Chapter 3

M a l e - F e m a l e Facts

and Fallacies

In most societies, for most of history, women have earned lower incomes than men. That fact is not in dispute. What is open to question— and what has generated many fallacies— have been various attempts to explain

this fact.

Plausible possibilities are many: Employers might discriminate against women, parents might raise girls and boys differently, women and men might have different skills or make different choices in education or careers. These and other possibilities are often collapsed into one prevailing conclusion: When and where there are significant differences between women and men in their employment, pay, or promotion, discrimination can be inferred and, where there has been a lessening of such disparities over time, it has been due to a lessening of discrimination under the pressures of government, the feminist movement or a general increase in enlightenment.

Such reasoning has been common from the media to the political arena to courts of law. But this explanation cannot withstand a scrutiny of history or of economics. It is one of the central fallacies of our time.

HISTORY

There is no question that the sexes have often been treated differently from childhood on. In some societies, girls have not been educated as often or to the same extent as boys, so that in such societies women on average are

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less qualified to hold jobs requiring education. Such societies in effect throw away much of the economic and other potential of half their population. Such discrimination on the part of those controlling the education of children obviously produces income differences between adult females and adult males— even if employers do not discriminate among comparable workers— because women and men end up with different levels and kinds of knowledge, skills and work experience.

Few societies today have such severe restrictions on the education of girls, at least not in the Western world. But whether, or to what degree, employer discrimination exists or can explain much of the male-female income differences is a question rather than a foregone conclusion because, for whatever reasons, differences in job qualifications between women and men have often been demonstrable and substantial. Moreover, these differences have changed over time, so that a lessening of income disparities between the sexes cannot be automatically attributed to a lessening of employer discrimination when it may also be due to a lessening of differences in education, job experience, or availability to work outside the home. These are all questions that require empirical evidence rather than blanket assumptions.

Even in the twenty-first century, "two-thirds of the world's illiterate adults are women," according to The Economist magazine. However, at the other end of the educational spectrum, women in the most industrially advanced countries are going on to higher education in numbers comparable to men— and, in some countries, more often than men. In Japan there are 90 women enrolled in higher education for every 100 men, in the United States 140 women for every 100 men and, in Sweden, 150 women for every 100 men.1 Nor is such predominance of women purely quantitative. In 2006, the New York Times reported, "at elite institutions like Harvard, small liberal arts colleges like Dickinson, huge public universities like the University of Wisconsin and U.C.L.A. and smaller ones like Florida Atlantic University, women are walking off with a disproportionate share of the honors degrees."2 But these are developments in relatively recent times.

Among the other factors in differences between male and female incomes have been differences between women and men in physical strength, a factor

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once very important during the long eras of history when most people in most countries worked in agriculture or in other occupations requiring much physical strength, such as mining, shipping or metallurgy. The replacement of human muscle by machine power in our own times has so reduced the importance of physical strength that it may be difficult today to imagine how important that factor was in centuries past. For example, at one time desperately poor people in China, living on the edge of starvation, often killed newborn baby girls because only boys were likely to grow strong enough, soon enough, to produce enough food to sustain themselves, and the poorest families had little or no surplus food with which to supplement what a girl could produce with primitive implements on small farms. For such desperately poor people, baby girls were often seen as a threat to the physical survival of the family. Higher levels of economic development in other countries, and in China in later times, made such anguished and brutal acts no longer necessary.

The replacement of human muscle by machine power, and the growing importance of industries and occupations not dependent on either, have made sex differences and age differences no longer as significant as they had once been. The economic consequences could be seen in the rising age at which people reached their peak earnings, now that experience and skill were more important than physical strength. Other economic consequences included reductions in male-female pay differentials, even before laws were passed mandating equal pay for equal work.

Another physical difference between women and men, child-bearing, has continued to have major economic consequences. Mothers as a group tend to fall furthest behind men in income, as competing domestic responsibilities reduce the ability of women with babies and small children to be able to maintain continuous, full-time employment in the workforce. This factor is especially important when it comes to high levels of achievement in the most demanding professions:

In the arts and sciences, forty is the mean age at which peak accomplishment occurs, preceded by years of intense effort mastering the discipline in question. These are precisely the years during which most women must bear children if they are to bear them at all.3

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While the relative weights of these and other factors in male-female economic differences cannot be pin-pointed, nevertheless there is empirical data that are suggestive, even if not definitive.

History is important in testing prevailing beliefs about male-female occupational and income differences in another way. It is widely believed that the rise of American women, for example, in professional and other high-level occupations since the 1960s has been due to anti-discrimination laws and policies imposed by government, and that these in turn have been due to more enlightened views of women by society at large promoted by the feminist movement and others. Plausible as this might seem, whenever a causal relationship is asserted between any variables, it should be possible to test whether these things in fact vary with one another with any consistency or whether they vary with other factors that have been left out of the equation.

Declines in Higher Education and Professional Occupations

History shows that the career paths of women over the course of the twentieth century bore little resemblance to a scenario in which variations in employer discrimination explain variations in women's career progress.

In reality, the proportion of women in the professions and other highlevel positions was greater during the first decades of the twentieth century than in the middle of the twentieth century— and all of this was before either anti-discrimination laws or the rise of the feminist movement. For example, the proportion of women among the people listed in Who's Who in America in 1902 was more than double the proportion in 1958.4 A study published in 1964 concluded: "The period of the first two decades of the twentieth century was the heyday of academic women." The trend of women as a percentage of academics was "up from 1910 to about 1930 and down thereafter, with a possible upward trend in recent years," according to the same 1964 study.5

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Hard data substantiate this pattern. In 1921 and again in 1932, the proportion of women among people receiving doctoral degrees was about 17 percent but this was down to 10 percent by the late 1950s and early 1960s. It was much the same story in the biological sciences, where women received from about one-fifth to one-fourth of the doctorates in the 1930s but only one-eighth by the late 1950s. In economics, women's share of doctorates declined from 10 percent to 2 percent. There were similar declines in women's shares of the doctoral degrees awarded in the humanities, chemistry, and law.6 A 1961 study of women's share of college faculty positions found that to be lower than it was in 1930.7

Declines in the representation of women among academic faculty during this era occurred even at women's colleges, run by women, such as Smith, Wellesley, Vassar, and Bryn Mawr,8 so this trend could hardly be attributed to increased male employer discrimination against women. But even if we were to assume for the sake of argument that employer discrimination against women was the crucial factor, such widespread negative trends for women in higher occupational levels over a period of decades are hardly consistent with the idea that employer discrimination against women declines over time with enlightenment. A closer scrutiny of facts suggests that what changed over these decades was not employer discrimination but women's marriage and child-bearing patterns. This in turn raises questions as to whether later positive trends in the occupational advancement of women reflected changes in employer discrimination or changes in marriage and child-bearing patterns. History strongly suggests the latter.

During the early decades of the twentieth century, when women's representation in higher level occupations and in the postgraduate education required for such occupations was higher than in the 1950s, the median age at which women first married was also higher than at mid-century.9 Most of the women who staffed women's colleges during this earlier era were not married at all.1 0 As the median age of marriage began to decline, the representation of women in high-level occupations and among recipients of postgraduate degrees also declined.

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Rises in Higher	Education and Professional Occupations

The decline in women's median age of first marriage ended in 1956 and began to rise thereafter. The birth rate also began to decline, from 1957 on, and by 1966 was again as low as it had been back in 1933.1 1 Women's share of postgraduate degrees closely followed these reversals of trends in age of marriage and birthrate.

The 1970s saw women's share of doctoral degrees rise. By 1972 that share was again as high as it had been back in 1932. It was much the same story with Master's degrees, where it was 1972 before women's share of these degrees reached the level of 1930, except for the World War II years when millions of young men were away in the military. With both Master's degrees and doctorates, women's share declined precipitously after the war to levels below those of the 1930s.1 2 These were of course the years of the "baby boom," indicating again the role of child-bearing in limiting women's educational and career prospects.

Women's rise in higher-level occupations in the second half of the twentieth century continued to follow the rise in their age of marriage, which rose sharply and finished the century significandy higher than it was at the beginning,1 3 while the birth rate fell sharply and was much lower at the end of the century than it was at the beginning.1 4 As the age of first marriage climbed to record high levels, women rose to record high levels in higher education and higher occupations. Women's percentage of postgraduate professional degrees in general, master's degrees in business in particular, law degrees, medical degrees, and Ph.D.s all skyrocketed from the 1970s on.1 5

It was not just in higher-level occupations that women's changing marriage and child-bearing patterns were reflected in their work patterns. The gap between men's and women's participation in the labor force in general narrowed dramatically. In 1950, 94 percent of men but only 33 percent of women were in the labor force. This gap of 61 percentage points narrowed to 45 percentage points by 1970. At the end of the century, the gap was only 12 percentage points, as 86 percent of men and 74 percent of women were in the labor force.1 6 In addition to entering the labor force in

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general, more women also entered occupations where men were previously predominant, especially those occupations requiring a college degree.1 7 The continuity of women's employment also increased after 1970, though the gap between the continuity of men's and women's employment did not disappear and women continued to work part-time more so than men.1 8

These positive changes in the second half of the twentieth century, as well as the negative changes during the earlier decades of that century, all follow remarkably closely changes in women's age of marriage and child-bearing. Male-female differences in income did not disappear completely, however. How much of those remaining differences can be attributed to employer discrimination, rather than to different career choices or differences in choices as to whether to work full-time, is another empirical question, one involving economics as well as history.

E C O N O M I C S

Ideally, we would like to be able to compare those women and men who are truly comparable in education, skills, experience, continuity of employment, and full-time or part-time work, among other variables, and then determine whether employers hire, pay, and promote women the same as they do comparable men. At the very least, we might then see in whatever differences in hiring, pay and promotions might exist a measure of how much employer discrimination exists. Given the absence or imperfections of data on some of these variables, the most that we can reasonably expect is some measure of whatever residual economic differences between women and men remain after taking into account those variables which can be measured with some degree of accuracy and reliability. That residual would then give us the upper limit of the combined effect of employer discrimination plus whatever unspecified or unmeasured variables might also exist. However, even if we were to find zero economic differences between those women and men who were truly comparable, that would not mean that women and men as a whole had the same income or the same likelihood of being hired or promoted, if the sexes as a whole were