Gender gap: Myth or reality?

Women make less money than men for the same work. It's a proven fact.

Or is it?

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, designed to highlight the gap between men's and women's wages. The idea is to point out that the average woman would have to work through all of 2011 and into early 2012 -- through Tuesday -- to earn what the average man took home just in 2011.

The wage gap has the attention of Nevada's congressional delegation. Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., pushed the Paycheck Fairness Act, which aims to close the gap, to a Senate vote in 2010, but a Republican filibuster blocked it.

The act has since languished, likely because supporters see little chance of passage with a Republican majority in the House, said Michele Leber, chairwoman of the National Committee on Pay Equity, the Virginia advocacy group behind Equal Pay Day.

Still, the issue's not dead. Leber's group is urging women to wear red on Tuesday to call attention to the gap, and Reid has said he's still working on the issue.

"I will continue to be a strong advocate for fair pay," he said last month. "Nobody should receive a paycheck different from his or her co-worker's based solely on irrelevant factors like gender."

Few would disagree. What's up for dispute is whether women earn less than men based only on gender. At first glance, the statistics seem to say yes. Census numbers show a big difference between men's and women's wages.

The median weekly income among all women working full time in 2010 was $669, or 81.2 percent of the median male wage of $824.

In Nevada, women earned a weekly median of $614, or 81.8 percent of the male median of $751. The National Partnership for Women & Families says that leaves an annual income disparity of $7,734 in the Silver State, for a total statewide wage impact of $2.5 billion.

But economists say stats don't tell the whole story. For one thing, they compare all women to all men, not people in the same job with the same experience. So a veteran male software designer's salary is weighed against a first-year female teacher's income.

Nor do the figures account for career and life choices.

Jeff Waddoups, a labor economist and professor with the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, said women gravitate toward lower-paying careers that are easier to get in and out of, perhaps because they plan to leave the work force periodically to have children. After an absence it's easier to resume a career in social work than to return to engineering, with its constantly changing technologies and standards.

That may help explain why universities have far more male engineering majors, while women dominate social-work programs, Waddoups said.

Plus, most women leave the labor force for months or years at a time to have children, so they often have less cumulative work experience than men their age.

Those women "have to run twice as fast to stay in the same place," said Gregory Kamer, of the Las Vegas labor law firm of Kamer Zucker Abbott.

Men also dominate dangerous but well-paid work in mining and construction.

A 2009 report from the U.S. Department of Labor backs up the idea that women earn less mostly by choice.

More women opt for part-time work, and they are more likely to leave their jobs to care for children or elders, the study said. They also are less likely to accept promotions that require long hours or heavy business travel.

In fact, "observable differences in the attributes of men and women" account for as much as 76.4 percent of the wage gap, the department concluded. That leaves an adjusted wage gap between 4.8 percent and 7.1 percent. Even that small gap may be the result of women's choices: The study said women focus more on benefits such as flex time and health insurance, and may trade lower pay for such perks.

Studies do show the wage gap disappears when controlled for years of experience and education.

A 2002 report from the National Center for Policy Analysis found that among childless people ages 27 to 33, women's earnings approached 98 percent of men's income. And a 2010 analysis of Census data by New York consumer-research firm Reach Advisors found that single, childless women ages 22 to 30 earned more than their male counterparts in most U.S. cities, with incomes 8 percent higher on average.

Those reports make sense to Kamer, who said he doesn't see many local cases these days involving gender-based wage discrimination. Employers just don't have an incentive to low-ball quality employees, male or female.

"People are paid what they're worth," Kamer said. "If you're going to retain a good work force, you have to pay people fairly. Otherwise, they're going to leave."

Women's advocates say there's still bias in the workplace, and subtle prejudices short-change women.

PUSHED INTO THE MOMMY TRACK

Leber, of the National Committee on Pay Equity, said several studies show college-educated women earn less than men right out of college. That's a problem, she said, because the worker who starts at a lower salary may never catch up "on a percentage basis, when raises and promotions are achieved."

What's more, women may choose the mommy track, but it's not really a choice at all when society steers women onto that path, Leber said.

Waddoups agreed, saying women are "kind of pushed their whole lives" toward motherhood.

Then there are the "age-old attitudes" built into wages -- for example, the notion that men work to support the household; women work for pin money.

"Wage structures have been built for decades on that idea, and some employers may not have examined them closely for that discrimination," Leber said.

And employers make assumptions that hurt women's earnings, Waddoups said.

Many managers, male and female, expect women to take time off to raise children, so they're less likely to spend money training and nurturing them.

"So in that way, firms are looking at gender and saying, 'Gender means something to me. It means to me that a female will not be as devoted to her career as a male, and I'm not going to train her,'" Waddoups said. "Therefore, she will make less. Or maybe it happens earlier, at the point of hiring. If an employer wants someone who will stay with them for a long time, and their last hire was a female who left after a couple of years to have a baby, they may say, 'I'm not hiring females anymore.'"

Women's groups say the only solution is a change in federal law.

UPDATE 49-YEAR-OLD LAW

The Paycheck Fairness Act would update the 49-year-old Equal Pay Act, which already bans gender-based pay discrimination. The Equal Pay Act falls short because employers are either ignorant of the law, or disregard it to cut costs, Leber said.

She added that the Paycheck Fairness Act would have stronger enforcement mechanisms and define how to interpret equal work. For example, current law says equal work applies only to people at the same location, so a retail chain could legally pay a male employee in Henderson more than a woman in North Las Vegas.

The Paycheck Fairness Act would stop that.

The act would also bar retaliation for filing wage-discrimination complaints or trying to get income information to prove discrimination.

Employers would also have to give bona fide reasons for paying men and women differently. Some excuses wouldn't cut it -- for example, the fact that a man made more in his prior job wouldn't pass muster, Leber said.

The act also calls for salary-negotiation training for women and girls, as well as training to help the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission handle wage disputes. The Department of Labor would have to reinstate activities to promote equal pay, such as research on pay differences.

And every federal contractor would have to report data on employment practices including hiring, promotions, terminations and pay.

Waddoups said legislation could ease lingering bias.

Business advocates say only trial lawyers would gain from the Paycheck Fairness Act.

"It should be called the Lawyer Paycheck Fairness Act, because all you're doing is making businesses more susceptible to lawsuits," said Randi Thompson, director of the Nevada chapter of the National Federation of Independent Business. "You're putting another burden on small businesses that will only increase costs for the consumer, and is it going to make a difference when the gap exists from the choices women make?"

The act would especially hurt businesses in Nevada, which already struggles with the nation's highest jobless rate, Thompson said.

The act could also hurt the flexibility many women seek if companies no longer think they can accommodate the mommy track without breaking the law.

Even that 2009 report from the Department of Labor warned lawmakers to tread carefully.

"The raw wage gap continues to be used in misleading ways to advance public-policy agendas without fully explaining reasons behind the gap. ... Although additional research in this area is clearly needed, this study leads to the unambiguous conclusion that the differences in the compensation of men and women are the result of a multitude of factors and that the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct."

Contact reporter Jennifer Robison at jrobison@reviewjournal.com or 702-380-4512. Follow @J_Robison1 on Twitter.