If someone takes 'time out' of their career to have/raise children, then shouldn't the person who stays in the field, who gives 100% of their time, be promoted further and paid more?
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
What isn't a matter of choice is if you belong to a segment of the population that is assumed to not put their career first.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
Wouldn't it be nice if men could bear children? Then we wouldn't have to be ones to take time out of our careers to raise their children. Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Actually, Kayla, as the article mentions, that is a matter of choice (I mean, beyond the actual birthing), too, isn't it?
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Actually, I think I read that article. And another one explaining the "women only make $.70 for every $1 a man makes" theory. Which, is remarkably similar to that article. Women take time off to have/raise kids, or work part-time, which, when added up over a lifetime, means she is making about 70% of what a man who didn't take that time off made. I think I also read an article about how "work" and "working conditions" were created by men (while women were still not allowed to have careers.) It was interesting and kind of eye-opening about why certain things are the way they are concerning work. (Hint: because men created them. ) Anyhoo, they figure that if women had been around, things would have been designed differently, schedules would have been different, benefits would have evolved differently and they point to how women in the work force has forced employers to adapt. Wish I knew where I read it, or what it was in reference to.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Of course, a devotion to the company can sink the company as we've seen in a lot of these book-cooking scams. I'm not saying it's more men than women but just that a corporate fanatic isn't always the best thing.
posted
Kayla, are you kidding about the 70% of time thing? Women live longer, which isn't to say it's all after the age of retirement. For the average age of men to rest where it does, a lot of those men have to die before the age of retirement. And in the lower working classes, not everyone has the luxury to retire at 65.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
posted
I'd do it, Kayla-- I'm one of those men who hates the rat race.
Bring on the pain, bring on the noise.
In our part of the country, it is becoming increasingly difficult for one parent to stay home. For one thing, the real-estate prices are outrageous-- our 1600 sq foot home appraised at $150,000 last year. It's getting worse-- a similarly sized house next door to us sold for $200,000 at the beginning of the summer.
It would not be so bad if there were jobs in my town-- but there aren't. All the jobs are up in Northern Virginia, where real-estate prices are even worse ($300-$400 k for a 3 bedroom home with no yard).
The dream of home ownership for many couples in our area is tied to the burden of debt. Because they have to scrape to pay for the mortgage, they use credit cards to pay for groceries and amenities. To pay for the credit cards, Mom & Dad both work. And because there are no jobs (with the exception of retail), they both commute to Northern VA.
The family next door does not get home until six or seven in the evening. They leave at around 6am. They are expecting another child in December. Both parents work, they are both exhausted. . . It is not a good situation.
Posts: 14554 | Registered: Dec 1999
| IP: Logged |
posted
It is, Storm. Mark and I have been discussing kids for a while now. I've decided that it's important to me to have someone staying at home with the kids at least until they're old enough to be in school. So, four or five years. I'd figured that that meant I'd need to be far enough along in my career, established enough, that such a long absence wouldn't be the end of it. Which meant no kids until I was at least 27-ish, maybe later.
Mark, on the other hand, is eager to have kids once we're financially and geographically stable. He says he's willing, and happy actually, to be the one to stay home with them if it means I could have them more around age 25 or so. Sounds fine to me. I know he'd be a better primary parent than I would, anyhow.
So, if it works out this way, it means I'll be able to have kids and know that they're being raised well without much of an interruption in my career.
I know this isn't the situation for everyone, and that I'm very lucky to have found a man who is willing to put his career second (when I'm really not)... but still, there's a choice. If a woman is more interested in providing for her family through her work than her child-rearing skills, she has options.
Posts: 2220 | Registered: Jun 1999
| IP: Logged |
Actually, women are still a bit screwed up. We're getting there though. If you think about it, women should be having children, then getting an education and hitting the workforce. Unfortunately, because of money matters, they are getting an education, working, quitting to have children and then reentering the work force. And that's only if they are lucky enough to have not waited too long to have kids. The whole "have a career, you can have kids till you hit menopause" isn't turning out to well for lots of women.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote:Women are disproportionately dependent on Social Security in retirement. Twice as many women as men retire in poverty, and women receive only 75 cents in Social Security benefits to men's $1.
posted
Kayla, I think you've hit on an interesting solution. Have children first, then a career.
There are two problems with this that I can think of off of the top of my head.
The first is that, if I remember my psychology 101 correctly, younger people are better at learning new things. I think the whole 'young brain' benefit went away at about the age of 30.
Now, obviously, people can learn information throughout their lives. I'm not saying that they can't, only that the 'optimal' time for learning might be when a person is youngish. Thus, going to school later in life will require more studying to learn the same material.
Another point that I can think of is that it's sometimes hard to adjust to being low dog on the totem pole to people for whom you could be their parent. So, even if a person learns a skill, I would think it would be harder to start a career later in life, rather than earlier.
Of course, there is also an option to remain childless. This demographic is growing at a tremendous rate and I don't doubt that it will cease to grow any time soon.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
That twice as many women retire in poverty agrees with my point, that more women live to 65 and more of them probably keep working after. My overall point is that the average woman who works actually spends more time in the work force than the average man.
Edit to add links: There is a Wage gap independent of the lifetime hours worked question. There apparently is progress, at least in entry level jobs.
Life expectancy gap (click on table 28, it's an embedded file) shows that for people born in 1970 (my year of birth) women are expected to live 7.6 years. I would venture a guess that it takes less time than that for the average woman to have her average 2.4 children.
posted
But makes less, takes years off, works part-time and doesn't contribute as much to her retirement fund (whether for work, though only 29% of women have a pension plan through work, as opposed to 49% of men) and because they've taken time off work to have kids, not gotten promotions as rapidly because they weren't able/willing to word the hours needed, they don't retire with the same social security benefits as men, getting only 75 cents per dollar a man gets. The average monthly benefit for men is $951 while it is $730 for women. Women switch jobs more often (for various reasons, children, husband changing locations, accommodating family) which means that they are more likely to forfeit pensions. On average, a woman with a college degree will earn over $500,000 less than her male counterpart.r
So, while a woman may work longer than a man in terms of working till she retires (which actually hasn't been proven at this point) she may work less months, quarters, or whatever they count down at Social Security. The five years she takes off to have kids, she makes up for after retirement.
Ages 65-69, there were 4,330,000 men in 2000 and 5,084,000 women. Stats drop from there. Men are so delicate. Of course, male/female populations diverge at 29. Notice how the last time men are ahead of women in the population is from 25-29.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote: On average, a woman with a college degree will earn over $500,000 less than her male counterpart.r
quote: So, while a woman may work longer than a man in terms of working till she retires (which actually hasn't been proven at this point)
Ding ding.
It would be interesting to see how many hours a woman works throughout her life compared to the average guy. And I mean hours that pay from a job. Let's not go to what housework is worth and all that, as much as I'm sure you want to.
Also, keep in mind with your results that in many households, the woman/wife controls the budget while the man earns the paycheck.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
The wage gap pretty well matches the Soc Security gap, so that would support the idea that women are spending the same amount of actual time in the work force. But since I agree that each time they start and stop it hurts their career track, so this must be compensated. It's not proof but I believe the compensation lies in them spending more time in the work force.
Anyway, the important thing is that not all women should be assumed to be 75% employees. And the trends show the wage gap improving.
Still, it sucks that you can't bust a discriminatory question like that. I was asked that back in 1994, before I knew it was illegal. Today I would answer it dishonestly and after being hired write the interviewers superior a letter. But I'm a big whistleblower and whatnot. Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
| IP: Logged |
A mishmash. Blah. Anyways, there are several categories of work in the less than 40 hours range where women actually make more than men. Probably skewed by all those Red Lobster waitresses and strippers, neh?
Note that this isn't any kind of refutation of the glass ceiling. This is more along the lines of 'Hmmm. That's interesting. I did not know that.'
posted
Well, think about it this way, even if women end up equaling out the pay, and we earn a dollar for every dollar a man earns, we will still end up with less at retirement, because as we all know, interest compounds. So, if a woman takes a couple of years off in her 20's to have kids, this will create a huge ripple effect (think tidal wave) on her retirement benefits.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
quote: The wage gap pretty well matches the Soc Security gap, so that would support the idea that women are spending the same amount of actual time in the work force.
No, it doesn't. Less time worked equals less money earned equals less social security.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
Legal assistants and miscellaneous food preparation workers were the only two categories that I saw where women out earned men.
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Stormy, you and I have to be the biggest nerds on the planet. It's saturday night for Heaven's sake and we are reading government statistics!
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
posted
Anyone who works for a company and gives it all their time and energy is an idiot. Companies don't (for the most part) give a flying fart about you, and even if you devote everything to advancement, chances are you'll be cut or whatever when your salary is too high when the economy down.
Workin' for da man is for chumps. Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote: Anyone who works for a company and gives it all their time and energy is an idiot. Companies don't (for the most part) give a flying fart about you, and even if you devote everything to advancement, chances are you'll be cut or whatever when your salary is too high when the economy down.
posted
I'm not sure I'm getting the connection between this conversation and the article Storm posted. As far as I can tell, the article brings up the point that many women "opt out" of the high-stress, high competition corporate advancement life style.
There was an article a little while back in U.S. News and World Report talking about how the much-ballyhooed female executive mentoring program was turning out to be extremely unsatisfactory to upcoming white colar women. Apparently they found the advice they were getting from successful women executives, such as put your job far ahead of anything else in your, described a life they didn't want to have.
The thing is, I totally get it. I've already opted-out and said screw it to the stereotypical corporate life-style. Quite a few of my friends, male and female, have also opted-out or are seriously considering it.
I think that there's a growing notion that the normal corporate world sucks and people are looking for ways to escape it or get around it. I'm not sure if this is actually greater in women or if it is just more noticable there.
Posts: 10177 | Registered: Apr 2001
| IP: Logged |
Obvious answer is that they have, for obvious reasons, that option to a vastly larger degree than men do. (With a nod to Scott's post about the necessity of two-income families in this day and age.)
The thing, Squicky, is that shite costs money. Finding the right girl costs money. Making her think you can support her costs money. Birth costs a lot of money. Getting a nice house in a neighborhood that doesn't have graffiti tags on the stop signs so your kid can go to decent schools costs money . Surgery for any inconvenient congenital defects your child might have costs a hell of a lot of money. Blah. Blah. Blah.
It's nice that Olivet and I kid around and say the rat race sucks, but in the end, there aren't a lot of other choices but the rat race to procure things so that we and the people we love can do things and so that people who depend on us don't have to eat Ramen noodles every night. The people that I've seen try and drop out of the rat race by, say, owning their own business end up being sucked even more into the race. Let's not even talk about the viability of being some kind of artist and raising a family.
You are young. This is all hypothetical to you. Tuning in and dropping out is still a viable option. Trust me when I say that as you get older this option virtually disappears. The rat race doesn't become less ratty, but the necessity of having to chip away in the crap mines to earn your daily bread so you can meet your responsibilities only increases.
Yes, there are some few people who manage to find a way to drop out of the rat race and earn a good living. Their fate will surely be horrible when the rest of us find out who they are.
I looked at the article and found it to be a rehash of Phyllis Schlaffy while manipulating statistics. the .70 on the 1.00 point is not about long term time, it is about wage average. To attempt to claim that it exists because men stay in the worforce longer and therefore should recieve higher raises due to seniority is ridiculous in that most raises take place within a short time of working when thinking of a 40 year time span involved in a carrier. Most of the women I've known don't have their children in the beginning-to-middle of their carriers anyway. They usually have them near-immediately or in their 40s.
I'm by no means a social anarchist but I do think that its obvious women are treated as second class in the workplace. This phenomina is worse in America than most of the western world due to our dispensationalist prostestant demographics.
posted
Are there any stats for one particular field? Could it be that one reason for the disparity in average income is the jobs we choose to do. At my college the majors for many of the lower paying jobs, teachers & social workers, are dominated by females while the higher paying jobs, Business & computers, are dominated by men. I'm not saying that this is the end all to the wage difference but I do think it explains much of it.
Posts: 7083 | Registered: Nov 2000
| IP: Logged |
posted
Even within the fields dominated by women, men are paid more, on average.
quote:The most recent data available on salaries of social workers who are members of NASW support the historic wage disparities; in 1995, the median income of female respondents was $34,135 and $37,503 for male respondents (Gibelman & Schervish, 1997).
source-So How Far Have We Come? Pestilent and Persistent Gender Gap in Pay , By: Gibelman, Margaret, Social Work, 00378046, Jan2003, Vol. 48, Issue 1
I'll find more tonight after work. Posts: 14745 | Registered: Dec 1999
| IP: Logged |
quote:The people that I've seen try and drop out of the rat race by, say, owning their own business end up being sucked even more into the race.
Yep. My dad worked in and hated the corporate culture for twenty years, but he did it to support his family. When he hit mid-life, instead of keeping his career and dumping his family, he kept his family and looked for a way to dump the career.
That's when he and my uncle did the business thing. It's worked out great, but it meant 70 hour weeks for the first five years, and my mother had to back to work for the first time in twenty years to get us through. On the whole, it's been a great thing, but it's hard, we were lucky, and the only reason it was possible was because my dad spent twenty years in the executive rat race and saved a good bit of his salary to finance the new business. Even with that, we were mortgaged to the hilt and my baby brother was promised into indentured servitude if it didn't work out.
posted
I have a question. Do companies have to make their salaries public? For example, I am reasonably well paid as a female engineer, I have no particular reason to suspect that the males of equivalent positions are getting paid more, but I have no way of finding out either because it is all hush hush in HR. The hush, hush bit is regardless of gender.
How does one find out?
AJ (This is a male dominated company where females are in the distinct minority in any position other than secretaries. So, while like I said I have no direct reason to suspect gender gaps, I can't help but wonder)
posted
You're an electrical engineer, right? I am absolutely sure IEEE does salary surveys, and your company probably publishes somewhere where they fall in terms of salary ranges. You can compare your own salary to the median to find out if you are being underpaid.
I'm somewhere in the low-to-median end of the salary range for my profession and experience, but that's generally the price you pay for being a non-profit. In return, there is no rat race, and while quality is important, the corporate culture is that your job is part of your life. I've never done overtime, and it wouldn't help me if I did.
Of course, part of the reason there is no rat race is because there really isn't anywhere for me to go if I want to stay a tech writer. If I ever want to be promoted, someone has to die or retire. There are rarely layoffs, and no managers quit the Boy Scouts.
posted
When I worked for the government, the agency I worked for was 85% female. No kidding. There were entire field offices without a single male employee. One very large office I was in for a while only had 3, while a smaller, more rural office I worked in had almost an even split. I think that is because the salaries were more acceptable to men in the relatively poor (and low cost of living) area where that office was located. Most of the people in that office were the sole income for their familes. Most of the women who had children were either divorced and had no real choice or thier kids were older (I think there were two in each of those categories).
Anyway, with that much of the workforce being female, the people at the very TOP of the agency (Presidential appointees) were generally female, but there were a lot more women in the lower ranks. But management seemed to be a pretty even mix.
Just an observation.
Posts: 9293 | Registered: Aug 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote: Are there any stats for one particular field?
Umm, yep. http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpswom98.pdf It starts on page 4 and list a ton of jobs and the median wages for men and women the percent difference between them. (Actually, it lists the percent of mens salary that women make.) For instance, the first on listed is Managerial and Professional Specialty (I have no idea what that is) and the women, as the weekly median, make $655 whereas the men make $905, giving the women 72.4% of the men's salary, which, in 1998, was up from 69.2% in 1983. It's really depressing to look at it.
State by State, it looks like the worst places to be a woman and work full time are Conneticut, Indiana, North Dakota, Utah and Wyoming. (Utah, 67.3% just missed last place, being beaten out by Wyoming 65.5%.)
Posts: 9871 | Registered: Aug 2001
| IP: Logged |
That's not surprising about Utah and Wyoming. Birth rate is higher there, as well. More children per woman, more staying out of work to have and raise them.
Posts: 26077 | Registered: Mar 2000
| IP: Logged |
quote:Gender. Chemical engineering continues to be a field in which the majority of employees are men, although the proportion of AIChE members who are women is growing. For both men and women, salary tends to increase with work experience, but in most categories women continue to earn less than men. Women, on average, have less labor force experience, are not as well-represented in high-paying management positions, and are less likely to have graduate degrees than men, accounting for much of the disparity in income. Nonetheless, when controlling for these and other variables, the men in this sample earn 6% more, on average, than the women.
Maybe the national society of professional engineers would have something!
posted
AJ, are you a member of ACS and/or do you subscribe to C&EN? If so, this link to their most recent salary survey should work ok -- but I think it'll force you to log in with your subscription code.
posted
I don't know if anyone's found something like this. But, it would be interesting to see if there are statistics comparing women who have worked a similar amount of time with similar experience as their male counter parts. In otherwords a woman who the question of maternity leave and family time don't apply to. If it could be seen that there is still a statistically significant difference between these women and their male counterparts then it would seem that something is wrong.
Posts: 872 | Registered: Mar 2002
| IP: Logged |
posted
actually rivka if you have Adobe professional you *can* cut and paste from a pdf which is how I got the above quote <grin>
I'm currently not a member of any professional societies. I probably should be but I've had a couple of bad run ins with AICHE. The type of people who were in it in college (at multiple universities) were all lazy resume padders and if those are the people who ended up out in the field I don't know if I want to interaact with them. I am an Tau Beta Pi member. I should join NSPE, but at heart I tend to like the NASCE people the best. (Not surprising since my father and bf both are members) As a collective, Civils just tend to be more down to earth than many of the other engineering associations.
posted
Kayla: If they've taken time off, there is less investment there. Generally, wages increase with experience, and interuptions throw you off the train. So, when they go back to work, they'll be earning less than if they never left.
Rivka: Do you have Adobe Reader 6.0? You can use the text select tool and copy from a pdf that way.
Printer-friendly view of this topic
![[Razz]](tongue.gif)
![[Wink]](wink.gif)
) Anyhoo, they figure that if women had been around, things would have been designed differently, schedules would have been different, benefits would have evolved differently and they point to how women in the work force has forced employers to adapt. Wish I knew where I read it, or what it was in reference to.
![[Roll Eyes]](rolleyes.gif)
but just that a corporate fanatic isn't always the best thing.![[Smile]](smile.gif)
![[Big Grin]](biggrin.gif)
![[Embarrassed]](redface.gif)
![[Kiss]](graemlins/kiss.gif)
![[Dont Know]](graemlins/dontknow.gif)
![[Frown]](frown.gif)
