What the ‘Hes’ Do Is More Valuable Than What the ‘Shes’ Do – Really??

The following post is by MPFJ staff writer, Marie. You can read more of Marie’s articles over at her own blog, Family Money Values. Enjoy! 

Ladies, work hard, study STEM, get a high paying job and close the gender pay gap – right?  Your efforts are an important and valued part of society, right?

Apparently not.

Three researchers analyzed Census data from 1950 to 2000 trying to figure out if women get paid less than men because they don’t go after the high paying jobs or if the high paying jobs lose their luster when dominated by women (the study’s ‘devaluation view’).

Guess what.  According to site Payscale :

“Ultimately, the evidence came down on the side of the devaluation view, meaning that occupations with more women pay less because they’re female-dominated.”

Women’s work.  Worth less.  Wrong and Wrong.

Computer science is a field that has changed from being female dominated to male dominated.

Computer programming used to be ‘women’s work’ way back in the 60’s and 70’s.  Grace Hopper (who most programmers will recognize as the woman who wrote the compiler that was a precursor to the  COBOL language and coined the term ‘computer bug’ due to a moth in her hardware) and the girls who programmed the University of Pennsylvania’s ENIAC computer in the 1940’s started it.

For decades after (until the early 1990’s), women tended to dominate the field.  I myself started programming in 1983 and there were a number of women right there with me.

Men weren’t being altruistic or favoring the woman’s movement back then.  They thought that programming was a low level skill that was akin to typing – not one of those ‘manly’ jobs.

In Stanford News article Researcher reveals how “Computer Geeks” replaced “Computer Girls” author Brenda D. Frink  explains how that changed into primarily a male dominated field today.

Two trends helped.  First, according to Frink:

“Male computer programmers sought to increase the prestige of their field, through creating professional associations, through erecting educational requirements for programming careers, and through discouraging the hiring of women. Increasingly, computer industry ad campaigns linked women staffers to human error and inefficiency.”

Secondly, sets of hiring tests were devised to help steer folks into jobs related to programming.  These tests were highly slanted to select male type traits.

Additionally, during the early 1990s, after the advent of personal home computing, geeking out on a home computer became a guy thing – like working on a car or playing football.  Families tended to give their boys access to the PCs, leaving the girls behind.  When it came time to attend computer classes then, girls were immediately at a disadvantage.

Oh, and did I mention that computer science fields are among the highest paying fields today in the 21st century?

I pursued a career in software development.  It paid more than any other job I could have found back in the 1980’s. Through the years, women continued to disappear from my companies. Most of my coworkers (both managers and staffers) were male.

Over the years, the pay differential between my salary and the salaries of my peer managers (mostly male) in my geographic region diverged by more than 11 %.  How do I know that?  My HR department did a study one year and gave me an 11% raise to bring my salary up to the norm so I wouldn’t leave.  The worst part of it was that my own boss was mad at HR because they didn’t consult him so he could adjust his part of my raise downward to compensate!!!

It’s not just a pay gap issue.

Aside from gender pay inequality, work that women have traditionally done and are starting to do now – gets undervalued.

My case in point.  I was the high wage earner in our family – as a computer software manager.  I made more than twice as much as hubby, even before bonus’s and stock options and retirement benefits.  I’m not sure anyone in my circle even recognized that.

Hubby retired 3 years before me and went to work landscaping our 6 acres.  He cuts grass, plants or removes trees, picks up trash and plants gardens.  After I retired, I started a revenue producing website, managed rentals for our condo resulting in tax cuts and profits, and established myself as an author (through writing a book as well as for sites such as this).  Guess whose work is valued more by our friends and family?

His ability to retire early, in part, relied on my success in my field.  Yet few of our circle realized that, my contributions were mainly invisible.

In Quartz article; At work as at home, men reap the benefits of women’s “invisible labor”,  the author included information on a study done on tenured men vs women and reported:

“In December of 2015, Heather Sarsons, an economist completing her PhD in economics at Harvard, released a working paper: “Gender Differences in Recognition for Group Work (pdf).” As part of her study, Sarsons analyzed 40 years’ worth of publications produced by economists at top US universities. She found that women who wrote on their own had the same chance of receiving tenure as men. However, women who collaborated with men had lower chances. The value of the women’s contributions were erased.

Meanwhile, men who collaborated with women didn’t suffer any penalty. In fact, they were four times more likely to succeed. Sarsons’ working conclusion? Women get almost no credit at all for collaborating and are tacitly perceived as subservient employees. Their gender, essentially, renders them assistants by default.”

Again, women doing the same (or more) work than men and being undervalued.

Will it ever end?

My advice?  In your next life, be born male.

How about you all?  What are your thoughts on the man vs woman pay gaps? What have you experienced compared to your colleagues of the other gender?

Share your experiences by commenting below!

***Photo courtesy https://www.flickr.com/photos/nickefford/26642377714/