A main source of the wage gap between men and women is job segregation. Men and women are sorted into different jobs and jobs associated with women are paid less.
Below is a list of occupations and their average wages for 2007 from The Bureau of Labor Statistics. I picked out occupations that were rather straightforward (not a random sample, just an illustrative one), put them in order from lowest to highest, and colored them according to whether they are feminine (pink) or masculine (blue) occupations. Comments below.
Parking Lot Attendants: $8.82
Child care workers: $8.82
Coatroom attendants: $9.18
Bellhops: $9.25
Sewing machine operators: $9.31
Manicurists and pedicurists: $9.60
Home health care aid: $9.62
Stock clerks: $9.85
Janitors: $10.00
Hairdressers: $10.68
Security Guards: $10.85
File clerks: $11.06
Pre-school teachers: $11.12
Barbers: $11.31
Receptionist: $11.40
Bus Driver (school): $12.43
Construction workers: $13.13
Butchers: $13.87
Dental Assistants: $15.17
Bus Driver (city): $15.94
Roofers: $15.98
Car mechanics: $16.43
Truck drivers: $17.41
Electricians: $21.53
1. Notice that feminized occupations, occupations that are disproportionately female, cluster towards the lower wage end of this hierarchy.
2. Notice also that, were we to rank these occupations in order of importance or difficulty, we might come out with a very different ranking. Importance and difficulty does not necessarily translate into wages.
For example, child care workers and home health care workers are paid only a bit more or no more than parking lot attendants. And coatroom attendants are paid more. So coats and cars are, I guess, pretty important.
Car mechanics are paid more than dental assistants. They require a similar amount of training, yet we still pay those taking care of our cars more than those taking care of our teeth.
And pre-school teachers are paid less than butchers and bus drivers. Is preparing our children for school less important than getting them there? Do we value the man preparing our meat more than we value the woman tending to our child?
3. Finally, notice that some jobs come in gender specific forms and the feminized form is paid less. For example, maids are paid less than janitors and hairdressers are paid less than barbers.
17 Comments
Maybe you should enroll in a couple of economics classes! You would get a bit of insight into labor markets and understand why people are paid the wages they are in a more empirical and less moralistic way. Just a thought.
Interesting, I rode the bus all through school and never had a male driver.
To add to what Eleanor said, I don’t think retail stock clerk is a “male” profession (other types, I don’t know).
Wow- I’m really disapointed in the comments here.
Before my current job I was a child care provider for eight years. I had years of experience and six years of college (elementary education) under my belt. The wages you report here are much higher than any wage I earned (and I worked from 2000 - 2008).
Economics or not, the fact remains that we seriously devalue the people who take care of our children. This is not an easy job. It is physically taxing, emotionally and mentally strenuous and takes a very specific sort of individual who is willing to forgo economic security to benefit _other people’s children_.
Chris doesn’t really know what he’s talking about. (Disclaimer, I do economics and sociology). Economics has some rudimentary marginally related models, but nothing that could explain the variance (or non-variance) on the scale of what we’re interested in here–maybe in time.
My sister is a highly skilled seamstress, of which there are few in her skill range, who works on some of the fanciest and most expensive dresses sold in her home city, Vancouver–read, 10 000 and up. She cannot hope to make more doing that than I did at a more or less entry level carpentry position right after leaving high school. As a skilled carpenter, I could make even more.
Unfortunately, as much as it has to do with society devaluing positions, it also has to do with workers devaluing positions.
Many of the women that I have known have also been some of the hardest workers I know–sometimes out of principle, and other times because they have to prove themselves in a man’s world. There’s nothing just about this–and they don’t do it because they want to. We have to ask ourselves, Why are women willing to work for less? I have ideas relating to society wide trends of inequality with respect to responsibility, self-perception and opportunity (dare I say something as systematic as patriarchy), but this comment is already long enough.
A paycheck isn’t a valentine. Very few jobs are paid according to how much we as a society love and value the work done. If the hours, skills, and conditions of, say, working in a preschool suit more applicants than the hours, skills, and conditions of working as a butcher, the butchers are going to get paid more, because there are fewer people willing or able to take those jobs–not because we value butchers more.
(Being a butcher is a hazardous job, working around sharp blades and grinding machines and raw meat; it makes sense someone would require more compensation for the substantial risks involved. When I worked at a preschool, maybe I was tired and emotionally spent after a day, but at least I was never covered in blood.)
Oh yeah, and my kid’s schoolbus drivers have mostly been women–maybe one man out of ten drivers in the past few years. So that one might be misclassified in the chart.
Hmm… But why is it that my barber costs much less than my female friends’ hairdressers? (Do I just have a cheap barber?)
As to another note, we seem to value many things that are “given” or “provided” much lower than those things that are “purchased”. For example, if we had to purchase teeth (think that we had evolved gizzards and not teeth), then we might give the selection of teeth and their preservation more importance. Similarly, if we had to purchase (high up-front cost) children, maybe we would pay more for child-care. (I wonder if anyone has done a study on willingness-to-pay for childcare for people who conceived naturally with no problems against other groups who had to spend lots of money before getting a child (fertility clinics, surrogate mother, artificial insemination, adoption, etc).
Just a thought, since - as an natural resource manager - I feel that many jobs in my area of expertise are not well-paid relative to their importance (clean environment, anyone?).
Your barber might be cheap, but I also suspect his supply closet doesn’t contain quite so many products and devices and tools as your average Fantastic Sam’s. And each cut probably takes less time than each customer at the hairdresser’s. So even if the stylists are paid the same in each business, the barbershop cut will generally be cheaper, because it’s faster and doesn’t have to cover so many other business expenses.
@ Chuk - I agree, this is about society devaluing positions. For example, why does a Secretary/Administrative Assistant get paid between $9-15 an hour when a CEO makes $30-40 per hour. Why not value the Admin just as much as the CEO and pay her more? I have always wondered about this. I have been one of these women and hard working too. I feel that women are not wanting to work for less. Especially with the current economy women are willing to take “whatever,” as the saying goes. So if they make $9.50 an hour as a cashier or $15.50 as an Administrative Assistant it is better than what they had before. Additionally, patriarchy, yes and internalized oppression are a factor in why women take jobs that pay them and treat them less than they deserve.
I think Penny’s made a very considerate point.
I’m somewhat disappointed with the reasoning here. A solid preliminary argument really helps people produce solid refutations or defenses. So we’ve taken a subjective (but “illustrative”) set of occupations, arranged them by pay and committed to them subjective sexualization. I have a suspicion that one could easily use your resources and method to create a list that could, say, argue that occupations that favor the transgendered typically involve soft textiles, cheese and are excellently compensated.
I would like to know how the “masculine” and “feminine” jobs were determined. Do statistics on gender employment also come from the Bureau of Labor, or did you assign that yourself based on what you’ve seen?
I’m curious because most people I see and know working retail, driving buses (school and city) and working as parking attendants are female. But that could just be me and my town.
All,
I picked the jobs myself and used my own cultural competence, partial and flawed as it is, to determine whether the job was feminized or masculinized.
I never meant for this to *prove* that job segregation occurs, that feminized occupations are generally paid less than masculinized ones, or that this contributes to a wage gap. That is well-established in the sociological literature.
I only meant the list to be illustrative and thought it nice to throw up some 2007 numbers.
Chuk, women are often willing to work for less because they do not have the luxury of waiting for something they think they deserve. Single mothers have childcare responsibilities at a much higher rate than single fathers. Women must feed not only themselves, but children, much of the time, so they take what they can get.
Chuck,
In addition to the point SarahMC made, there are also studies out there you can read about what happens when women do demand more money. Women are penalized when they ask for a higher wage, whereas men are generally not ( though sometimes they are).
To Chuk and all of those who have commented on his response-
I do not believe Chuk meant to blame women for their marginalized economic status. Instead, he blamed workers for devaluing women’s contribution to the workplace, while also pointing out society’s contribution to this gender hierarchy. Since Western civilization has long relied on a partriarchal system, it does make sense that over time, women would acquire a lower sense of self-worth in the workplace. This idea does NOT blame women in any way, but instead shows that the way our society orders gender may contribute to women feeling devalued and thus not requesting higher wages.
In response to the comment made that said women are penalized when they ask for higher wages- Perhaps women may not receive higher wages when they ask, but I have heard numerous stories proving the contrary. For a woman to show an employer that she is strong and assertive, for a woman to stand firmly and not take a job until she is paid well, is something to be encouraged and appreciated. I know women who have done this and received a better salary. Let us encourage our women to attempt to rectify this problem and not shy away from it.
I don’t know a lot about economics, but it seems to me that it’s difficult to genuinely compare these positions with each other. It’s somewhat interesting from a gender wage-gap perspective (i.e. maid vs. janitor) but beyond that it seems like there are a lot of factors missing from the analysis. For instance, doesn’t it matter who sets the wages and who is doing the paying for these services?
The dental assistant’s salary is set by the dentist (who incidentally is paid much more per hour than the mechanic) and the consumer doesn’t really know anything beyond the total bill they pay to the dental practice or the garage. So as individuals, we are not necessarily valuing the mechanic more.
Also, isn’t it a little awkward to compare something like childcare workers with manicurists? Childcare is paid for out of necessity, usually by working parents with limited income. It has to be affordable, even though it is an unfair wage because the service provided is priceless. People who get manicures, on the other hand, have at least some disposable income, so salons can charge whatever they want and thus pay their workers more.
I suppose I also take issue with your assumptions about what should be valued most. All these jobs are important in their own ways. Yes, teachers matter and should earn more, but it is just as important that kids be driven safely to school by their bus drivers. I value my teeth and dental care, but I also don’t want to die in an accident because my mechanic did shoddy work on my brake lines. There’s plenty of classism inherent in my own value system, so I’m not judging you too harshly, but that’s how this reads to me.
–Kekla
http://chicksrockblog.com
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