Jamie Tobias Neely: Gender gap disturbs daughters and dads
Here was the face of one concerned dad on International Women’s Day last week: A forehead furrowed above bushy dark eyebrows and wire-rim glasses perched above a mustache sparked with gray.
This face belonged to Dr. Rex Fuller, who stood before a classroom at Riverpoint Campus Thursday noon. He wore a charcoal gray pinstripe suit and thinning dark hair, and he clicked his way through a Power Point presentation on the American gender salary gap.
Fuller is the new dean of business at Eastern Washington University, but he was speaking on the invitation of the school’s Women’s Studies Center. He presented research he and a colleague conducted in the 1980s and early ‘90s, when he was a labor economist and the father of two young daughters.
They selected a group of graduating business students at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, and controlled for majors, GPA’s and internships. They looked at their starting salaries and checked back four years later.
They found, despite the students’ remarkable similarities, that women took starting salaries 11 percent less than men and that gap only widened over time.
Fuller layered on the research of others. One report showed that the U.S. clearly lags behind other countries. American women earn 76 cents for every dollar made by a man. The best country of all: France, where women make 90 cents for a man’s dollar.
Does that sound like we’re talking about pennies?
Here’s how they add up over a woman’s lifetime:
Economist Evelyn Waugh estimates that a woman with a high school diploma working full-time for 47 years makes $700,000 less than a similarly educated man. For a woman college graduate, that gap amounts to $1.2 million. And for women with professional school degrees, it climbs to an astonishing $2 million.
Over the noon hour on Thursday, Fuller’s furrowed brow focused primarily on the figures, on means and regression coefficients and on neatly plotted graphs.
His was not the only face of the concerned father last Thursday, however. I’m betting others showed up in school gymnasiums to cheer on female athletes or applaud daughters recognized for their musical or academic abilities.
Other concerned dads worked in the trenches, influencing hiring practices, encouraging women to join higher-paying careers and drafting new legislation.
One Yale study found the factor that drives congressmen to vote for women’s issues is simple: Like Fuller, they’re the fathers of daughters.
Fuller has the numbers that make the case. There’s been progress in this country since the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963. American women made 59 cents to a man’s dollar then. But some of the highest paid fields in this country, engineering, law and medicine, still have the lowest percentage of women today.
It wasn’t until after his talk that Fuller spent a minute describing his own well-educated, now-grown daughters. They’re 25 and 28 and pursuing careers in public administration and business.
He offers advice when they ask it, but mostly he focuses on how college administrators and faculty can influence the women they teach. He’s convinced women college seniors should be trained in stronger interviewing skills. They particularly need to learn to wage tougher salary negotiations. Male job applicants, faced with a job offer, will often counter with a request for a higher salary. Female applicants typically do not. That kicks off a salary gap that only continues to grow.
Fuller also advocates that fathers do all they can to ensure their daughters’ education is first rate and that they pursue majors and careers that best suit their gifts — not their genders.
Fuller hopes by the time his grandchildren start careers of their own, the figures on his Power Point slides have changed.
By then, he says firmly, this time with a new light in his eyes, “I hope we’re more like France than the U.S.”
When the gender salary gap finally disappears, that will be one International Women’s Day that every fair-minded economist and concerned dad alike will celebrate.