Female Grads Get Paid Less
2007Barry Weisleder 2007-06The page as the paper published it (Wayback Machine) →
From the paper's own web edition, recovered from the Internet Archive: the text as the paper put it online, not machine-read. The printed issue of June 2007 is not held.
By Barry Weisleder / June 2007 issue of Socialist Action newspaper
Nowadays, women outnumber men at universities, overall they get better grades, and yet women get paid less than men after graduation.
Surprising to many is not the well-documented existence of the income gap, but that it starts so soon.
According to a new study by the American Association of University Women, women already earn 20 per cent less than men at the same level and in the same field one year after college graduation. Right at the beginning, before taking time off for childbirth or child rearing, women find themselves behind.
And then it gets worse. Women are paid about 77 cents for every dollar a man is paid, according to U.S. census data, a figure that has remained steady for about a decade.
Ten years after graduation, women fall further behind, earning 69 per cent of what men earn.
A 12 per cent gap appeared even when the AAUW Education Foundation, which did the research, accounted for hours, occupation, parenthood and other factors known to directly affect earnings.
The remainder of the gap is unexplained by any other control factors. That may mean, said Catherine Hill, director of research for the AAUW, that discrimination is the root cause.
And to discover the deeper root of that ‘root cause’ one needs only to answer the question, “Who benefits by paying women less?”