--:-- Sean Rameswaram: My husband was telling me, he's like, I really like the ads on Today Explained. Thank you. He said the toothbrush ones have been his favorite. I was like, well, I'm more of a mattress firm partisan, but he likes Quip ads. Does he want to be in some toothbrush ads? Probably. Yeah. I think he'd be in a toothbrush ad. Tell me his phone number. I'll call him and we'll do toothbrush ads. Gotta keep him fresh. Fresh like your mouth after brushing with Quip. Exactly. That's an ad. Getquip.com slash explained. Shh. I'm recording an ad.
--:-- [Sean Rameswaram chuckles]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I work in financial services and as sometimes happens, we were all out at a happy hour and one of the men on my team that I was supervising sort of let slip what he was making in base pay each year. And I remember just sort of stopping and kind of rewinding and like, what? He was making almost $20,000 more per year than I was. I remember just being completely floored. He wasn't more experienced. He wasn't older. There wasn't any good reason, you know, especially considering that I was managing him and training him kind of in my footsteps.
--:-- [Sean Rameswaram pauses]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And I ended up going to the director of our department and I'll never forget. He looked at me and he said, unfortunately, that's just what the market demands that we pay you. If you can prove to me that the market would demand we pay you more, go for it. I remember having this glass shattering moment, realizing that the company had no interest in paying me what I was worth and that they were going to do whatever they could to pay me the least amount that they could for as long as they could.
--:-- [Sean Rameswaram takes a deep breath]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That was a Today Explained listener who shared her story with us. And we asked for listener stories because today is equal payday. It is. It is the day that women would have to work to to earn as much as men earned in 2017. It changes every year. Which is to say that this year, women would have had to work from January 2017 straight through today, April 10th, 2018, to earn as much as men did in 2017. Yes. Which is to say things aren't getting that much better too quickly. It's to say the gender wage gap is alive and well.
--:-- [Sean Rameswaram pauses]
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And it's not just sexism behind it. Turns out there's a super specific reason we have a gender wage gap. Sarah Cliff, host of the Impact podcast here at Vox. How bad is the wage gap? Right now, women earn about 82% of what men earn.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: Why is it so alive and why is it so well in 2018? This is an answer that changes over time. You know, if we had been doing this interview, if podcasts existed in like the 1970s or so. We would have said that, well, women aren't in the labor force as much. And when they are, they don't have as good of an education. They don't get graduate degrees. Right. But a lot of those factors have actually faded away. Women get more graduate degrees than men at this point. Women's labor force participation has risen hugely over the past few decades. The one thing that has not changed is this expectation that when couples have children, it is the women who are going to step back and take care of them.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: And that expectation really seems to be at the heart of the wage gap that exists in 2018. Really? It's all about having children maternity leave? Yeah, there's one statistic I found that just really blew me away and drove this home. Women who don't have children, they earn on average 96% of what men make. Almost closes the gap. Almost closes the gap.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: If you don't have kids, your earnings look a lot like your male counterparts. And that suggests a lot of what's going on with the wage gap is really a motherhood penalty. Is the larger problem that someone's got to care for the kids and workplaces aren't that flexible? Is that the problem?
--:-- Sarah Cliff: I think that's certainly a chunk of what's going on is that one of the things I think is really revealing about the gender wage gap is that it changes over the time of a career. I actually want to tell you about this University of Chicago study that helped me understand it. Please.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: So there were about 10,000 people who graduated with business degrees from the graduate school at University of Chicago between 1990 and 2006. OK. In 2009, three economists decide to study a quarter of those people. And they find that when people graduated, there was a wage gap, but it was pretty tiny. That women earned $115,000 right out of graduate school. Men earned $130,000.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: Nine years out of graduate school, women are earning an average of $250,000, while men are averaging out at $400,000. Wow. So men are earning 60% more than women nine years out. So that initial gap was like that pure, we just pay men more gap, and then it gets exponentially worse because women have taken time to have kids.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Yeah, so that first gap, you know, might be paying men more. Maybe, you know, you have some people who are looking down the future and thinking, I want a certain kind of job that's going to be more flexible. Okay. But something happens in that nine-year time period. And if you think of like the life events that happen between finishing a graduate degree and a decade later one of those big life events is kids.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: And you just see in study after study the wage gap gets really really big as women hit their 30s and 40s Sounds a lot like where you're at, Sarah. Have you experienced this at all, like firsthand?
--:-- Sarah Cliff: So people who are listening to this cannot see that I'm about eight months pregnant at this point. So I've been thinking about this a lot. I've seen in the research and like seen in my own life that one of the things that happens when you get pregnant is people make certain assumptions about what you might want. People assume you might not want to travel as much or that you're going to want to scale back your responsibilities once you have this child.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: And there really isn't that kind of assumption that gets placed on men. Some of it probably isn't conscious. Some of it's just like, oh, well, Sarah looks pretty uncomfortable sitting at her desk at this point. Maybe she doesn't want to get on a five-hour plane flight is well-meaning in a way. But it also kind of holds women back, you know, by not asking, you know, if I do want to get on that five-hour plane flight.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: A few months ago, yes. When a father takes time off for child care, do we see it affecting his earnings? We do. And this is like one of the most fascinating, I think, horrific parts of the wage gap literature is men actually get penalized more than women for taking significant time off.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: That's refreshing. So I guess it's like it is a little refreshing, but it's also disturbing to me because it is a totally rational decision. If you're like a couple having a baby, you know, who are looking at all this research, you might say, well, you know, the world being what it is, it makes more sense for the woman to take the time off because she's going to get penalized less than if the man takes the time off.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So it's kind of like a bummer. The wage gap research suggests they actually face a steeper economic penalty for taking that time off. So if the United States or, you know, employers in the United States help pay for more child care, would the gender wage gap sort of disappear or go back to the smaller gap that you said would happen just after college or something like that?
--:-- Sarah Cliff: Not necessarily. And I think, you know, the Scandinavian countries are actually really instructive to look at here because they do have heavily subsidized daycare. There was this recent study that came out of Denmark's wage gap. It is startling to me how much the charts of Denmark's wage gap look like what you'd find in the United States, where a woman has a baby and her earnings just totally crater.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: And one of the things that's really interesting when you dig into, well, why is that happening? They have subsidized child care, is that in Denmark, they have very generous maternity leave or actually very generous parental leave, men have the option to take it. But again, there's like that cultural norm that women are going to take the entirety of this really generous leave.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: I think it's a full year of leave after you have a baby. So what would help then? Are there any policies in other countries that actually work? So in Iceland, for example, there's three months of leave that can only be used by the dad, three months of leave that can only be used by the mom, and the rest can be split up between the couple. So you kind of have this three months of use it or lose it paternity leave in Iceland.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: The rates of men taking paternity leave skyrocket in Iceland. All of a sudden, when it was like, well, I could get three months paid for free or just lose it and go to work. I was like, yeah, that seems like a pretty decent deal. I'll stay home and take care of my kids for those three months.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So, I mean, in the United States, that feels like it'd be kind of radical to say like, man, you're taking three months now. But is it like just something that we need to have a cultural awakening on? I mean, it'd be radical to say, hey, women, you get three months of paid leave at this point. You know, there's some fascinating international research that shows, you know, whether you're in the US, in Denmark, in the UK, the vast majority of people who live in these developed countries do not think that women should work full time when they have kids who are not yet school age.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: In all those countries I just listed, it's less than 20% of the people who live there agree with the statement, you know, women should work full time. You look at should men work full time and like the number skyrockets up to a big majority. So I don't think our cultural norms are quite there yet.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: How do we convince like male father people that they can take time to take care of their children? You know, I'm about to have a baby. I'm going to take three months of leave and be back here at Vox. So there's been a huge shift on the part of women into the workforce. And I think a lot of that is by modeling that, you know, I see all my friends are doing this. Like I see other people doing this. and that becomes more normal.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: I think the same shift hasn't happened for men. Men have kept working, but there hasn't been that addition of the caregiving. And like you need some kind of ad campaign almost showing men in caregiving roles. And we just don't see that a lot. If like a man is going to look around and look at his friends at the moment he's having kids, he probably sees a lot of guys who go back to work very quickly.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: You need some kind of like PSA or something like, hey, this is like a normal thing to do, to take time to take care of your children. We should make the PSA. We're going to make a PSA? Well, let's do it. Hell yeah, we'll make a PSA.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: To all you men out there, what would you say in this PSA? What would my PSA say? Hello, men of America. This is Sarah Cliff with a public service announcement on Equal Payday 2018. If you think it wrong that women get paid less than men there is a huge role for you to play If you are going to be a more active caregiver if you going to tell your work I having a baby and I want to take a certain amount of time off that is the contribution you can make to helping close the gender wage gap.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Hello, men of America. This is Daniel. I'm Sarah's husband.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] Daniel, it's Sean Rameswaram. I'm calling from Today Explained.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Hey Sean, how are you doing?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] I'm so sorry, Daniel. I tried calling you a second ago but I don't know, your phone was dead.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Oh man, I'm so sorry about that.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] No worries, no worries. So, I was just talking to Sarah about the Quip electric toothbrush. And I was thinking, you know, you'd be a great spokesperson for it.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Oh yeah? What's so great about it?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] Well, when the batteries in your Quip electric toothbrush die, you can just replace them with AAA batteries. You don't have to plug it into a wall or something. That's pretty damn cool.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] That is pretty cool. I'm going to go check it out right now.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] Yeah, go for it. Getquip.com slash explained.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: Welcome back to Today Explained. I'm Valerie Wilson, director of the program on race, ethnicity, and the economy at the Economic Policy Institute.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Valerie, thanks for joining us.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: Thanks for having me.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today is Equal Pay Day. We've been talking about the wage gap between men and women. But how does that conversation change when you factor in race?
--:-- Valerie Wilson: Well, when you factor in race, that gender gap expands tremendously. Today, we are acknowledging that this is equal pay day. This is the day when, on average, women will catch up with what men earned in the previous year. For African-American women, that date will come on August 7th. For Hispanic women, that date will come November 1st.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Holy smokes. So race adds an entirely different dimension to gender pay disparities. Can you give me some specific numbers here so we can sort of paint a picture? Like, what are African-American women making on average? What are white women making on average? Latin American women?
--:-- Valerie Wilson: If we consider median wages, so median is the person right in the middle. Half will make less, half will make more. For white women, the median hourly wage is $18.26. For African-American women, it's $14.61. And for Hispanic women, it's $13.50.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And if we're going to then compare that to men, for white men, their median hourly wage is $22.50. Sense. And, you know, when we're talking about the gender wage gap, you factor in maternity leave and it makes things much worse. But otherwise, it kind of looked like wages are reasonably close.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: So that's interesting because most of the wage disadvantage that women of color experience is a gender pay disparity. Yeah. So when the gender pay gap narrowed during the 1980s and about midway through the 90s, all women experienced that improvement in pay. But when that gender wage gap sort of flattened out and we started to see less positive progress, for African-American women, the gap expanded.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: And why is it expanding? For African-American women, the expansion of the gap is sort of interesting because we see that educational attainment is increasing. It's increasing for all workers. The gap that's growing between black women and white women is largely because the rate of educational attainment for white women is growing faster than it is for black women.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: So both groups are increasing education. It's just not increasing as quickly for African-American women. We have to factor in the impact of the wealth gap, the racial wealth gap, and the fact that it costs a lot of money to go to college and to get more education. That sort of slows the rate at which you're able to increase attainment.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Do we assume that racism plays a role here too?
--:-- Valerie Wilson: I absolutely assume that racism plays a role. And I say that and I'm so confident. I say that in such a strong way because, you know, we did a study a couple of years ago where we looked at the trends in the racial wage gap. And we cut the data almost any way you can think of trying to find some slice of the population where you get more parity or equality is not there If we look within the same level of education, there's a pay gap. If we look in the same region of the country, there's a pay gap. If we consider how distribution across occupations has changed over time, that doesn't explain the widening of the pay gap.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: So there's really little left to explain the fact that there is a disparity by gender and by race other than racism and sexism and the role that those play and how people get paid, whether or not they get hired, whether or not they get promoted.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: And do you see that gap decreasing in size out of curiosity, the one that you can't explain through factors like education or work experience?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: No, in fact, that gap has widened.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: No. So, yeah, that. What? And when we look at this trend in the expansion of the racial wage gap, more of that gap is unexplained, leaving that sort of gaping hole and big question mark of, is this something else we just haven't measured or is it really race?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: That's not what I wanted to hear, Valerie.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: Me either. What are we doing about that?
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: I think that there was some progress under the Obama administration to try to make some progress in addressing it in terms of greater pay transparency and requiring companies with 100 employees or more to report pay data by race, ethnicity, gender, and by job.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: But the current administration has decided not to move forward with that. What could you possibly object to about greater transparency in labor statistics? Your guess is as good as mine.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But what it does say to me is that pay equity, gender pay equity, racial pay equity is not a priority for this administration because that was a simple thing to do.
--:-- Valerie Wilson: I wonder, you know, we asked Sarah Cliff, the reporter we spoke to in the first half about her own personal experiences with this. Have you personally experienced the wage gap? Do you have a story you could share?
--:-- Sarah Cliff: So that's an interesting question because I will say that my answer is probably what you're going to get from most women. I don't know. And I think that that's a problem with why we have a gender pay gap. For the most part, we don't know what other people who work with us or who work in our profession doing similar types of work. We don't know what other people are making.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: But, you know, there are a number of websites out there, Glassdoor and others, where you can search on job titles. And I think even companies. I mean, the best you can do as an individual is to be informed. Being informed isn't just pie in the sky.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: This is how her wage gap story ends. It's kind of awful that I had to do this, but I ended up interviewing around, searching the internet and job boards for comparable job opportunities, and then actually going through that full interview process until I had an offer in hand from another firm.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: When I had a few legitimate offers to present, I made a meeting with my director, and to the company's credit, they matched the best offer. But it sucks that I had to go through that process in the first place. Being a woman in finance is already kind of hard, But on top, you have this pay gap to be addressed.
--:-- Sarah Cliff: To this day, I'm continuously interviewing elsewhere and being honest about that with my colleagues. Maybe one day, none of us will have to waste our time interviewing for jobs that we don't want to get paid fairly.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Thanks to all the Today Explained listeners who shared their stories with us. And thanks to Lauren Katz and Julie Bogan at Vox for helping us reach out.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: Today Explained is produced in association with Stitcher, and we're part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our executive producer is Irene Noguchi, Noam Hassenfeld and Luke Vanderplug produce, Bridget McCarthy is our editor, Afim Shapiro is our engineer, and the unbeatable Breakmaster Cylinder makes music for us.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: You can do Today Explained a solid and rate and review us on Apple Podcasts. Thanks.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Hey, Daniel, it's Sean Rameswaram.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Yeah, hi Sean.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] I'm so glad this worked out and I got a hold of you.
--:-- Daniel: [over the phone] Yeah, me too. I'm really glad to talk to you and learn about the Quip toothbrush.
--:-- Sean Rameswaram: [over the phone] Yeah, it's fantastic. We just recorded an ad. It's done.
