields like technology. Without children, men have more liberty to earn less — that is, they are free to pursue more fulfilling and less lucrative careers, like writing or art or teaching social studies.
No comment, but thanks for posting that. Farrell is a very useful guy to have around.
Crid at May 15, 2006 11:57 AM
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