Gender Pay Gap Begins Right After Graduation

[DeepModem Mom]

WP: Life at Work
Her Pay Gap Begins Right After Graduation
By Amy Joyce
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, April 29, 2007; Page F01

For years, women have outnumbered men on college campuses. Overall, they get better grades than men. And yet, just months after they toss their mortarboards into the air at college graduation, men start to pull ahead of women in pay.

Though the pay gap between men and women is well documented, it is startling to discover that it begins so soon. According to a new study by the American Association of University Women, women already earn 20 percent less than men at the same level and in the same field one year after college graduation. Right at the beginning, before taking time off for childbirth or child-rearing, women find themselves behind.

Of course, it only gets worse. Today, women earn about 77 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to census data, a figure that has remained steady for about a decade. The gap is deeply entrenched. The AAUW started studying the disparity in 1913, documenting different pay for men and women among federal government workers.

The latest study is unusual because it devotes attention to the first year out of school. "We are looking at a younger group of people who have many similarities," said Catherine Hill, director of research for the AAUW. "When they are just coming out of college, we expect to see fewer differences."

The gap, starting early, only widens as time goes on, according to the AAUW report "Behind the Pay Gap," released Monday. Ten years after graduation, women fall further behind, earning 69 percent of what men earn. A 12 percent gap appeared even when the AAUW Educational Foundation, which did the research, controlled for hours, occupation, parenthood and other factors known to directly affect earnings.

The remainder of the gap is unexplained by any other control factors. That may mean, Hill said, that discrimination is the root cause....

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/04/28/AR2007042800827.html?hpid=topnews

[proud2BlibKansan]

1. So do we bomb ourselves?

This is such great irony, since lately we have been flooded with articles detailing how women are mistreated in Iran. I see it as an attempt to build up negative opinions of Iran and then we can't object when it comes time to bomb them.

So I guess we should bomb the US.

[Igel]

2. But you stop before the important bit.

'"While discrimination accounts for some of the discrepancy, said Linda Babcock, James M. Walton professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, women also suffer because they have not been taught to ask for more. Babcock, co-author of "Women Don't Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide," argues that women don't negotiate enough, or many times, at all. She is not blaming women for creating their own wage gap, she said, but rather, society, for raising "little girls to accept the status quo."'

My favorite paragraph was this one:
'Babcock conducted a study in 2002 that looked at starting salaries of students graduating from Carnegie Mellon University with master's degrees. The starting salaries of men were 7.6 percent higher, or almost $4,000 more, on average, than those of the women. It turned out, however, that only 7 percent of the female students had negotiated, but 57 percent of the men had asked for more money. The students who negotiated increased their starting salaries by 7.4 percent on average, or $4,053. That's almost exactly the difference between men's and women's average starting pay.'


That's half the problem. The other half is that men aren't used to woman negotiating.