THE EVER-WIDENING GENDER GAP
BY JULIANNE MALVEAUX

I love it when conservatives start talking about the absence of a gender gap – especially conservative women. For close to decades now, conservatives have maligned the idea of the “gender gap” – the phenomenon expressed in the wage differentials of American women and men – saying that “OF COURSE there’s a gender gap . . . women work fewer hours, leave the workforce more frequently, have less education and typically work in fields paying less than the average wage for which a man typically works” – and this is my favorite -- “and when we account for length of time in the workforce, education and job type, the gender gap virtually disappears” according to the Independent Women’s Forum. To be fair, there are kernels of truth in their argument. Women do typically work fewer hours, with more women working part-time rather than full-time because of either child care limitations or a desire to be with their children. Women also currently lag behind men in educational attainment, but don’t expect that to last for long – women outnumber men XX to X in American colleges and universities, with the ratio being so lopsided at some colleges, like the College of Charleston in South Carolina, that some people believe male recruitment efforts are not far away.

But what about this idea that when researchers control for age, length of time in workforce and so on, the gender gap disappears? I would tell that to the women members of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology faculty whose university released last week a report detailing that female professors often received lower pay and had access to fewer resources, according to the New York Times. MIT, my alma mater and a bastion of male dominance, has been brought to task for such blatant inequality before – in 1999 a report on the MIT School of Science produced similar findings: women faculty members were subject to systemic marginalization, lower pay and fewer resources, the New York Times reminded us.

And then, last year, U.S. Reps. Carolyn Maloney (D-NY) and John D. Dingell (D-MI), asked the General Accounting Office to provide them with information on the “challenges women face in advancing their careers.” The GAO study, Women in Management: Analysis of Selected Data from the Current Population Survey, dealt only with women and men in management position, which should raise a few eyebrows, if only because the gender gap, though still present, decreases in management positions. The study focused on 10 industries and used data from the Current Population Survey in 1995 and 2000 to arrive at their conclusions. Some of their findings were predictable: female managers often had less education, were younger, and were more likely to work part-time (information we already knew), not to mention they were less likely to be married than their male counterparts.

The most telling fact of all however is that in both 1995 and 2000, full-time female managers earned less than full-time male managers, AFTER controlling for education, age, marital status and race. These are precisely the factors conservatives would tell you should statistically eliminate the wage disparity among women and men! Hmmm. Still think there’s no gender gap?