Dimensions: 6'' x 9'' 144 pages AEI Press  (Washington) Publication Date: January 1999 Hardcover ISBN: 0844741132 Price: $ 14.95 Add to Cart   Examination Copies

January 1999
Women’s Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America
By Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba

For three decades, women have been moving steadily upward in the American work force. But, according to many women’s rights advocates, considerable bias against women remains.

This book uses extensive data to demonstrate that systematic discrimination against women in the workplace has essentially been eradicated in the United States. Individual men and women with the same education and experience enjoy equal standing and equal opportunity in the working world.

Diana Furchtgott-Roth is a resident fellow at AEI. Christine Stolba is a historian living in Washington, D.C.  She joined the Independent Women's Forum as Director of Economic Projects. 

A major thesis of popular media culture in the United States is that women suffer from substantial discrimination that leaves them less wealthy, on average, than men. The apostles of that women-as-victims perspective use selected statistics and anecdotes to illustrate their theory. They have succeeded in introducing a few important terms and images into public discourse that advance their views. For example, women are depict ed as suffering from a "wage gap," prevented from rising to positions of importance by a "glass ceiling," and funneled into lower-paying jobs in a "pink ghetto." The putative solution is for government intervention to eradicate such discrimination to achieve parity between men and women.

Women's Figures: An Illustrated Guide to the Economic Progress of Women in America challenges that thesis. In debunking the familiar feminist tropes about women in the workplace--the glass ceiling, the wage gap, the pink ghetto--Diana Furchtgott-Roth and Christine Stolba advance the debate about women's economic progress by revealing the faulty methodological assumptions behind the conventional wisdom on that subject. They highlight some of the many areas where women have made considerable gains, such as wages, professional status, education, entrepreneurship, and electoral politics. The authors conclude that complaints about systematic economic discrimination against women simply do not square with the evidence.

To counter common fictions about women in the workplace, Women's Figures offers an accessible interpretation of data comparing women and men in America. Weaving those data together with explanations of the empirical evidence, the book shows how women's wages and education levels are closing the gap with those of men; how occupational choices, experience, and intensity of work effort have influenced wages; and how African American women have overcome enormous legal and social obstacles. An appendix provides a full set of data points, and an extensive bibliography offers a wide range of source material for those who wish to explore these issues further.

Educational and Professional Success

The evidence on the status of women in society is far more complex than the women-as-victims theory can explain. Women have made substantial progress in labor markets as a result of changes in technology, social attitudes, and laws. At the beginning of the twentieth century, education, particularly higher education, was aimed primarily at men. Many schools and colleges were exclusively for men. Today, the majority of associate’s, bachelor's, and master's degrees are awarded to women, as well as 40 percent of doctorates. Women not only are represented in greater numbers at the college and postgraduate levels but have also been steadily entering traditionally male-dominated programs. In 1999 women represented 44 percent of the freshman class at Yale Medical School. In 1970 women earned 4 percent of master’s degrees in business disciplines; in 1996, 37 percent of those degrees were awarded to women (See figure 1). Between 1970 and 1996 the percentage of law degrees awarded to women rose from 5 percent to 43 percent.

The higher educational attainment of women is related to increased participation in the U.S. labor market. The percentage of adult women who work increased from 26 percent in 1940 to 60 percent in 1997. Moreover, in the 1990s, more than 70 percent of women between the ages of twenty and fifty-four have been in the labor force. Women's employment has more than doubled since 1968 for both full-time and part-time employment, with about a quarter of employed women working part-time.

Greater numbers of women are succeeding in traditionally male-dominated professions. In 1970 only 12 percent of pharmacists were women: by 1998, the percentage had jumped to forty-four. Between 1970 and 1998 women's representation increased from 5 percent to 29 percent of lawyers, from 27 percent to 66 percent of public relations specialists, and from 39 percent to 62 percent of psychologists. In 1998 the top five government officials elected to office in Arizona were female, and the number of women in the U.S. Congress was at a record high. Studies show that women’s chances of winning electoral office are equal to men's. Other traditionally male-dominated areas have shown similar growth in the numbers of female professionals.

In addition to the outstanding gains women are making in the professions, women nationwide have been starting their own small businesses and succeeding. Today, according to the Small Business Administration, over 8.5 million women-owned businesses employ 24 million people and generate $3.1 trillion in revenue. The number of women-owned businesses more than doubled between 1987 and 1997. Women are starting businesses at twice the rate of men. The majority of such businesses are in the service sector, accounting for 52 percent, followed by retail trade, with 19 percent, followed by finance, insurance, and real estate with 10 percent.

Despite those gains, in January 1999 President Clinton stated that "women earn about 75 cents for every dollar a man earns." The National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) declared April 8, 1999, Equal Pay Day, to publicize and protest the claim that women earn only 74 percent of men's wages. If those claims are to be believed, then American women are still second-class citizens. But both President Clinton and the NCPE--as well as other groups that routinely use those statistics, such as the National Organization for Women--compare the wages of all women working full-time with the wages of all men working full-time and fail to adjust for such crucial factors in determining wages as occupation, position, age, experience, education, and consecutive years in the work force. It is well known that the adjusted wage gap between men and women--the difference in wages adjusted for those factors--is far smaller than the average wage gap—the difference in wages found by comparing averages of men's and women's wages. The former is a more accurate description of earnings differentials.

How much less do equally qualified women make? Surprisingly, given all the misused statistics to the contrary, they make about ninety-five to ninety-eight cents on the man's dollar, according to studies by June O’Neill of the City University of New York and Jane Waldfogel of Columbia University. The effects on wages of decisions that affect seniority and turnover are particularly important to understand. The most obvious example is the decision to have children. Figure 2 shows the substantial difference in pay between mothers and childless women at age thirty. The figure also shows, however, that by 1991 the pay of childless women at that age had risen to 95 percent of male pay. Eighty percent of women bear children at some point in their lives, and a quarter of women work part-time, so a higher percentage of women’s time in their work years is spent away from work. Women, who are typically the primary caregivers for their children, consider the responsibilities of motherhood when making employment decisions, and many women choose jobs where flexibility is greater and salaries are lower. Given those choices, comparing the average wages of men and women is a misuse of statistics and a grossly misleading comparison.

The "Glass Ceiling"

Does a glass ceiling prevent American women from reaching the upper echelons of professions, simply because they are women? In 1995 the Glass Ceiling Commission released a report concluding that only 5 percent of senior managers at Fortune 1000 and Fortune 500 service companies were women and implied that systematic discrimination was the cause. Yet an assessment of the Glass Ceiling Commission’s methods raises questions about the 5 percent figure. Typical qualifications for senior management include both an MBA degree and twenty-five years of work experience. The logical sequence of questions the commission should ask would be, first, What percentage of women meets those requirements? and, second, Of that group of qualified women, what proportion has made it to the upper ranks of corporate America? By comparing the number of women qualified to hold top executive positions with the number actually in those positions, one could draw conclusions about the existence of a glass ceiling.

Those are not the questions the commission asked. Instead, it compared the number of women in the total labor force, without reference to experience or education, with the number wielding power at large corporations. That comparison results in a statistically corrupt but politically useful figure of 5 percent. In refusing to use the qualified labor pool in its assessment, the commission reached alarming but highly misleading conclusions about women's employment opportunities. Furthermore, large corporations are only one portion of the market, and, given recent evidence of the success of women moving into previously male-dominated occupations, the conclusions say little about women’s participation in the economy as a whole.

Conclusion

As the above discussion has demonstrated, both the glass ceiling and the wage gap are rhetorically powerful but factually bankrupt terms. Those who insist on invoking such concepts as evidence of discrimination encourage unnecessary and harmful government intervention. Individual cases of discrimination still occur in the workplace, but laws prohibiting discrimination have been in place for more than thirty years and should continue to be rigorously enforced. What we need to recognize is that salary levels are not the only consideration for workers. Flexibility, work setting, and job interest are important to both men and women.

The personal choices women have made are perhaps the most important and least appreciated factor in women’s economic progress over the years. Decisions to enter previously male-dominated fields of education and employment, to marry and bear children later in life, to join the work force, and to leave the work force to raise children have all had an enormous effect on whether women can achieve total parity with men. Some of those choices, such as leaving the work force for a time to raise children or working part-time, can have a negative effect on women's earnings. Others, such as entering previously all-male fields, have led to remarkable gains for women in the work force.

A portrayal of women as victims of widespread discrimination overlooks an important factor: the possibility that many women do not want to reach the top of the corporate ladder. The mass media uncritically accept as the standard of equality the requirement that women's achievements be statistically identical to men's achievements in all areas. That standard is insidious: it suggests that something is wrong if women do not earn the highest salaries. That is insulting to all workers who choose flexibility, a friendly workplace environment, and other nonmonetary factors in the course of their careers.

The heterogeneity of the female population in this country guarantees that women will never reach consensus on all issues. From a statistical perspective, however, women have clearly made impressive gains: levels of education, wages, entrepreneurship, and employment have increased dramatically in the past several decades, and they will continue to improve. Although women faced discrimination in the past, the story of their recent success deserves to be told.