formal studies about the wage gap in the US and choice quotes
The Long Road to Pay Equity for Women at Adelphi
Cooperstein, Deborah
Academe, 2008, Vol.94(1), p.34-36 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Women's underrepresentation in upper management: New insights on a persistent problem
Hoobler, Jenny M. ; Lemmon, Grace ; Wayne, Sandy J.
Organizational Dynamics, 2011, Vol.40(3), pp.151-156 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
The assumption is that when enough qualified women are “in the pipeline” they will eventually assume leadership positions in senior management in equal numbers to men. However, the data do not support this explanation (except perhaps in the hard sciences, where women are still the minority of students). Consider academia as an example: since 2001, women have received the majority of Ph.D.s awarded by U.S. universities to U.S. citizens, but in 2003 only 35 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty were women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The U.S. Department of Education reported that, by 2007, just 39 percent of associate professor positions (which signify job security and the first level of seniority) were occupied by women, whereas those in instructor positions (with little job security, lower pay and prestige) were 54 percent female. If this were simply a pipeline issue (since women have been “in the pipeline” in equal numbers since around 2000, and it takes on average six years to achieve tenure and a promotion to the ranks of associate), women should have reached parity with men in this same timeframe.
In a diverse sample of working managers and their direct reports in a Fortune 100 manufacturing and transportation organization, we found evidence of a fifth reason for the glass ceiling: the family-work conflict bias. The family-work conflict bias means that just being a woman signals to a manager that her family will interfere with her work, irrespective of whether or not that woman actually has family-work conflict, is married, has children, or has children of a certain age.
Specifically, managers tend to view female employees as experiencing more family-work conflict than their male employees, even when their female employees have no children, are not married, have never had a career interruption, and do not care for any other dependents. Just being female seems to signal to male and female managers that a female worker will let her outside responsibilities interfere with her work performance, or perhaps that she will someday-in other words, that she is less dedicated to her career. Interestingly, we found that male employees actually self-reported more family-work conflict than did female employees. This means that even though male employees felt that their family conflicted more with their work than did female employees, managers assumed that female employees were the ones who more frequently let family responsibilities conflict with work.
Even highly qualified women in academic medicine paid less than equally qualified men
Women's Health Weekly, April 15, 2010, p.446
"The gender gap in pay has been well documented, but what was not understood was whether academicaccomplishments could overcome the pay gap," says Catherine DesRoches, DrPh, of the Mongan Institute, who led the study. "Our study found that, across the board, men are being paid substantially more than equally qualifiedand accomplished women at academic medical centers."
"These differences may seem modest," DesRoches says, "but over a 30-year career, an average female faculty member with a PhD would earn almost $215,000 less that a comparable male. If that deficit were invested in a retirement account earning 6 percent per year, the difference would grow to almost $700,000 over a career. For department of medicine faculty, that difference could be almost twice as great."
The results indicated that women who reached the rank of full professor worked significantly more hours per weekthan men of the same rank, a difference primarily accounted for by more time spent in administrative and other professional tasks and not patient care, teaching or research. There was no significant difference in hours worked among associate professors, but women at the assistant professor level worked fewer hours overall, primarily spending less time doing research. Even after controlling for the differences in academic ranking, research productivity and other personal characteristics, women earned from $6,000 to $15,000 less per year than men of similar levels of accomplishment.
Slowly but can we say "surely"? pay equity & segregation a decade later in west Virginia state government
Alkadry, Mohamad G. ; Tower, Leslie E.
Public Administration Quarterly, Summer, 2013, Vol.37(2), p.208(30) [Peer Reviewed Journal]
There are other developments that are likely to help remedy the under-representation of women and the gap between male and female earnings. By 2002, women had a pattern of uninterrupted work that paralleled men’s (Women at Work, 2003). More specifically, women have stopped exiting the workforce between the ages of 25 and 34 and re-entering between the ages of 45-54. The gap in educational attainment between men and women is closing. The percentage of women and men 25 years and older who have at least a Bachelors degree are very close: 26.5% of women compared to 29.1% of men (Hartmann et al., 2006).
A study by the American Association of University Women shows that the gender pay gap is present within one year of graduation and widens even more within the first decade after graduation (AAUW, 2007).
Women in the West Virginia State public service are making some important strides toward parity but these advances are not happening evenly across agency types, occupations, or positions.
The road to the glass cliff: Differences in the perceived suitability of men and women for leadership positions in succeeding and failing organizations
Haslam, S. Alexander ; Ryan, Michelle K.
The Leadership Quarterly, 2008, Vol.19(5), pp.530-546 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Consistent with predictions, results indicate that the likelihood of a female candidate being selected ahead of an equally qualified male candidate increased when the organization's performance was declining rather than improving. Study 3 also provided evidence that glass cliff appointments are associated with beliefs that they (a) suit the distinctive leadership abilities of women, (b) provide women with good leadership opportunities and (c) are particularly stressful for women.
Such research provides evidence that women often encounter a range of problems and barriers on the other side of the glass ceiling. For example, longitudinal research by Stroh, Brett, & Reilly (1996)found that, in a sub-sample of 20 Fortune 500 companies examined over a two-year period, more women left management positions than men (26% vs. 14%, respectively). Importantly, this difference was notbecause women had more family commitments (as is often portrayed in the popular media, e.g., Helping women get to the top, 2005 and Hall, 2005) but rather because women had become more disaffected with their working life because their career opportunities were limited and sub-optimal (see also Merritt, Reskin, & Fondell, 1993). Indeed, the authors concluded that women left their jobs for exactly the same reasons as men-it was simply that they had more reason to do so.
These studies demonstrate that the glass cliff phenomenon is not restricted to board appointments in FTSE 100 companies, and can be reproduced under laboratory conditions, where key variables (in particular, candidates' biographical details and the precise nature of the positions) are controlled. This is important, as, in the absence of this data, it could be argued simply that women prefer, and actively choose, leadership positions which are more risky (an explanation favoured by some senior women themselves; see Ryan et al., 2007 and Woods, 2004) or, more drastically, that women leaders are actually the cause of organizational crisis (e.g., as argued by Judge, 2003).
Less positively, though, this pattern can be seen as evidence that people are simply more willing to place women in stressful leadership situations-possibly because they are perceived to represent a less valuable and more expendable resource than male leaders, and one less worthy of protection. Such a view chimes with the observations of around 15% of the women (but none of the men) who participated in an on-line study reported by Ryan et al. (2007).
Family‐friendly policies and gender bias in academia
Mayer, Audreyl. ; Tikka, Päivim.
Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 2008, Vol.30(4), p.363-374 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Although family leave and childcare policies are significantly more generous in the Nordic countries than in the US, we found no appreciable difference between the countries in the representation of women among academic staff. [...] In all three countries, women face greater societal expectation for care giving, yet are penalized professionally for doing so (Armenia & Gerstel, 2006; Drago et al., 2006; Evans, 2007; Gault & Lovell, 2006). Female professors in the US are sacrificing relationships and childbearing to acquiesce to the male-centred academic tradition (Drago et al., 2006; Williams, 2004). Those who are in tenure-track positions and have children are less likely to take advantage of options, such as stopping the tenure clock or long maternity leaves, for fear of being seen as less serious about their careers than their male peers (Drago et al., 2006).
Women also face prejudice unrelated to their parental status. Studies in the Nordic countries and the US have found that women face widespread biases regarding the value of their work and their scientific competence, despite overwhelming evidence that these biases are unfounded (Handelsman et al., 2005; Shibley Hyde & Linn, 2006; Williams, 2004). Women must be more productive than men to receive equal pay, promotion and recognition (American Association of University Professors, 2001; National Academy of Sciences, 2007; Wennera˚s & Wold, 1997). Other cross-national comparisons of women in academia have indicated a strong influence of societal stereotypes and expectations on the representation of women in permanent academic positions (Hanson, Schaub & Baker, 1996; Wennera˚s & Wold, 2000).
In male-dominated departments and disciplines, women experience increased discrimination and harassment (Settles et al., 2006), which may prompt women to seek out institutions in which women make up a larger proportion of the academic staff.
Indeed, Mason and Goulden (2004) found that neither marriage nor children explained why women were less likely than men to achieve tenure.
Engendering Inequity? How Social Accounts Create vs. Merely Explain Unfavorable Pay Outcomes for Women
2012, Vol.23(4), p.1154-1174 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Although barriers to women's access to higher-paying occupations and advancement within occupations contribute to the overall gender wage gap, women receive lower remuneration than men even when they hold the same jobs in the same firms (Elvira and Graham 2002, Petersen and Morgan 1995, Tomaskovic-Devey 1995). In fact, even when women adopt strategies associated with higher compensation and career advancement for men, such as changing employers or using external offers to increase pay with current employers, they do not obtain the same returns from these strategies as men do (Brett and Stroh 1997, Fernandez-Mateo 2009,Stroh et al. 1992).
As a result, despite evidence that women occupying the same roles as men demonstrate similar levels of agency (Eagly and Wood 1991) and value pay slightly but significantly more than men do (Konrad et al. 2000), managers mayexpect that women will be more motivated than men by rewards other than pay-specifically, other rewards that address women's assumed focus on relationships (see Filer 1989).
To the extent that managers assume that procedurally fair treatment will be especially motivating and valuable for women because of their perceived communality, managers may decide to give women lower pay when an account is available than when an account is not available. More important, when an account is available, managers may pay women less than otherwise identical men because their perceptions of men's greater self-interest and lower relational focus lead them to assume that procedural fairness will not be a viable substitute for higher pay for men. Hence, as might be expected on the basis of theory and research on benevolent sexism (Glick and Fiske 2001), rather than paying women less than men because of hostile gender prejudice, managers may do so because they hold seemingly benevolent beliefs about the unique importance to women of fair procedural treatment.
In sum, this paper shows that the underlying assumption in the procedural justice literature-that decision makers' benevolent procedural treatment of group members has positive effects on those group members-does not apply to women. Instead, my results indicate that the opportunity for managers to treat women in a more procedurally fair way by providing a social account can cause them to behave in a distributively unfair manner toward female employees. Taken together, these two studies reveal that managers treat accounts as substitutes for higher pay for women because they believe that women will be more motivated by procedurally fair treatment than men, rather than because they think that the account simply provides “cover” for them to express an underlying hostile gender prejudice (see Crandall and Eshleman 2003). That is, managers appear to believe the disproven thesis underlying the “compensating differentials” explanation for the gender wage gap: that women willingly accept lower wages because they value other relational rewards offered by the job (see the compensating differentials argument inFiler 1989; for counterarguments and contrary evidence, see Jacobs and Steinberg 1990,Lefkowitz 1994, Ross and Mirowsky 1996). The ironic consequence of this chain of assumptions and behaviors is that a seemingly benevolent belief in women's preference for procedural fairness enables managers to perceive themselves as behaving fairly and efficiently when making pay decisions that benefit men and perpetuate gender-based wage inequity (Jost et al. 2003, Kay et al. 2009).
Cooperstein, Deborah
Academe, 2008, Vol.94(1), p.34-36 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Women's underrepresentation in upper management: New insights on a persistent problem
Hoobler, Jenny M. ; Lemmon, Grace ; Wayne, Sandy J.
Organizational Dynamics, 2011, Vol.40(3), pp.151-156 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
The assumption is that when enough qualified women are “in the pipeline” they will eventually assume leadership positions in senior management in equal numbers to men. However, the data do not support this explanation (except perhaps in the hard sciences, where women are still the minority of students). Consider academia as an example: since 2001, women have received the majority of Ph.D.s awarded by U.S. universities to U.S. citizens, but in 2003 only 35 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty were women, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The U.S. Department of Education reported that, by 2007, just 39 percent of associate professor positions (which signify job security and the first level of seniority) were occupied by women, whereas those in instructor positions (with little job security, lower pay and prestige) were 54 percent female. If this were simply a pipeline issue (since women have been “in the pipeline” in equal numbers since around 2000, and it takes on average six years to achieve tenure and a promotion to the ranks of associate), women should have reached parity with men in this same timeframe.
In a diverse sample of working managers and their direct reports in a Fortune 100 manufacturing and transportation organization, we found evidence of a fifth reason for the glass ceiling: the family-work conflict bias. The family-work conflict bias means that just being a woman signals to a manager that her family will interfere with her work, irrespective of whether or not that woman actually has family-work conflict, is married, has children, or has children of a certain age.
Specifically, managers tend to view female employees as experiencing more family-work conflict than their male employees, even when their female employees have no children, are not married, have never had a career interruption, and do not care for any other dependents. Just being female seems to signal to male and female managers that a female worker will let her outside responsibilities interfere with her work performance, or perhaps that she will someday-in other words, that she is less dedicated to her career. Interestingly, we found that male employees actually self-reported more family-work conflict than did female employees. This means that even though male employees felt that their family conflicted more with their work than did female employees, managers assumed that female employees were the ones who more frequently let family responsibilities conflict with work.
Even highly qualified women in academic medicine paid less than equally qualified men
Women's Health Weekly, April 15, 2010, p.446
"The gender gap in pay has been well documented, but what was not understood was whether academicaccomplishments could overcome the pay gap," says Catherine DesRoches, DrPh, of the Mongan Institute, who led the study. "Our study found that, across the board, men are being paid substantially more than equally qualifiedand accomplished women at academic medical centers."
"These differences may seem modest," DesRoches says, "but over a 30-year career, an average female faculty member with a PhD would earn almost $215,000 less that a comparable male. If that deficit were invested in a retirement account earning 6 percent per year, the difference would grow to almost $700,000 over a career. For department of medicine faculty, that difference could be almost twice as great."
The results indicated that women who reached the rank of full professor worked significantly more hours per weekthan men of the same rank, a difference primarily accounted for by more time spent in administrative and other professional tasks and not patient care, teaching or research. There was no significant difference in hours worked among associate professors, but women at the assistant professor level worked fewer hours overall, primarily spending less time doing research. Even after controlling for the differences in academic ranking, research productivity and other personal characteristics, women earned from $6,000 to $15,000 less per year than men of similar levels of accomplishment.
Slowly but can we say "surely"? pay equity & segregation a decade later in west Virginia state government
Alkadry, Mohamad G. ; Tower, Leslie E.
Public Administration Quarterly, Summer, 2013, Vol.37(2), p.208(30) [Peer Reviewed Journal]
There are other developments that are likely to help remedy the under-representation of women and the gap between male and female earnings. By 2002, women had a pattern of uninterrupted work that paralleled men’s (Women at Work, 2003). More specifically, women have stopped exiting the workforce between the ages of 25 and 34 and re-entering between the ages of 45-54. The gap in educational attainment between men and women is closing. The percentage of women and men 25 years and older who have at least a Bachelors degree are very close: 26.5% of women compared to 29.1% of men (Hartmann et al., 2006).
A study by the American Association of University Women shows that the gender pay gap is present within one year of graduation and widens even more within the first decade after graduation (AAUW, 2007).
Women in the West Virginia State public service are making some important strides toward parity but these advances are not happening evenly across agency types, occupations, or positions.
The road to the glass cliff: Differences in the perceived suitability of men and women for leadership positions in succeeding and failing organizations
Haslam, S. Alexander ; Ryan, Michelle K.
The Leadership Quarterly, 2008, Vol.19(5), pp.530-546 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Consistent with predictions, results indicate that the likelihood of a female candidate being selected ahead of an equally qualified male candidate increased when the organization's performance was declining rather than improving. Study 3 also provided evidence that glass cliff appointments are associated with beliefs that they (a) suit the distinctive leadership abilities of women, (b) provide women with good leadership opportunities and (c) are particularly stressful for women.
Such research provides evidence that women often encounter a range of problems and barriers on the other side of the glass ceiling. For example, longitudinal research by Stroh, Brett, & Reilly (1996)found that, in a sub-sample of 20 Fortune 500 companies examined over a two-year period, more women left management positions than men (26% vs. 14%, respectively). Importantly, this difference was notbecause women had more family commitments (as is often portrayed in the popular media, e.g., Helping women get to the top, 2005 and Hall, 2005) but rather because women had become more disaffected with their working life because their career opportunities were limited and sub-optimal (see also Merritt, Reskin, & Fondell, 1993). Indeed, the authors concluded that women left their jobs for exactly the same reasons as men-it was simply that they had more reason to do so.
These studies demonstrate that the glass cliff phenomenon is not restricted to board appointments in FTSE 100 companies, and can be reproduced under laboratory conditions, where key variables (in particular, candidates' biographical details and the precise nature of the positions) are controlled. This is important, as, in the absence of this data, it could be argued simply that women prefer, and actively choose, leadership positions which are more risky (an explanation favoured by some senior women themselves; see Ryan et al., 2007 and Woods, 2004) or, more drastically, that women leaders are actually the cause of organizational crisis (e.g., as argued by Judge, 2003).
Less positively, though, this pattern can be seen as evidence that people are simply more willing to place women in stressful leadership situations-possibly because they are perceived to represent a less valuable and more expendable resource than male leaders, and one less worthy of protection. Such a view chimes with the observations of around 15% of the women (but none of the men) who participated in an on-line study reported by Ryan et al. (2007).
Family‐friendly policies and gender bias in academia
Mayer, Audreyl. ; Tikka, Päivim.
Journal of Higher Education Policy and Management, 2008, Vol.30(4), p.363-374 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Although family leave and childcare policies are significantly more generous in the Nordic countries than in the US, we found no appreciable difference between the countries in the representation of women among academic staff. [...] In all three countries, women face greater societal expectation for care giving, yet are penalized professionally for doing so (Armenia & Gerstel, 2006; Drago et al., 2006; Evans, 2007; Gault & Lovell, 2006). Female professors in the US are sacrificing relationships and childbearing to acquiesce to the male-centred academic tradition (Drago et al., 2006; Williams, 2004). Those who are in tenure-track positions and have children are less likely to take advantage of options, such as stopping the tenure clock or long maternity leaves, for fear of being seen as less serious about their careers than their male peers (Drago et al., 2006).
Women also face prejudice unrelated to their parental status. Studies in the Nordic countries and the US have found that women face widespread biases regarding the value of their work and their scientific competence, despite overwhelming evidence that these biases are unfounded (Handelsman et al., 2005; Shibley Hyde & Linn, 2006; Williams, 2004). Women must be more productive than men to receive equal pay, promotion and recognition (American Association of University Professors, 2001; National Academy of Sciences, 2007; Wennera˚s & Wold, 1997). Other cross-national comparisons of women in academia have indicated a strong influence of societal stereotypes and expectations on the representation of women in permanent academic positions (Hanson, Schaub & Baker, 1996; Wennera˚s & Wold, 2000).
In male-dominated departments and disciplines, women experience increased discrimination and harassment (Settles et al., 2006), which may prompt women to seek out institutions in which women make up a larger proportion of the academic staff.
Indeed, Mason and Goulden (2004) found that neither marriage nor children explained why women were less likely than men to achieve tenure.
Engendering Inequity? How Social Accounts Create vs. Merely Explain Unfavorable Pay Outcomes for Women
2012, Vol.23(4), p.1154-1174 [Peer Reviewed Journal]
Although barriers to women's access to higher-paying occupations and advancement within occupations contribute to the overall gender wage gap, women receive lower remuneration than men even when they hold the same jobs in the same firms (Elvira and Graham 2002, Petersen and Morgan 1995, Tomaskovic-Devey 1995). In fact, even when women adopt strategies associated with higher compensation and career advancement for men, such as changing employers or using external offers to increase pay with current employers, they do not obtain the same returns from these strategies as men do (Brett and Stroh 1997, Fernandez-Mateo 2009,Stroh et al. 1992).
As a result, despite evidence that women occupying the same roles as men demonstrate similar levels of agency (Eagly and Wood 1991) and value pay slightly but significantly more than men do (Konrad et al. 2000), managers mayexpect that women will be more motivated than men by rewards other than pay-specifically, other rewards that address women's assumed focus on relationships (see Filer 1989).
To the extent that managers assume that procedurally fair treatment will be especially motivating and valuable for women because of their perceived communality, managers may decide to give women lower pay when an account is available than when an account is not available. More important, when an account is available, managers may pay women less than otherwise identical men because their perceptions of men's greater self-interest and lower relational focus lead them to assume that procedural fairness will not be a viable substitute for higher pay for men. Hence, as might be expected on the basis of theory and research on benevolent sexism (Glick and Fiske 2001), rather than paying women less than men because of hostile gender prejudice, managers may do so because they hold seemingly benevolent beliefs about the unique importance to women of fair procedural treatment.
In sum, this paper shows that the underlying assumption in the procedural justice literature-that decision makers' benevolent procedural treatment of group members has positive effects on those group members-does not apply to women. Instead, my results indicate that the opportunity for managers to treat women in a more procedurally fair way by providing a social account can cause them to behave in a distributively unfair manner toward female employees. Taken together, these two studies reveal that managers treat accounts as substitutes for higher pay for women because they believe that women will be more motivated by procedurally fair treatment than men, rather than because they think that the account simply provides “cover” for them to express an underlying hostile gender prejudice (see Crandall and Eshleman 2003). That is, managers appear to believe the disproven thesis underlying the “compensating differentials” explanation for the gender wage gap: that women willingly accept lower wages because they value other relational rewards offered by the job (see the compensating differentials argument inFiler 1989; for counterarguments and contrary evidence, see Jacobs and Steinberg 1990,Lefkowitz 1994, Ross and Mirowsky 1996). The ironic consequence of this chain of assumptions and behaviors is that a seemingly benevolent belief in women's preference for procedural fairness enables managers to perceive themselves as behaving fairly and efficiently when making pay decisions that benefit men and perpetuate gender-based wage inequity (Jost et al. 2003, Kay et al. 2009).