How bad is the gender pay gap? In answer, I give you this: data that shows men make more money than women. It comes from the ATO’s taxation statistics for 2020-21. But beware. At the same time, this data leaves lots of space for people who want to claim that everything is totally fine.
The following chart shows all the jobs in Australia, arrayed from most male-dominated to most female-dominated. Did you know there are almost 100 male electricians for every female electrician? And almost 100 female midwives for every male? Men make up a slightly greater share of the workforce, so there are more blue (male-dominated) professions than female ones.
On the vertical axis is average pay in that profession. What this chart shows is that male-dominated professions make more on average, while the worst-paid jobs (often part-time and casual) are female-dominated.
The pay effect is, interestingly, not most pronounced in the most male-dominated professions. The sweet spot looks to be professions such as mining engineering, where men outnumber women more like 5:1.
The red line is best thought of as a visual guide to the pattern in the data, not a definitive causal model. It uses locally estimated scatterplot smoothing, a type of moving regression that helps illustrate the relationship between variables. (It has a higher margin of error out at the edges where there’s less data to average.)
I told you so!
This chart has something for everyone. Whether you want to affirm or deny the merits of the gender pay gap, you can point at this and shout: “See!”
Haters will argue that much of the gender pay gap doesn’t come from women being paid less for the same work, it comes from sorting into job categories, and that this chart is proof women choose lower-paying jobs and part-time jobs.
Believers will argue there’s a reason we pay midwives less than electricians, and it isn’t that their work is less valuable. Society devalues women’s work, and this chart is proof of that.
My view is this chart can’t prove reasons, but it is proof of how powerful gender norms can be. There’s no reason a woman can’t be an electrician — it’s not a job that requires enormous body strength or those marginal few centimetres of height.
And the reasons often put forward for why men aren’t nurses — it’s gross, etc — don’t explain why men are so keen to be plumbers. It certainly seems that, somehow, we channel boys into one group of jobs and girls into another.
Where does that start? How do kids absorb these lessons? I’m not sure, but when I go online to buy kids’ clothes, they sure look different.
You can’t buy a T-shirt with a digger or a dinosaur on it in the girls’ section. You can’t buy a unicorn shirt in the boys’ section. To me that suggests that at least some of the difference between genders is cultural. We manufacture it by putting different expectations on our kids and showing them different norms.
In the kids’ section, the one cartoon that crosses gender lines seems to be Bluey, and that might be part of its success in our modern environment. Bluey is a girl, but you don’t necessarily realise that straight away. That’s very much deliberate, I think, and in the show’s second season there’s even an episode where they make a joke of it, with a relative forgetting she’s is a girl.
Bluey is a relatively new show and although it doesn’t dispense with gender roles entirely — Bluey’s dad watches cricket and works the barbecue; mum works part-time, etc — it also breaks them down, especially when it comes to parenting roles.
The blurring of gender roles is something we see in the data. If you look at this as an animation, you see the rising tide of wages, but you also see that the more extreme gender sorting is reducing. The dots angle in over time, as fewer professions can sustain a ratio of 100:1.
Another way to look at the same data is in the following chart. It shows each frame of the above animation as a dot. The message I hope to convey is that on average, the lines slope in, suggesting that over time, as pay rises, most jobs are becoming more diverse.
There is one interesting exception: the high-paid line bending to the right, at the top right quadrant. The only female-dominated profession with average pay of more than $100,000 a year: human resource managers, a role that is increasingly female.
It’s interesting that the gatekeeper role of HR manager has become female-coded. Hopefully that helps sort out some of the inequities in the workforce over time. But so will the increasing presence of women in work: female workforce participation should hopefully bend more and more roles towards equal representation.
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For me the main causes of the gender pay gap are:
a) female dominated industries like healthcare and childcare tend to be paid poorly because:
i) people working in this field care about people and less about money and neo-liberalism penalises those who care; and
ii) they tend to be essential workers (who hilariously are in high demand but apparently the laws of demand and supply works differently for these workers because neoliberalism penalises those people who are most useful to society);
b) women still tend to take most parental leave and neo-liberalism penalises those who care and are the most useful to society;
c) mates will be mates and neo-liberalism loves a good mate.
The solutions are:
a) Moving away from the notion that a government with its own currency can’t “afford” healthcare or is relying on Google or Gina Rinehardt to pay their “fair share of taxes” before we can “fund” essential services. Instead we need to answer all questions by reference to what resources the federal government (and by extension state governments) needs to do X and then working out how to find those resources. Given that there is a shortage of childcare and healthcare workers that would mean the federal government significantly increasing pay to these sectors (because it can) to attract more workers (there’s that law of demand and supply…) which in turn would benefit women the most.
b) Now that we are working on the basis that the federal government doesn’t fund things through taxes or other nonsense but prints money out of thin air we can also remove arbitrary limits on paid parental leave which will encourage dad to take a break.
c) We counter mates through affirmative action.
Job done. What’s the next problem you’d like me to solve?
Think you’re right, but disappointed the analysis did not look at hours worked. Essentially men do more paid hous of work, women do more unpaid (childcare etc) but at least according to Pew Centre Study do not do more work. Even though headline was “men have more leisure”, small print said women had (marginally) more free time, just did less things defined as leisure. Mind you, if men did not earn more, where would women find somebody attractive to marry eh? Is joke.
I think the whole “unpaid work” argument is not helpful.
We don’t, unfortunately, have a universal basic income, so this can only be measured in terms of how many hours a person does of paid work (or, for example, their contribution to profitability).
Agree hours of paid work is what matters for gender gap and men do way more of it! The gender pay gap will always look bigger if you dont take account of hours of paid work. But unpaid work provides similar economic benefits to paid work, just mainly to the families involved, not included in GDP etc, and women happen to do way more of it. Lets be fair to women and recognise unpaid work! I sound like Gloria Steinem!
Yes but ultimately if we want to make the buck stop with employers (by requiring them to pay their workers more or that they pay men and women the same), we need to keep the focus on actual work for which employers have responsibility.
This is the problem with so many things. There’s no focus. Everyone wants to make some big societal statement. But we need to stick to the specifics.
How do we make employers pay women more?
If they are not paying the same for same work, sue them. If paying socially useful caring work less because women will still do such jobs for less pay, women should no longer do this (or bargain harder) unless they still prefer this to higher paid but less worthy jobs. If women will only still mainly marry taller men who have focussed on getting a high paid job and working long hours to support family, then maybe switch preferences to shorter more average men more willing to look after kids and do housework?
Women doing less hours of paid work is perhaps because they are expected to do the majority of childcare, organising shopping, birthday presents, Xmas shopping, Easter eggs, organising birthday parties, paying bills, taking kids to the Dr , dentist , be at home when the plumber comes, or the washing machine repairer etc etc etc. The Pew Centre is in the US & not sure they’re relevant to Australia, especially as Australian research has definitely not found that women have more leisure time!
All good points Alison. Showing my age, but I think there was an 80s study for Office of Status of Women showed men had 10 mins a day more leisure. And I think there are always probs of the extent to which shopping is unpaid work (groceries) or leisure (clothes). Agree though that it usually unfortunately makes sense to sacrifice the second income earner’s income for unpaid work, which is usually the woman. Even in Sweden I think, despite huge efforts inc great idea to have paid paternity leave, which is lost if not taken by the man, rather than there being a choice, which usually defaults to the woman. Was not allowed by employer to take three months unpaid leave to be at home with baby, though was graciously offered the chance to do pretty much exact same job four days a week at 80% pay.
It would be helpful to have an agreed definition of what the gender pay gap is. My experience of discussion on this topic is those defending the gap get very agitated if you ask any questions at all and seemed unable to clearly articulate what the gap is. It seems to leave it open to ask what is wanted? same job, same pay seems a no brainer but same pay , less hours seems a less likely scenario.
At a macro level, it is the substantial bias towards women in lower-paying jobs.
At a micro level, it is paying women less for the same job.
An interesting extra axis would be unionised jobs versus non unionised and then could add levels of actual membership and historical levels of successful advocacy.
Though, perhaps doing their bit for equality, the Coalition have worked long and with success to take unions out of the equation.
Was the pink and blue deliberate given what you’ve just presented? I mean, yes, pink and blue collar was a historical thing, but most of these cover white collar as well.
But, to more important matters, I have a mate who is adamant that there is no gender pay gap because within job categories men and women are paid the same. I know this is a very limited conceptualisation of what the ‘gender pay gap’ is, but in this narrow sense does the data show that he is right?
Also, I think the second pic of the kids is supposed to be girls or have i missed something.
No. Though the disparity will primarily exist in industries where remuneration and salary bands are not strictly defined (ie: where employees don’t have much room to negotiate).
As an anecdote, earlier this year my wife received a substantial (tens of thousands) pay rise to bring her salary into line with her male counterparts, after a (female) senior manager started reviewing remuneration packages.
Yes, negotiating wages can be quite a different proposition for different people and gender plays a role there. My mate is adamant that given the occupation, same experience and qualifications, studies now show all being equal there is no gap between men and women. I don’t know the studies he’s referring to, but I suspect limitations – surely this is not in all occupations? I suspect this is an area where stats are found wanting or are able to be manipulated to serve a narrative. I’m sure there have been gains made in this area in that past 100 years or so, but the idea that all’s well now even on such a narrow definition of equal gender pay is spurious.