Tag: gap

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Google vs the gender gap

Google has promised to do all it can to recruit more women into Silicon Valley, and now the company is putting its money where its PR is. On Thursday, it launched a $50 million initiative to teach young girls how to code.images

Just last month, Google announced that only 17% of its tech employees are women. The gender disparity is a dire issue for all tech companies. There will be 1.4 million computing jobs available in 2020, but only 400,000 computer-science graduates from U.S. universities to fill them. Part of the problem is that only 12% of computer-science degrees go to women, and in order for Silicon Valley to survive and thrive, it must be able to recruit more engineering talent from the other 50% of the population.

“Coding is a fundamental skill that’s going to be a part of almost everything,” Megan Smith, VP of Google[x], tells TIME. “So for kids to really at a minimum just be able to express themselves in code and make things and feel confident, that would be important — no matter what their career is.”

Google has invested a lot more than just money in the project. The company conducted research to determine why girls are opting out of learning how to code: the number of female computer-science majors has dropped dramatically since 1984, when 37% of computer-science degrees went to women. How do we get them back into computer-science classrooms?

Google found that most girls decide before they even enter college whether they want to learn to code — so the tech world must win them over them at a young age. They also found that there were four major factors that determined whether girls opted into computer science: social encouragement, self-perception, academic exposure and career perception.  Continue reading “Google vs the gender gap”

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More on the wage gap

When Jill Abramson was fired from her post as executive editor of the New York Times last Wednesday, the world took notice. The New Yorker reported on tensions between Abramson and the paper’s owner, which may have been heightened in part by an argument over her pay relative to that of her male predecessor.images-1

Whether Abramson’s pay did or didn’t have anything to do with her dismissal from the Times, one thing is certain: there is a gender wage gap. Among full-time workers, women earn 77% of what men earn. Even after accounting for the fact that women often work in different occupations and industries than men, as well as differences in work experience, union status, education and race, 41% of that gap is still unexplained. When social scientists control for every employment factor that could possibly explain the disparity, women still earn 91% of what men earn for doing the same job.

Female-dominated occupations tend to pay less, often much less, than male-dominated occupations. Women made great progress in the 1970s and 1980s in moving into careers traditionally dominated by men, but since the mid-1990s that progress has largely stalled. Today women still account for the vast majority of waitresses, retail workers, administrative assistants and nurses, but very few engineers, scientists, managers and technicians. Women also tend to work in service jobs and not-for-profit and public-sector organizations, which aren’t highly valued in a market economy. Moreover, though women lost fewer jobs than men did in therecession, they gained fewer during the recovery. And many of the gains were in sectors facing serious budget cuts, like education and social services.

What’s more, education has not effectively reduced the gender wage gap, even though women are now substantially more educated than men. Women surpassed men in college enrollment in the mid-1990s, and the gap has been growing ever since. Today 45% of young women are enrolled in college, compared with 38% of young men; 36% of young women have a bachelor’s or a graduate degree, compared with 28% of young men. Yet women with graduate degrees earn the same as men with bachelor’s degrees, and women with bachelor’s degrees earn the same as men with associate’s degrees.

What’s behind these differences? Part of the problem lies in what women study, which plays a large role in where they work later on. Women aren’t likely to choose high-paying majors like engineering; instead, they often gravitate to low-paying majors like education, psychology and social work. Women represent 97% of early-childhood-education majors but only 6% of mechanical-engineering majors. Continue reading “More on the wage gap”

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Wealth gap is worse than you think

Economists Emmanuel Saez, of the University of California–Berkeley, and Gabriel Zucman, of the London School of Economics, are out with a new set of findings on American wealth inequality, and their numbers are startling. Wealth, for reference, is the

value of what you own—assets like housing, stocks, and bonds, minus your debts. And while it certainly comes up from time to time, it has

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tended to play second fiddle to income in conversations about America’s widening class divide. In part, that’s because it’s a trickier conversation subject. Wealth has always been far more concentrated than income in the United States. Plus, research suggested that the top 1 percent of households had actually lost some of its share since the 1980s.That might not really have been the case.

Forget the 1 percent. The winners of this race, according to Zucman and Saez, have been the 0.1 percent. Since the 1960s, the richest one-thousandth of U.S. households, with a minimum net worth today above $20 million, have more than doubled their share of U.S. wealth, from around 10 percent to more than 20 percent. Take a moment to process that. One-thousandth of the country owns one-fifth of the wealth. By comparison, the entire top 1 percent of households takes in about 22 percent of U.S. income, counting capital gains.

While the super-rich have risen, the merely affluent have barely budged. As shown on this next graph from Saez and Zucman, the share of wealth belonging to the top 1 to 0.5 percent of households has remained about level. The 0.5 to 0.1 percent have tacked roughly an extra percentage point onto their piece of the pie. The relative gains have been eaten up by the elite—the 0.1 percent and even the 0.01 percent. Continue reading “Wealth gap is worse than you think”

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50 shades of gender inequity

Not only does the gender wage gap have real staying power, but it’s alive and kicking in all 50 states.

As reported in Huffington Post, “according to a new report released earlier this week by the American Association of University Women (AAUW), the gender pay gap — which had significantly narrowed since the 1970s — has slowly plateaued in recent years.

“Compiling data from the Census Bureau, the Department of Education and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, AAUW calculated the median salaries for full-time employment in all 50 states and the District of Columbia. In the U.S., women are paid 23 percent less than men on average. Although down from a 2012 figure of 91 percent, Washington, D.C. maintains the smallest wage gap in the U.S., with women earning 90 percent of what their male counterparts do ($66,754 vs. $60,116). Also consistent with last year’s results, Wyoming came in last with women taking home a shocking 64 percent of men’s average earnings ($51,932 vs. $33,152).

“While it remains important to note that geography and local industry have a large influence on differing salaries, there are other major factors that come into play — namely education level, race/ethnicity and age. AAUW analyzed the pay gap by looking at full-time, year-round workers over the age of 15. Beyond comparing salaries of all men to salaries of all women, the report broke down wage imbalances between the sexes along three additional demographics: race/ethnicity, education level and age. Asian-American women had the largest gender wage gap while Hispanic or Latina women’s earnings were most comparable to their male counterparts.  Continue reading “50 shades of gender inequity”

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The museum gender gap

Women run just a quarter of the biggest art museums in the United States and Canada, and they earn about a third less than their male counterparts, according to a report released on Friday by the Association of Art Museum Directors, a professional organization. The New York Times reports that “The group examined salary data on the

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217 members it had last year through the prism of gender, for the first time. The report noted strides made by women at small and midsize museums, with budgets under $15 million, often university or contemporary-art institutions. Here, women have basically achieved parity, holding nearly half of the directorships and earning just about the same as men. But the gap is glaring at big institutions, those with budgets over $15 million: Only 24 percent are led by women, and they make 29 percent less than their male peers.

“And just five of the 33 most prominent art museums — those with budgets greater than $20 million — have women at the helm. “There is a difference if a woman is running one of these big museums,” said Elizabeth Easton, director of the Center for Curatorial Leadership, a training program in New York that has helped place nine women in directorships, but none at the country’s most influential museums. “Those directors are the most loud and authoritative voices. It sets the tone.” Continue reading “The museum gender gap”

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Return of the gender gap

imagesFor decades, women scaled Gender Gap Mountain. Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique. Congress passed the Equal Pay Act in 1963. Women attended law school to become lawyers, not paralegals – studied for the MCAT to be doctors, not nurses. They ascended to the C-Suite and filled corner offices.

As The New America Foundation reports today, “Turns out the Mountain has more than one peak – and its climbers today seem to be stagnating on a plateau. Recently, Debora Spar, the president of Barnard College and the author of the new book “Wonder Women: Sex, Power, and the Quest for Perfection,” sat down with Liza Mundy, director of New America’s Work and Family Program to discuss why America still struggles with gender equality. Women now make up 67 percent of college graduates. Four in ten American families look to a woman as their primary breadwinner (and that number is rising, according to Mundy’s book “The Richer Sex”). And yet, at least in the very upper echelons of the professional world, women hold only 15-20 percent of leadership positions. Those numbers are mirrored in the federal government, where women occupy only 20 of 100 Senate seats, comprise 17.9 percent of the House, and have yet to wage a victorious presidential campaign. Why can’t qualified and competitive women get out of what Spar calls the “16 percent Ghetto”?

“Part of the answer, both Mundy and Spar suggest, lies in a persistent cultural expectation that women should be flawless, well-rounded robots. To illustrate the point, Mundy recalled interviewing a close friend of Hillary Clinton’s for a profile back in 1999. When she asked the source how Clinton achieved balance in the early years of her career—excelling as both a mother and full-time lawyer—the friend admitted that “she was an indifferent housekeeper.” The comment betrayed an outmoded, yet still-pervasive view of gender roles: Even when women work 60-hour weeks, they’re still to blame for dirty dishes. Somewhere along the way to equality, feminism became “perfectionism.”

“Rather than getting rid of the old expectations that feminism tried to liberate us from, we’ve actually held on to the old expectations – so that girls should be sweet, and pretty, and sparkly and princesses,” Spar said. “But we’ve added to them: and they should play soccer, and be really smart, and start their own NGOs.” Continue reading “Return of the gender gap”

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High school and the college gender gap

Recent research has suggested various ways in which girls outperform boys in high school, making them more likely to go to college:images stronger desire to get good grades, better social skills, greater validation from academic performance.

But as Inside Higher Ed reports, “A new study suggests gender sorting — a boy’s or girl’s decision to attend one school or another – could have its own effect on the college enrollment gap.

“In a study of public school systems in Florida, researchers found that what high school a student attends is “strongly associated” with college enrollment; girls are attending high schools that have higher rates of college-going than one would expect based on the students’ test scores – and boys, vice versa.

“Over all, the high school that boys and girls attended accounts for 10.9 percent of the gender gap in college enrollment – in other words, 11 percent of the approximately 7-percentage-point nationwide gender gap in colleges is attributable to the high school attended — but the figure is significantly higher for black (15.8 percent) and Hispanic students (12.2 percent) than it is for white students (5.2 percent).

“While the paper does not make a causal link – it’s not clear whether the high schools themselves are causing the gaps – if it is the high schools having this effect on the students, one would conclude that equal gender distribution across high schools would close the college gender gap by 11 percent.

“Either girls are choosing to attend high schools that are going to advantage them by making them more likely to go to college, or girls are simply attracted to high schools whose students have higher college-going rates — even if the school does not cause this outcome — while boys are attracted to other features of high schools,” such as facilities or the characteristics of the school’s students, said Mark C. Long, co-author of the paper published in Educational Researcher and associate professor of public affairs at the University of Washington.

“The sample includes nearly 537,000 students who enrolled in a Florida public high school between 2002-6 and graduated within four years. While not every student has the ability to choose which high school to attend — say, private, traditional public, or charter — there is often some element of choice involved, either by the student selecting from a group of residential schools or a parent opting to live in a certain neighborhood.”

Read more: http://www.insidehighered.com/news/2013/09/05/how-boys-and-girls-choice-high-school-affects-college-gender-gap#ixzz2eFOz1gAH
Inside Higher Ed

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Pay gap isn’t going away

Reports recently released by the American Association of University People indicate a gender pay gap not only still exists in the American workforce but often reveals itself the moment people accept their first job.

“People working full time one year after college graduation are paid an average of 18 percent less than people also working full time one year after receiving a bachelor’s degree, according to “Graduating to a Pay Gap.”images-3

“Some of the difference may be because many people pursue majors and enter careers that offer less pay. Some of it could be caused by varying levels of salary negotiation skills or other factors. But in many cases, the study suggests, part of the gap results from gender alone.

“So many times people hear about the overall pay gap and say ‘That’s because people are making different choices,'” said Christianne Corbett, AAUW senior researcher and one of the report’s authors. “We were really trying to get at a group that was as close to the same as possible right out of college … and we still found a gap.” Continue reading “Pay gap isn’t going away”

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Ending gender gap in government employment

imagesPresident Obama on Friday called for the elimination of any gender pay gap in the federal workplace, issuing an executive order requiring a full review of pay and promotion policies, reports GovExec.com

“The federal government is the nation’s largest employer,” Obama wrote in the order. “It has a special responsibility to act as a model employer.”

“Obama called for a report from the Office of Personnel Management within 180 days to provide a “governmentwide strategy to address any gender pay gap in the federal workforce.” The proposal should include any changes that need to be made to the General Schedule to address the issue and provide guidance to agencies on how to promote transparency with starting salaries, Obama said.

“The executive order also asked each agency to review its specific policies, focusing on treatment of employees who take extended time off or work part-time in order to serve as caregivers to family. Obama requested each agency share its best practices for improving gender pay equality.

“All agencies must report to OPM within 90 days.”

 

More at: http://www.govexec.com/pay-benefits/2013/05/obama-asks-federal-agencies-be-model-gender-pay-equality/63114/

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Canada’s gender gap will close … in two centuries

Women in Canada are as healthy and educated as men, but gender equality plummets when it comes to economic and political opportunities, according to a new study, as reports the Tornoto Star.images-1

“Even though six of Canada’s provinces and territories have female premiers, women’s representation in politics and on corporate boards has grown by just 2.3 per cent in the past two decades, says the study by the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives released Tuesday.

“At this rate, Canada will not close its gender gap for another 228 years,” said the report’s author Kate McInturff, “I won’t be alive to see it close and neither will my children or my grandchildren.”The study, based on methodology developed by the World Economic Forum, calculates the Canada’s overall performance in the areas of health, education, economics and politics since 1993.

“Canadian women are living longer and graduating from post-secondary education in greater numbers than men, the report notes. But once they graduate, “it all goes downhill,” McInturff said of women’s political and economic achievements. Continue reading “Canada’s gender gap will close … in two centuries”

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The fatigue gender gap

Who is more exhausted: men or women?

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has the answer, though it’s one that you probably could have arrived at without a second’s thought, reports NPR.images-1

“More women than men said they felt very tired or exhausted most days or every day, when government surveyors asked them. Overall, about 15 percent of women said they were worn out compared with 10 percent of the men.

“Now, it gets even more interesting, or maybe it’s just obvious, when you break down the responses by age.

“The biggest difference in tiredness by sex is in the 18-44 age group. Women in the group were about twice as likely as men to feel wiped out: 16 percent versus 9 percent.

“Now what in the world could be going on? Hmm. Continue reading “The fatigue gender gap”

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Today’s literary gender gap

UnknownMale authors and reviewers continue to take a disproportionate slice of the literary pie, according to new research which reveals that publications including the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement and the New Yorker all show a considerable bias towards men, reports todays edition of The Guardian Continue reading “Today’s literary gender gap”

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College gender gap widens further

Women are a third more likely to go to university than men, according to a new report, widening the gender gulf in higher education. The Guardian reported today that”

“Demand for university places fell in terms of applications (-8.8%) and acceptances (-13%) when higher fees were introduced for students this October. But the fall in the number of young men applying was about twice that of young women, with entry rates for both at 24.6% and 32.5% respectively. Continue reading “College gender gap widens further”