Rethinking the Gender Pay Gap

If women are BETTER at their jobs than men, perhaps we should expect them to get PAID LESS than men (Why? Hear me out).

Second, yes women are paid less than men for comparable jobs, but do they have greater horizontal mobility than men?

I was reflecting on the many studies that have demonstrated a long standing pay gap between men and women in comparable job positions. Surely, it’s indisputable. Women make less than men for comparable job positions. And yet, to claim there is something unfair going on may depend upon showing two things:

A) That men’s salaries truly increase according to the merit of their work, and moreover, that men’s pay does not, in fact, decrease according to individual merit.

B) Once you have to shown that, it is probably not hard to show that women are being treated differently and getting paid less for work of the same or greater merit.

But, I think that most studies simply assume that (A) is true. What if it is not true? What if in term’s of men’s salaries, pay actually decreases as the merit of their work increases. That is to say:

A) Actually, men who do better things or do a better job, men whose lives and work are of higher merit will always tend to get paid less.

B) Therefore, women getting paid less may very well indicate that they are both better at what they do, and are being paid less only because they are being held to the same standards as men.

What I mean is, what if the managers of our institutions taken in the aggregate— for a reason we don’t have to explain right now — consistently promote the wrong people? What if our companies are consistently promoting the wrong people (regardless of gender)?

If, lower pay for better work is the rule, and if women are actually doing better work than men — not merely doing as good a job as men — then we would expect women to get paid less.

In other words, it is not just women who receive lower wages and fewer promotions for being more meritorious employees. But women are more meritorious employees more of the time.

Perverse but quite possibly true.

Let me add one more point, though.

Intuitively, it seems like women may accumulate at least one other form of personal capital faster than men, namely horizontal mobility not only among companies in similar fields but also among different fields: This is to say:

Can women change careers more easily than men can?

I think that would be an interesting research question. Googling it doesn’t turn up much of interest, incidentally.

Just to explain further: Men may track vertically upwards faster and higher within a single firm or field. (And these rewards may, perversely, be inversely correlated to their overall merit as employees, by the way.) But still, women may move horizontally with greater ease than men and may re-skill to more distant fields than men with a higher degree of success. Women may also retain the ability to switch careers with greater ease (and retain a greater degree of their personal capital) until a much later point in their lives.

If this all sounds abstract, what I am saying is, we should look at how well men and women do relative to one another when they try to leave their jobs as computer programmers and become ceramicists later in life. How often do the genders make such changes? How drastic are they? How well do they do? Tough questions to measure and sum up empirically, but, isn’t that what sociologists are supposed to do?

And if this latter hypothesis is true, such female-correlated ability and freedom to move horizontally may often be more valuable than a higher salary or a higher status within a single firm, if that high status within a single field/firm comes with cultural capital which does not permit horizontal mobility.

Where is this hypothesis coming from? I guess it’s based on the fact that I have seen and heard of a lot of successful women — educators, managers, researchers, craftspeople — tell stories about moving around and changing careers, and succeeding at new things after they reinvent themselves. By contrast, I can think of only a few successful men who I have heard tell stories like that.

What is more, though, the idea that women will be able to switch careers more easily than men also resonates with an intuitive fact about gender with regard to management and human resources: That firms are going to — rightly or wrongly — perceive the task of retraining a woman, or hiring a woman who has re-skilled from a different career path as less of a risk than attempting the same thing with a male. Males attempting to transition from a different career may be characterized as a potential disruption to the firm or as liable to relapse to their old field or company.

Admittedly, the dynamics of all these perceptions of merit, value, dependability and, so on, are complex and deeply intersubjective. But my point is that when we want to talk about fairness and eventually talk about viable solutions to social problems, we have to look at context.

Personally, working as a guest teacher in almost a hundred schools at all age levels over 5 years, I had plenty of experience being a man working alongside women who make 1.5 or even 2 times as much as I made doing work that was of equal or worse quality and confronting difficulties of equal or lesser magnitude. This is a rare scenario, admittedly. And my perspective may be biased by being in education, a field that is an unusually high percentage female.

But even acknowledging all that about my own experiences, these hypotheses deserve more reflection and empirical consideration. When we talk about the Gender Pay Gap it may be worthwhile to consider both:

A) The more intangible effects of gender that are not measured in dollars per year, most notably horizontal mobility.

B) And perhaps, more importantly, we should attend to the irrationality and even to the downright perverseness of salary in relation to merit even among men. If this perverse hypothesis does hold, then if women are on the whole better at their jobs than men, then we would expect them to get paid less — just as men who are better at their jobs get paid less than other men.

Addressing problem (A), the inverse meritocracies within our institutions today, will require adjustments much more serious and much different than wage mandates or workplace gender regulations.

And the idea implied by (B), that factoring in horizontal mobility in measuring the relative success of people — the Gross Personal Happiness that a person is getting from their career — may be crucial for contextualizing the true meaning, causes and effects of the Gender Pay Gap.