Gender Pay Gap: NOT what you think!

It is one hundred percent true that women make less money than men, but the sole (or even the primary) causal factor for it is not prejudice against women in the workplace. What one tends to imagine on hearing "gender pay gap" is a man and a woman working the same job and the woman being paid less for it, because of, well, "patriarchy"! This, as surprising as it may seem given the incomplete yet popular internet conviction, is the rarest of a rarity.    

Let’s view through an objective and a rational lens, setting aside our personal biases and ideologies, the various reasons as to why women actually make less money than men-

1) Differences in Occupational Choices

University subject choices give us an insight into what careers men and women end up pursuing later on in their lives. While there are more men in STEM fields, humanities classrooms like psychology and history have disproportionately larger number of women than men. The former category of job positions where men form the larger part of the workforce are significantly better paying than professions such as teaching, counselling or nursing that are predominantly occupied by women.

Even within different fields, both sexes make diverse choices. For example, more men in medicine pick up specializations such as cardiology and orthopedics and more women opt for dentistry and pediatrics. Even within nursing (by and large a female domain), men are concentrated on the higher paying end such as nursing anesthesiology, as they are willing to work longer hours.

2) Biological factors

Differences in biology and personal lifestyle choices do naturally account for societal occupational outcomes. Men and women choose different career paths because on average, they are innately good at different things. Although there is no denying that often gender roles are a deciding factor in the jobs men and women take up, what’s worth noting is that social norms are lesser fixed in our societies than biological traits.

It has been pointed out in several researches conducted in different countries around the world that the lesser the social differences between the two sexes, the more they tend to sort each other into different occupations, i.e. contrary to the hypothesis, as countries like Sweden and France became more egalitarian on terms including education and available occupational opportunities, there was a lowering female demographic in STEM careers and their concentration in healthcare, education and humanities.

There are more female coders in Mexico and Turkey than in Belgium or Switzerland. This is because with greater prosperity, people get to focus more on their self-actualization needs and truly be who they are, without having to care about making more money by looking for industrially robust jobs.

3) Family Responsibilities

Undeniably, the biggest factor determining less pay for women is motherhood. Unpaid family responsibilities take up a huge chunk of time and limit some women’s ability to earn higher wages. However, more often than not, prioritizing families is a voluntary decision taken by women and not the result of social conditioning or force, so, calling it the “motherhood penalty” that women have to bear the brunt of is a rather skewed view.

It’s a general worldwide observation that fathers are more likely to work overtime for that extra cash while mothers are more likely to time off work, but that doesn’t always have to be a bad thing. Of course, this isn’t to justify inequitable parenting or household chores responsibilities- certainly there, we have a very long way to go.

4) Working hours

Women prefer more flexible jobs while men are much more likely to work longer hours and do overtime. Even the full-time working hours of men and women differ significantly. Is it then such a surprise that there is a disparity in what they earn?

There is simple math that easily defies misleading statistics such as “A woman earns 80 cents for each dollar a man makes” (an American statistic now being disturbingly used in Indian debates too). This number is misconstrued as it is merely an average of wages earned by men and women across different working sectors. When we do account for methodology, number of working hours, job types etc., the pay gap narrows down to about 96%. There is no empirical evidence to conclude that even the 4% gap is due to gender discrimination.

It is paramount that we ensure that nobody faces a hindrance in pursuit of happiness due to their gender. We need to bridge the opportunities gap between men and women- girls shouldn’t have to drop out of schools because of no-functioning toilets, and gender roles or safety in the workplace shouldn’t come in the way of their financial independence. Gender parity in the labour force after all, can boost India’s GDP by 27%!

But perhaps we need to ponder if inequality is always unfairness. If we are obsessed with the wrong questions. We need to extend our “whys” on every issues to a wider spectrum of answers than simply patriarchy. We must reconsider if we need to worry as much as we do about lesser women than men in STEM or managerial fields. Is it even worth the time and effort, or are we trying to pursue an arbitrary goal of making everybody equal without considering personal choices? We need, most importantly to look, and not just see, for women who are struggling with finances or gender bias will best be served by truth, careful research and not hype or advocacy data.

-Rishika Chutani