You can divide the reasons women earn less money than men do, on average, into three categories, in declining order or importance:
- Working fewer years, weeks, and hours
- Working in different occupations
- Being paid less in the same occupations
The first has to do with families and children. That has a large voluntary, or at least kind of voluntary, component (or it reflects hiring discrimination, which is hard to prove, prevent or punish under our legal regime). The third is illegal and sometimes actionable, as in the Lilly Ledbetter situation.
The second — occupational segregation — is a difficult hybrid. Segregation reflects both discrimination in hiring and promotions, and socialization-related choices, including in education. And it is wrapped up with divisions that may even be relatively harmless in a separate-but-equal kind of way — that is, not directly harmful, but contributing to the categorical divisions that make gender inequality more intractable. But the different pay in female- versus male-dominated occupations is a problem, well documented (see here and here) but virtually impossible to address under current law.
Today’s example: nursing assistants versus light truck drivers
The government’s O*Net job classification system provides detailed descriptions of the qualifications, skills, and conditions of hundreds of occupations. The comparison between nursing assistants (1.5 million workers) and light truck or delivery services drivers (.9 million) is instructive for the question of gender composition. Using the 2009-2011 American Community Survey, I figure nursing assistants are 88% female, compared with 6% female for the light truck drivers. Here are some other facts:
- The nursing assistants are better educated on average, with only 50% having no education beyond high school, compared with 67% of the light truck drivers.
- But in terms of job skills, they are both in the O*Net “Job Zone Two,” with 3 months to 1 year of training “required by a typical worker to learn the techniques, acquire the information, and develop the facility needed for average performance in a specific job-worker situation.”
- The O*Net reported median wage for 2012 was $11.74 for nursing assistants, compared with $14.13 for light truck drivers, so nursing assistants earn 83% of light truck drivers’ hourly earnings.
To make a stricter apples-to-apples comparison, I took those workers from the two occupations who fit these narrow criteria in 2009-2011:
- Age 20-29
- High school graduate with no further education
- Employed 50-52 weeks in the previous year, with usual hours of exactly 40 per week
- Never married, no children
This gave me 748 light truck drivers and 693 nursing assistants, with median annual earnings of $22,564 and $20,000, respectively — the light truck drivers earn 13% more. Why?
The typical argument for heavy truck drivers’ higher pay is that they spend a lot of time on the road away from home. But that’s not the case with the light truck drivers. They are more likely to work longer hours, but I restricted this comparison to 40-hour workers only. Here are comparisons of the O*Net database scores for abilities and conditions of the two jobs. For each I calculated score differences, so the qualities with bars above zero have higher scores for nursing assistants and those with bars below zero have higher scores for light truck drivers. See what you think (click to enlarge the figures). My comments are below.
You can stare at these lists and see which skills should be rewarded more, or which conditions compensated more. Or you could derive some formula based on the pay of the hundreds of occupations, to see which skills or conditions “the market” values more. But you will not be able to divine a fair market value for these differences that doesn’t have gender composition already baked into it. And “the market” doesn’t make this comparison directly, because nursing assistants and light truck drivers generally don’t work for the same employers or hire from the same labor pools. You might see reasons in these lists for why women choose one occupation and men choose the other, but I don’t see how that fairly leads to a pay difference.
The only solution I know of to the problem of unequal pay according to gender composition is government wage scales according to a “comparable worth” scheme (the subject of old books by Joan Acker and Paula England, but not high on the current political agenda). Under our current legal regime no one woman, or class of women, can successfully bring a suit to challenge this disparity.* That means occupational integration might be the best way to break this down.
*One exception to this is the public sector in Minnesota, in which local jurisdictions have their pay structures reviewed at regular intervals for evidence of gender bias, based on the required conditions and abilities of their jobs (as reported by me by Patricia Tanji of the Pay Equity Coalition of Minnesota).