Blog Post

AEIdeas

Every year the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) publicizes its “Equal Pay Day” to bring public attention to the gender pay gap. According to the NCPE, “Equal Pay Day” will fall this year on April 12, and allegedly represents how far into 2016 women will have to continue working to earn the same income that the men earned last year, supposedly for doing the same job. Inspired by Equal Pay Day, I introduced “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” in 2010 to bring public attention to the huge gender disparity in work-related deaths every year in the United States. “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” tells us how many years into the future women will be able to continue to work before they will experience the same number of occupational fatalities that occurred for men in the previous year.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) released data last fall on workplace fatalities for 2014, and a new “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” can now be calculated. As in previous years, the chart above shows the significant gender disparity in workplace fatalities in 2014: 4,320 men died on the job (92.3% of the total) compared to only 359 women (7.7% of the total). The “gender occupational fatality gap” in 2014 was considerable — more than 12 men died on the job last year for every woman who died while working.

Based on the BLS data for 2014 (and assuming it will be comparable to 2015 data when it becomes available), the next “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” will occur about 12 years from now ­­– on January 12, 2027. That date symbolizes how far into the future women will be able to continue working before they experience the same loss of life that men experienced in 2015 from work-related deaths. Because women tend to work in safer occupations than men on average, they have the advantage of being able to work for more than a decade longer than men before they experience the same number of male occupational fatalities in a single year.

Economic theory tells us that the “gender occupational fatality gap” explains part of the “gender pay gap” because a disproportionate number of men work in higher-risk, but higher-paid occupations like coal mining (almost 100 % male), fire fighters (94.3% male), police officers (87.6% male), correctional officers (71.4% male), logging (94.6% male), refuse collectors (91.4%), truck drivers (94.2%), roofers (99.5% male), highway maintenance (98.5%), commercial fishing (100%) and construction (97.4% male); see BLS data here. The table above shows that for the ten most dangerous occupations in 2014 based on fatality rates per 100,000 workers, men represented more than 91% of the workers in those occupations for all of the ten occupations except for farming, which is 76.2% male.

On the other hand, women far outnumber men in relatively low-risk industries, often with lower pay to partially compensate for the safer, more comfortable indoor office environments in occupations like office and administrative support (72.9% female), education, training, and library occupations (74.1% female), and healthcare (74.2% female). The higher concentrations of men in riskier occupations with greater occurrences of workplace injuries and fatalities suggest that more men than women are willing to expose themselves to work-related injury or death in exchange for higher wages. In contrast, women, more than men, prefer lower risk occupations with greater workplace safety, and are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the reduced probability of work-related injury or death. The reality is that men and women demonstrate clear gender differences when they voluntarily select the careers, occupations, and industries that suit them best, and those voluntary choices contribute to differences in pay that have nothing to do with gender discrimination.

Bottom Line: Groups like the NCPE use “Equal Pay Day” to promote a goal of perfect gender pay equity, probably not realizing that they are simultaneously advocating an increase in the number of women working in higher-paying, but higher-risk occupations like fire-fighting, roofing, construction, farming, and coal mining. The reality is that a reduction in the gender pay gap would come at a huge cost: several thousand more women will be killed each year working in dangerous occupations.

Further, the proponents of “Equal Pay Day” are promoting a statistical falsehood by suggesting that women working side-by-side with men in the same occupation for the same company are making something like 25% less than their male counterparts, which causes them to have to work an additional 70 days (and 14 weeks) to achieve “equal pay.” The NCPE’s statement that “because women earn less, on average, than men, they must work [25%] longer for the same amount of pay,” implies that gender wage discrimination is behind the gender pay gap. Of course that would imply that some corrective action by government is necessary to address the gender pay gap, even though most studies find that there is no gender pay gap after factors like hours worked, child birth and child care, career interruptions, and individual choices about industry and occupation are considered. For example, a 2009 study by the Department of Labor concluded:

This study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct. The differences in raw wages may be almost entirely the result of the individual choices being made by both male and female workers.

Conclusion: I hereby suggest, that after adjusting for all factors that contribute to gender differences, Equal Pay Day actually fell on about December 31 last year. Or maybe the first week of January…. but NOT the second week of April. Women should be embarrassed by the statistical falsehood that is annually promoted by NCPE’s Equal Pay Day that suggests that gender discrimination in the labor market burdens them with 14 additional weeks of work to earn the same as their male counterparts – when that’s not even remotely true.

Finally, here’s a question I pose for the NCPE every year: Closing the “gender pay gap” can really only be achieved by closing the “occupational fatality gap.” Would achieving the goal of perfect pay equity really be worth the loss of life for thousands of additional women each year who would die in work-related accidents?