Why I reckon we have a pay equity problem - a response to Psycho Milt

Psycho Milt is a leftie who blogs at right-wing blog No Minister, and he's been playing devil's advocate around the issue of pay equity here and elsewhere, culminating in a post that puts his thoughts together. The below is my response.

I'm going to start by summarising what I think are Milt's points:

1. Right-wingers simply don't see pay equity as an issue at all, partly because of the way it is framed, eg the Herald report claiming CYF pays it's female staff significantly less than the men, deleting that important phrase "on average", making it easily dismissed as it's obviously wrong.
2. Many of the occupational groups compared in pay equity investigations are stupid match-ups, eg nurses and police officers, shop assistants and electricians.
3. Pay equity does seem to be a real problem though, as it definitely does exist and right-wingers are unable to explain it without recourse to sexist explanations.
4. The main reasons for pay inequity are:
   "[4.]1. Women taking years out of the workforce to look after children or sick/aged relatives.
   [4.]2. Women avoiding additional responsibility/overtime because their family comes first.
   [4.]3. Women not seeking promotion because their husband's career comes first."
5. Thus the real question should not be "why do [women] average less pay, but why are they the ones most likely to be making these pay-reducing sacrifices?"
6. And as for female-dominated occupations tending to be lower paid than male-dominated ones, Milt reckons the answers are:
   6.1 Male-dominated professions are more likely to make lots of money for a business owner than female-dominated work.
   6.2. Higher pay does not reflect a higher value placed on your labour, but is related to either supply and demand and/or level of union organisation.
7. Milt asks why women continue to go into lower paid areas these days, and concludes that "there's a hell of a nature-vs-nurture argument to be had out of that question."
8. There is a pay equity issue, but it's not something government can resolve; it will have to be dealt with on a case-by-case basis.

If I've mis-represented anything there PM please be assured it's not deliberate and if you point out my errors in comments that would be super.

So, to turn to each of these in turn.

1. Framing the issue of pay equity inaccurately
This seems to me to be a bit of a side issue. Yes it's irritating. So is the concerted National-led campaign to misrepresent the situation with ACC (witness the now many many editorial cartoons bad-mouthing the scheme). What can those of us interested in furthering the pay equity issue do about? Continue to put out there information that isn't framed in such an easily dismissed fashion. But can we control the media reporting? Nope. (To be honest I thought that most intelligent people would read that 9.5% thing and work out that it meant on average, but perhaps I was being too optimistic?)

2. Incomparable occupational groups are compared in pay equity investigations
That's somewhat subjective really. I don't think the comparison of nurses and police officers is particularly far fetched, which has been argued about over at Kiwipolitico already. I'm not sure it's all that easy, or indeed possible, to unhitch our views of various occupational groups from our views of traditional women's work as being less worthy. People are often rather sneering about hairdressers, but in my experience a good one is rather highly skilled indeed, and it's definitely not something you can walk off the street and do immediately with a high level of competence. As we've discussed here in the recent past, there is a real problem with our common definitions of skilled and unskilled work. Collecting rubbish may not be mentally taxing (maybe it is, I've never done it), but the physical skills involved are significant. Again, not a job most people could walk off the street and instantly do well. I'm quite happy to leave the really quite hard work of doing these comparisons to the experts. Sadly for many the mere fact that information comes out of the Ministry of Women's Affairs makes it automatically wrong, regardless of content or level of analysis.

3. Right-wingers are unable to explain pay equity without falling back on sexist arguments
No disagreement there!

4. The main reasons for pay inequity are
4.1 "Women taking years out of the workforce to look after children or sick/aged relatives. "
Definitely a contributing factor. In the school teaching profession those who take time out to care for young children can actually get service credits to recognise it, but this is not a widespread practice outside the big education collective agreements (I think).

4.2 "Women avoiding additional responsibility/overtime because their family comes first."
Again, clearly this does have some impact.

4.3 "Women not seeking promotion because their husband's career comes first."
My perception is that this is less of a factor for my generation and younger women. Time will tell.

5. "Why do [women] average less pay, but why are they the ones most likely to be making these pay-reducing sacrifices?"
This is where I think Milt is absolutely bang on. He doesn't offer any possibilities as to the answer though. This point alone is worthy of a whole post, or series of posts. In short I believe it's because we still live in a society that does not see women, and women's work, as equal to men. Here's one such real life example, and here's another. No doubt there are many more that readers could share.

I should also note that I think there are other factors which contribute in a similar way to Milt's threesome above, e.g. levels of education. More on that another time perhaps.

6. Female-dominated work is likely to be lower paid than male-dominated work because:
6.1 Male-dominated professions are more likely to make lots of money for a business owner than female-dominated work.
Milt gives the example of designing microelectrical circuitry delivering lots of possible profit for the boss, whereas care-giving work looking after the elderly is just not a money-spinner. But this ignores the massive government funding that has gone into the Aged Care sector in recent years, and similar in early childhood education and care, which has made these areas that corporates have wanted to get into. Part of the reason they can make a big profit is because of how low the wages are. And the wages are low, I believe, because it's traditional women's work which used to be done within the family unpaid.

Anita's comment on the nurses and police officers comparison goes to the epicentre of this, imho:
"Can I hypothesize that we value manly danger more highly than womanly danger?"

6.2. Higher pay does not reflect a higher value placed on your labour, but is related to either supply and demand and/or level of union organisation.
The supply and demand argument depends on a model which has been shown again and again to rarely work as precisely as my fourth form economics teacher laid it out. In fact it's probably more about the perception of supply and demand, and the power an individual worker (or group of workers) feel they have to determine the worth of their labour. Clearly this is intrinsically linked to the second part of Milt's point, around union organisation.

It's more complex than that though. To generalise wildly, many women are informed from birth that their ideas, their work, their needs, are worth less than the men around them. In the reception example I linked earlier, all three of the workers approached had indicated we were going out that afternoon at some point, yet the receptionist determined that the two men were busy and I was not. I'd worked there the same length of time as one of the men, longer than the other. One is quite a bit older than me, the other is about a week younger than me. We're all white. What could have possibly motivated my workmate to assume that I was more available to pick up her (traditionally female) work than my male colleagues?

In the union movement we sometimes talk about Nice Lady Syndrome. It's the difficulty unionists face with encouraging women workers to stand up for their rights. I think there's a class dimension to it too, and an ethnic factor in many cases; to me though gender is at the heart of the trouble.

7. Why do women continue to go into lower paid jobs?
See 6.2 above, in part. How many women reading this have had the experience of saying as a child "I'd like to be a doctor (or other male-dominated profession)" and having an adult tell them "What about being a nurse (or other related female-dominated profession)"? It was pretty crystal to me as a child what the acceptable occupations were for a girl and I took great pleasure in being contrary about it. I still recall the realisation I couldn't be an All Black.*

And it goes back to 4 and 5 as well. If family is your priority then the message is often that you must put career on the back burner. Many young girls grow up in an environment where it is assumed they will stay at home with the children and make that their career. It's worthwhile, however it's pretty much the supreme example of underpaid important work.

Is there something biological in women that compels us to seek out the cheaper options? I think not.

8. Government can't have much impact on the pay equity issue; it needs to be dealt with case-by-case
As a major employer in Aotearoa the state can have a significant impact by addressing the gender pay gaps within its own workforce. This progress would in turn have an impact on the private sector, as there is competition for workers between private and state. That wouldn't be enough, but it would be a good start.

Saying that pay disparities should be dealt with case-by-case seems to me to be denying that there is any systematic issue. It sounds like arguing that when a woman is paid less than a man doing the same or comparable work it is because of the overt sexism of the person setting those wages. Yes, that will be the case sometimes. But it's simply not enough to explain the significantly gendered differences in pay across single occupational groups. Anita gives the example of law graduates - women are on average paid $5000 less a year than their male counterparts, and this is at the start of their careers, before any time off for children or whatever.



Phew, I don't know about you, but I feel like I need a break. Your turn, dear readers (and of course Psycho Milt).


* Although as I grew older I did determine that even if I had possessed the requisite penis I would still have fallen down in the crucial areas of kicking, catching, running, and throwing.