And, challenges remain in ensuring equal pay for equal work. In 2022, among all salary workers in the White House, a woman made just 80 cents every dollar paid to a man.
This is from a blog post written by an economist with President Biden’s Council of Economic Advisers. It takes some courage to call out “the big guy,” aka Joe Biden, for paying women less than men, but the economist who wrote it had that courage.
Oops. I got it wrong. It was economist Mark J. Perry who pointed out that the median pay for female workers in the White House is only 80 percent of the median pay for male White House workers.
The CEA blogger wrote this:
And, challenges remain in ensuring equal pay for equal work. In 2022, among all wage and salary workers usually working full-time, a woman made just 83 cents for every dollar paid to a man.
According to that blogger, this is a problem. The blogger did not address the gender pay gap in the White House.
Here are the White House data.
Interestingly, the blogger did not point out an even bigger gender gap in the workplace: the gap between fatalities for male workers and those for female workers.
Mark J. Perry has also presented good material on this. Men suffer 91.4 percent of fatal injuries on the job, versus 8.6 precent for women.
The most dangerous occupation in the United States is logging, where the fatal injury rate is 82.2 per 100,000 workers and where 96.0 percent of the people in the occupation are male. Underground mining, an occupation I had when I was 18, is the 8th most dangerous, with 26.7 deaths per 100,000 workers and with 99.0 percent of the workers being male.
Should we get more women in those occupations to close that fatality gender gap?
Note: In David R. Henderson, The Concise Encyclopedia of Economics, Claudia Golden of Harvard writes on the “Gender Gap.”
READER COMMENTS
steve
Aug 11 2023 at 10:07am
I think the focus should be on equal pay for the same jobs, which is what largely happens everywhere now though not true in the past. What I don’t get is this recent stuff about dying. I worked on the family farms and did construction in the summers. I did fairly dangerous work after getting out of the Navy getting stabbed twice and shot at. No one forced me to do it. I am pretty sure no one forces people to do logging so they could do daycare or work in a nursing home changing adult diapers, but that is not the choice they made. I am also pretty sure they would hate or refuse to change adult diapers for a living.
Steve
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 11 2023 at 11:17am
Riskier jobs tend to pay more.
JFA
Aug 11 2023 at 12:07pm
This is more of a rhetorical tactic. If you look at the “gender pay gap”, you get something like women making $0.77 to $0.80 for every $1 men make. Now, to the lay person who doesn’t bother to ask follow-up questions, that looks like some sort of discrimination and that legislation is needed pronto. But a mildly curious person would ask “do men and women work different jobs?” or “do men and women work different hours?” or “do men and women have different lengths of work experience?” or “do men and women vary in their tendency to take risk?” and many other questions. Turns out, if you actually control for those things, the “gender pay gap” shrinks quite a bit and sometimes disappears (and according to friends who work in economic consulting, it sometimes reverses).
Discussion of the “gender workplace mortality gap” forces those who make the strongest gender pay gap claims to confront their own double standard of rigor. When it comes to the mortality gap, they will automatically think to ask “do men and women work different jobs?” or “do men and women vary in their tendency to take risk?” and many other questions that would relate to actually explaining… well… anything that requires explanation.
David Henderson
Aug 11 2023 at 10:31am
You write:
Exactly, Steve. Pay, risks taken, and other aspects of the job are all things people do voluntarily, as long as they choose their jobs.
Peter
Aug 11 2023 at 6:51pm
Just a tangent but the two most dangerous jobs in the US are prostitution and drug dealing.
Also I’m curious on that data dump. All workers at the White House AND all White House employees are not synonyms. That data I think only lists the latter, i.e. I’m pretty positive a big chunk that work there (and are missing) are civil servants and given the way the GS/SES pay grade is structured (tenured years), there really isn’t much pay differences you can contribute to gender outside the margins.
Richard W Fulmer
Aug 12 2023 at 3:14pm
Robbing banks is probably very dangerous as well.
Lee M Zendel
Aug 12 2023 at 9:02am
Thomas Sowell has examined the “Pay Gap” and found when your data is the same for both sexes, that is same educational attainment and the same CONTINUOUS length of time on the job there was practically no “pay gap”.
Richard Tyson
Aug 13 2023 at 2:09pm
I’m an outlier here. I believe employers should pay as little as they can and employees should make as much as they can. Let the free market determine their pay without outside interference.
David Henderson
Aug 14 2023 at 10:53am
I’m not sure how much you read EconLog, but be assured that your belief that pay should be determined in a free market does not make you an outlier on one of the most prominent free-market blogs.
Comments are closed.