Letter to the Editor: Professor doubts “discrimination alone” leads to gender gap
The war between the sexes, perhaps humankind’s oldest, continues to flicker on the University of South Dakota campus.
Payton Randle fired an opening salvo in the Oct. 2 Volante, questioning the need for a feminist women’s group on campus.
Sarah Heerdt responded, arguing that the existence of the wage gap, violence against women and employment disparities illustrate the need for a group on campus advocating for and supporting women. Interest in this subject is further heightened by The Volante initiating a four-part series on the status of women in South Dakota, the first installment of which relies heavily on a report of the Center for American Progress.
Heerdt and the report of the Center for American Progress both correctly assert that, based on annual data, women earn only 77 cents for every dollar a man makes. Such a figure is simple, but of no use in evaluating claims of discrimination. Discrimination alone does not determine compensation.
As Heerdt apparently understands, raw figures must be adjusted for number of hours worked, years of continuous experience in the workforce, level of education, occupation in which the person works and a host of other factors, not all of which can be quantified.
The wage gap diminishes dramatically once adjustments for these productivity factors are made, and in some cases disappears.
The wage gap seldom completely disappears under statistical analysis. In 1998, the typical labor economist at top research universities believed that about 20 percent of the raw gap was due to employer discrimination.
This may be too much today. For example, a 2010 report prepared for the Labor Department by CONSAD Research Corporation states that it is doubtful whether “… any portion of the observed gender wage gap …can be confidently attributed to overt discrimination against women.”
The forward to the CONSAD report states “… the raw wage gap should not be used as the basis to justify corrective action. Indeed, there may be nothing to correct.”
Ms. Heerdt also laments that although women make up over half of the total U.S. population, they hold but 38.2 percent of the management positions, 12.9 percent of architecture and engineering positions and about a fourth of executive positions. However, it has never been the case that all occupational ratios are equal to population ratios. Blacks comprise only about fourteen percent of the population, but almost eighty percent of the NBA roster is black. Jews have long been disproportionately prominent in the garment industry. Furthermore, Jews comprise only two percent of the U.S. population, yet they won 37 percent of all Nobel prizes awarded to Americans between 1901 and 2005. Lack of proportionality tells us nothing about discrimination.
Feminist advocates often overlook the pressure to end discrimination that is exerted by competitive markets. Given equal productivity, any firm that pays men more than women is forgoing substantial profits, and this provides a substantial incentive not to discriminate. A free market is perhaps the best and most effective anti-discrimination policy.
A consistent belief underlying many comments on discrimination is that equal opportunity implies equal outcomes. This is patently untrue. Anyone who still believes, after more than a half century of research, that contemporary differences in earnings in the U.S. are due largely to systemic discrimination, and that discrimination is costless to the discriminator, has not been paying attention.
Dennis A. Johnson, Ph.D.
Professor Emeritus of Economics
