Utah’s wage gap between men and women largest in nation
Utah’s wage gap between men and women is the highest in the U.S., which can be paralleled with recent gender-related tenure data found by USU’s Center for Women in Gender, said FCHD Professor Ann Berghout Austin, the center’s director.
“We’ve suspected for a long time that Utah State University probably does not have the number of women faculty members in the tenured and tenure-tracks,comparable to our sister institutions,” Austin said.
The center found that the proportion of women faculty at USU that are tenured or tenure-track has gradually risen to 32 percent in 2011, a 2 percent increase from 2006, Austin said.
Austin said there is a comparison group of “peer institutions” – other western land-grant universities – consisting of schools such as New Mexico State University, University of Arizona, Colorado State University and University of Alaska.
The Center for Women in Gender, in conjunction with the Office of Analysis, Assessment and Accreditation, began comparing USU’s numbers with these peer institutions and found that the percentage of tenured and tenure-track women faculty ranges from 32 percent to 41 percent, with an average of 38 percent. USU is at the bottom of that range.
“My ultimate goal is to raise awareness among the faculty,” Austin said, “to the point that the sensitivity that the faculty are developing continues and increases where it needs to increase with regard to the hiring and the tenuring of diverse faculty.”
On a yearly basis, Austin said, data are made available regarding the highest-paid employees of the university. She said one of the questions she would like to address is why women are not often seen in those data sets. She added that usually high-paid faculty work in central administration.
One of the things she finds disheartening is that USU’s nationally recognized College of Education does not pay its dean enough to put her on the list of top-paid USU faculty members, she said.
Utah’s Gender Wage Gap
“In Utah, on average, a woman working full time is paid $31,186 per year, while a man working full time is paid $45,800 per year,” according to a recently released data report aggregated by the National Partnership for Women and Families (NPWF).
The report states that this disparity creates a wage gap of almost $15,000 between men and women who work full-time, thus causing an almost $5 billion loss per year among families of working women in Utah.
Jenny Walker, 23, a single, working mother of a 2-year-old son, said she will attend USU in the fall and plans to major in education. She said her first choice was law enforcement, but she felt education was a safer and more stable career for a single mother.
“I don’t think it’s really too concerning for me,” Walker said, “because I’m a very assertive and aggressive woman; and I would demand equal pay as my male colleagues, especially if you have something like a master’s (degree).”
Leslie Moon, a 2009 BYU graduate and Cache Valley resident, said she believes Utah culture has a lot to do with women’s wages. She said when she has a family she would like to stay home and raise children.
A lot of Utah women are steered into different jobs such as education or family consumer and human development because of their upbringing, Walker said.
“A significant proportion of my current work looks at the motherhood penalty,” said recently- tenured professor Christy Glass. “It’s not so much about gender as it is the interaction between gender and parenthood. Given that’s what scholars have increasingly identified as the mechanism that’s driving the wage gap nationally, it’s not surprising that the wage gap is the largest in Utah, because fertility rates are higher.”
The Motherhood Penalty
Glass, a member of the sociology, social work and anthropology (SSWA) department faculty, said Utah has been No. 1 for having the highest gender-based wage gap in the country for years.
“We used to think it was a gap driven by differences between men and women,” Glass said, “but contemporary research suggests that it’s not a gap between men and women, per se, the wage gap is largely driven by wage penalties that mothers face, compared to non-mothers.”
The problem with wage disparity is less, Glass said, when looking at women who are not mothers, than when compared with women who are mothers. She said scholars have shown that women pay a 6-7 percent wage penalty per child, which means they make 6-7 cents on the dollar less than men for each child they have.
Glass said there are two possible strategies for reducing the sting of the motherhood penalty. First, policy makers would have to increase the penalty for employer discrimination and second, if the government provided subsidized health care, single, working mothers would experience less adversity within the labor market.
Another professor from the SSWA department, Amy Bailey, who teaches a social inequality class, said national averages show that women in general make 23 percent less – 77 cents on the dollar – than men to begin with. In Utah this number is even lower, at 68 cents on the dollar.
“I didn’t want to be one of those moms who work at Wal-Mart or waitresses when she’s 35 or 40,” Walker said. “I wanted to be somewhere with a good career that you can look up to and model after.”
Utah is also fourth from the bottom out of the 50 states for educational attainment between men and women, Bailey said.
The NPWF report states that 81,171 households in Utah are headed by women, and 24 percent of households headed by women in Utah live below the poverty line. This translates into more than 19,000 families whose financial standings would be improved if the wage gap is eliminated, according to the report.
“If you consider the high rates of labor force participation that we observe among women in Utah, regardless of what our culture and ideology and religion tell us should be happening,” Bailey said. “The reality is that women in Utah are participating at very high rates and our families are suffering.”
Moon said she believes that women should be allowed to do what they want, even if that means withdrawing from the labor force to stay at home to raise children.
Gender Steering – Nurture vs. Nature
Especially in Utah, due to the proliferation of patriarchal culture, women tend to take jobs in education and social sciences, Moon said, as opposed to men who typically take jobs in the hard sciences.
“I think that they (women) don’t necessarily deserve to be paid less because of the type of job it is,” Moon said. “For example, teachers should probably be paid more than they are. There are more men teachers now than there were but in general there are still more women teachers.”
Gender steering is the concept that people are steered into different jobs based on their gender as a result of how they are socialized as children, said Professor Peg Petrzelka of the SSWA department. She said she assigns an exercise to her intro to sociology classes in which the students analyze faculty salaries to see how gender relates to wages on campus.
“If you look at the top 25 (earning faculty members), you can see that there are very few in leadership positions here that are women,” Petrzelka said. “Then if you look at the lowest 25 in the staff assistant pos
itions, you can see that the vast majority of them are women.”
Austin said it is important to note that the College of Agriculture has increased from 21 percent in 2006, to 30 percent in 2010 in tenure and tenure-track positions for women. She said in order to match the peer-institution average of 38 percent, USU would have to hire 68 women without hiring any more men.
“Women shouldn’t be discouraged from doing anything they want to do because they feel like they’re going to get the second-string,” Walker said. “It’s what you make of it, and if you want to be assertive and aggressive and promote yourself up to the man’s level, then you can. You just got to grab life by the balls.”
– dan.whitney.smith@aggiemail.usu.edu