Infographic #3: Geographic distribution of the Women of the 112th Congress
good:
Women Make Less Than Men at Every Education Level
Among Americans with some form of post-high school education—a vocational, associate’s, bachelor’s, or advanced degree—men make more than $800 above women’s pay every month. And the gap widens as men and women climb educational ranks. In short, education is valuable, but it’s most lucrative if you’re male.
Ladies, we have to start negotiating the living shit out of our salaries. Everywhere, every job.
RELATED: Why Women Don’t Negotiate — And What We Can Do About It (Forbes)
(via jessbennett)
Good Morning: And Happy (Er, Sad) Equal Pay Day
Today, April 20, is Equal Pay Day—a yearly marker of how long women must work into the current year (at 77 cents per every male dollar) to earn what men earned in the year past. We’ll be updating throughout the day, but here are a few figures to get your morning started:
8 months of groceries
The amount a woman could buy for a family of four if she were paid equal to her male peers, according to data from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research and the USDA.
58 cents
The amount that Latina women make per every male dollar in the United States. The gap among African American women is 70 cents; women overall—the figure we most often hear—is 77 cents.
9 percent
The amount by which the United States’ GDP could increase if the gender gap were closed.
Find us over at NEWSWEEK for 9 more staggering statistics about women and work.
Harvard: Why Focusing on the Pay Gap Misses the Point
Great piece from Harvard Business Review blogs, brought to our attention by a reader (thank you!), about how we must shift the conversation about work and gender from the problem with the wage gap to solutions for corporations. Some highlights:
- Women represent one of the world’s biggest and most under-reported opportunities—a growth market twice as big as India and China combined.
- The business world has been so focused on stories like the rise of China that it has not been invited to see that, much closer to home, business could be reaping the benefits of the rise of women.
- We must stop asking “What’s wrong with women that they’re not making it to the top?” and start asking “What’s wrong with companies if they can’t retain and promote the majority of educated Americans?” (That’s us, womyn!)
(Oh, and maybe we shouldn’t be high-fiving yet. But we kinda liked this picture.)
Kristof: The Boys Have Fallen Behind. But What About the Girls?
In this week’s New York Times, columnist Nick Kristof reports on the latest trouble with young boys—who, according to the Center on Education Policy, have fallen behind girls in reading in every single state. “The most pressing issue related to gender gaps,” the report claims, “is the lagging performance of boys in reading.”
Before everyone starts freaking out about the boy crisis, a quick reality check:
Boys have been lagging behind girls in school for decades. As Peg Tyre wrote in her book, “The Trouble With Boys,” elementary-aged boys are two times more likely than girls to be diagnosed with learning disabilities; and the number of boys who said they didn’t like school rose 71 percent between 1980 and 2001, according to a University of Michigan study. Nowhere is the shift more evident than on college campuses: thirty years ago, men represented 58 percent of the undergraduate student body, today, at 40 percent, they’re a minority. As Margaret Spellings, the former U.S. secretary of Education, told Newsweek in 2006, this widening achievement gap “has profound implications for the economy, society, families and democracy.”
But here’s the rub: no matter how poorly boys do in school, there is no evidence to show that that those lags impede their later success. And in fact, young men still outpace women in the workforce to an astonishing degree. U.S. Department of Education data shows that despite earning lower college GPAs, men still earn some 20 percent more than women in their first jobs out of college. The wage gap widens as men accelerate into management positions more quickly—over a lifetime, male high school graduates will earn some $700,000 more than their wives or sisters; college graduates will earn $1.2 million more.
To be sure, academia is critical—but the workplace lasts the rest of your life. And while young women may thrive in a merit-based system, there is growing evidence to prove they don’t have the skills to excel in a professional setting. Young women are four times less likely to negotiate a first salary, and, according to a recent Girl Scouts study, afraid to take on leadership positions they fear will make them seem “bossy.” “The zeitgeist is that girls are excelling and boys are having trouble,” says Rachel Simmons, the author of The Curse of the Good Girl. But it all depends on what you’re measuring.” In other words, all those ribbons and medals don’t translate to the real world if women are too afraid to ask for what they deserve.
Kristof makes the point that this doesn’t need to be a zero-sum game: “We should be able to help struggling boys without imposing any cost on girls,” he writes. He’s right. But the reality remains: gender inequities still—as they have for centuries—damage many more women than men.
