#2: Pay up
A painting by my friend Betsy Feuerstein, who’s been spending far more time making art during the pandemic.
On my mind this week is $$$.
Thanks to sky-high unemployment, many millions of Americans are on the job market. Ideally, those job seekers don’t just want a paycheck; they want a fair paycheck. But fair pay is far from a guarantee if you’re a woman or person of color in the U.S. You can slice the data in different ways, but the gist is, women and people of color earn less than their white male counterparts for the same work. I came across a pair of recent papers that show that the factors that contribute to disparities like pay gaps aren’t always, on their face, a matter of racism or sexism. That means effective solutions to problems like pay gaps can look fairly indirect.
I’ll start with the bad news. The decline of collective bargaining does not bode well for the gender pay gap. A couple of economists looked at the salaries of teachers in Wisconsin after the implementation of Act 10, a state law that took away unions’ right to collectively bargain. Whereas teachers’ salaries used to be determined by a combination of their education and seniority, Act 10 forced teachers to bargain individually for their pay. This graph says it all (note: CBA means collective bargaining agreement). Prior to the bill, there was no gender pay gap. Afterward, female teachers started making less than male teachers who had the same credentials. The pay gap was larger between younger and less experienced female teachers and their male peers than for older and more female experienced teachers and their male peers.
Interestingly, there were cases in which no gap emerged. These were in districts that had female principals or superintendents. Why? Under a female superintendent, female and male teachers were equally likely to negotiate their salaries. But under a male principal or superintendent, women were less likely than men to negotiate. Because women are less likely than men to negotiate, the fend-for-yourself arrangement leads to disparate outcomes. (The obvious answer to encourage women to negotiate more is not as easy as it seems. Researchers have found that women are often penalized for negotiating)
Now for the sunnier news. A recent paper by a group of legal scholars shows how the structure of the hiring process can affect the gender pay gap. They looked at the effect of laws that ban employers from accessing applicants’ salary histories. A bunch of states have passed these laws in the last several years. The idea behind these laws is that certain groups—women, POC etc.—are likely to earn less than their peers, so using salary history as the basis for compensation in a new job perpetuates inequalities. The researchers wanted to know: for workers who are switching jobs, does the salary ban affect how much they earn?
What they found is pretty encouraging, especially given how low-touch the policy is. When women switch jobs, they earn significantly more in states that have these salary history bans. About half of the gender pay gap for these women goes away when the ban is in effect, and the share is even larger for Black Americans. This suggests that the pay gap can’t be explained away with reasons like, for instance, women put in fewer hours, or are less productive.
Both of these papers remind us that people, in this case, employers, don’t have to be cruel or prejudiced for discrimination to persist. The use of salary histories seems to perpetuate the effects of past discrimination, and the loss of collective bargaining seems to disproportionately harm women. I think one implication is that you can try to make people less biased on an individual level, but that may not solve the bigger problems. The solutions can look more mechanical, less moral.
I’m still thinking about
Words: A long-form piece on a relatively new form of psychotherapy. As my friend who recommended this article noted, there are ideas in here that we can all use to make sense of the seemingly warring factions within us.
Sounds: I loved this pair of episodes about the nine other women who were in Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s Harvard Law School class. Their lives did not exactly turn out like RBG’s.
Watch: When I heard this song, “Inside Friend,” by Leon Bridges and John Mayer, I assumed the lyrics were about the pandemic. In fact they wrote it before the pandemic, intending to get at introverts’ desire to stay home. Their video, which is recorded from their homes, embraces the new meaning of the song.
I made
I reviewed the book Big Friendship, written by Ann Friedman and Aminatou Sow of Call Your Girlfriend fame, for the Washington Post. Thank you to the friends who put their eyes on a draft of the review and made it better.
Now you know
It’s a relatively recent phenomenon for an entire populace to have last names. Surnames became common in China by about the 4th century B.C.E., but much later in Europe, around the 13th century in Europe. Governments have imposed last names on their people to enable important state functions (taxation, conscription etc). As the historian James Scott points out,
“Imagine the dilemma of a tithe or capitation-tax collector faced with a male population, 90 percent of whom bore just six Christian names (John, William, Thomas, Robert, Richard, and Henry).”
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