Commentary—

Let’s See The Numbers On Women’s Pay

By Martha Burk

We’ve just passed Equal Pay Day again. That’s the day in April every year when women’s earnings finally catch up with what men made by December 31 of the previous year. The pay gap is still a stubborn problem, with women who work full time, year-round, making 76 cents to a man’s dollar. Though it consistently polls number one with female voters in election years, politicians don’t seem motivated to do much about it. The Fair Pay Act (FPA), a bill that would help narrow the gap, has grown old bouncing around Capitol Hill since the early 1990s, never receiving as much as a hearing.

Some people say pay disparities between women and men are an illusion — women just like to choose jobs that pay less because they’re not as risky or have shorter hours. But the data don’t back up these claims. Even when researchers take into account such factors as part-time work or time out of the work force to care for kids, the numbers show that men make more.

Another problem that just won’t go away is that so-called “men’s jobs” like plumbing, pay more than “women’s jobs,” like nursing. That tells us something about what we value as a society, and it’s not women’s work.

If the FPA ever passed, it would require employers to release statistics on what they pay men and what they pay women. Not anybody’s salary on a bulletin board — just overall data for a company by job category, race, and gender. Employers naturally resist this, citing loss of “competitive advantage,” but women’s advocates suspect the real reason is that the numbers would be too damning. Women might even get big ideas like suing their employers for sex discrimination in pay and promotion, as female workers at Wal-Mart have done in the largest class action suit in history.

Wal-Mart has mounted a major public relations campaign since the suit was filed a couple of years ago, and says it has put in policies to remedy any pay discrimination that might have existed. Time (and data that will come out in open court) will tell. In the meanwhile, the company has done one good thing in response to stockholder pressure. It recently agreed to release its EEO-1 form online. That’s a report to the government on jobs by race and gender — without any pay data — and employers are not required to release it to the public. The report documents that while over 60 percent of Wal-Mart’s workers are female, only 39 percent of its managers are. Now that the world knows this, perhaps the company will really address the reasons women aren’t getting to the top.

While there’s no law that says companies have to disclose how they pay and promote their workers, there’s no law that says they can’t. Some disclosure is better than none, but Wal-Mart should go a step further and release its pay statistics, as Ben & Jerry’s has done for years. If pay scales are equitable, there should be nothing to hide. Women could see right up front if the company is fair. It would eliminate the need for lawsuits, and create tremendous employee loyalty and customer good will. That ought to be worth 24 extra cents in the pay envelope.

(Martha Burk is the author of Cult of Power: Sex Discrimination in Corporate America and What Can Be Done About It, just out from Scribner. )