Let’s Talk About Choices

Not too long ago, employers advertised for higher-paying jobs in a section of the newspaper labeled, “Help Wanted—Male.” When Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from law school, they got no job offers. And, in the more recent past, when Michele A. Roberts went to court as a public defender, she was often mistaken for someone charged with a crime, a mistake she attributes to her race and gender. Ms. Roberts is now a Partner at Skadden.

These attitudes about women in the workplace have not gone away. Their vestiges can be seen today in women’s continued lower pay for the same job; segregation into a set of jobs that are perceived as “women’s work,” the vast majority of which are low paying; and exclusion and underrepresentation of women in high-wage jobs. And that doesn’t even cover the severe penalty that mothers face in the workplace, simply for being mothers. Each of these factors depresses women’s wages, and each is linked to practices and policies that are woven into the fabric of the American workplace.

So it’s hard not to feel a little bewildered when discussions about the wage gap—which has stayed stagnant at 77 cents for over a decade—devolve into assertions that we should chalk it all up to women’s choices and go home. Many of the factors that influence the wage gap have nothing to do with choice:

Employers discriminate against women by paying women less for equal work in the same job as men. When women venture into male-dominated fields—which are more likely to be higher-paying—women often encounter isolation, harassment, and outright exclusion. Perhaps it’s not surprising that, unwelcome in these fields, women are instead overrepresented in low-paying jobs like home health aide, child care provider, and nursing home worker. Four out of ten women work in female-dominated occupations and almost two-thirds of workers earning the lowest wages—those who make the federal minimum wage or less—are women.

When women do make choices about their careers, they are penalized for these choices—and men aren’t. Women who decide to be mothers automatically face barriers in the workplace. Fathers, on the other hand, are viewed more positively by employers than non-fathers. For example, a recent study found that mothers with nearly identical resumes to non-mothers were recommended for significantly lower starting salaries, perceived as less competent, and less likely to be recommended for hire than non-mothers. In contrast, fathers fared better than non-fathers on each of these metrics.

It’s time to come clean about the wage gap. That means confronting the barriers to fair pay head on. It means no more bizarre assertions that the wage gap doesn’t exist, or if it does, it is somehow women’s fault.