When I was growing up in the 1970s, feminists complained of a wage gap between men and women. The fulltime woman worker’s wage was said to be 51 cents to the fulltime man worker’s dollar.
In not too many years, the operative figure became 59 cents. A few years later it went up again and then again and now it is 77 cents.
In other words, the amount of money a woman working fulltime can expect to make relative to what a man working fulltime makes has been steadily rising for the past decades.
What accounts for the rise? Discrimination against women in pay and promotions has dramatically decreased due to more vigorous enforcement of laws banning such discrimination. (Some say we are now discriminating against men in some areas but that’s a subject for another essay.) “Help Wanted†newspaper ads were classified into “male†and “female†up until the 1970s but the Supreme Court ruled such practices unconstitutional, leading to more women entering high-paying jobs that were previously male-dominated.
In the decades since the 1970s, more women have received higher educations and more have worked for uninterrupted years of their lives. Indeed, when the wages of women and men who have the same education, work the same jobs (not “comparable†jobs), and have worked the same amount of time are compared, the wage gap often comes close to vanishing – or even reverses.
Part of the reason a wage gap persists are that the sexes continue to work different amounts of times and at different jobs.
Women are still more likely than men to take time off from the labor market for fulltime homemaking. Inevitably, a worker who is out of the labor market for years will not, on average, make as much as one who has been in it without interruption.
Another reason for the wage gap is that men take the physical-strength intensive jobs. These jobs pay highly in large part because they are dangerous. This brings us to another on-the-job gender gap but one less well publicized than the wage gap.
Men are heavily represented in those jobs with high injury and fatal accident rates. Men are the majority of coal miners, garbage collectors, lumberjacks (there aren’t many lumberjills!), firefighters, and workers in other physically hazardous areas. Coal miners suffer a double whammy as they not only work in an environment that is accident-prone but are exposed to the dreaded “black lung†as a result of their work.
Why don’t women take these jobs? It might be that women place a greater premium on personal safety as opposed to high pay than men do because men are still expected to shoulder the greatest share of family support. Perhaps even more relevantly, these jobs require more upper-body physical strength than is possessed by the vast majority of women.
People who take great physical risks on their jobs should be compensated for those risks. To the extent that the wage gap reflects women’s lesser participation in the labor market and men’s greater chance of injuries and deaths on the job, it is not an injustice but a difference based on fairness.
