According to this article, a recent study shows that Virginia ranks near the bottom in terms of equal pay for women. Only New Jersey and Louisiana rank lower.
Nationally, the study found that one year out of college, women earn 80 percent of what men make. The gap widens with time: 10 years after college, the differential is 69 percent. The report looked at jobs in the public and private sectors.
It is appropriate that former ODU president and economics professor James Koch would weigh in on this study.
Koch, who has written about pay equity in academia and sports, also said women’s behavior contributed to the difference. Women, he said, often negotiate less aggressively than men and are less likely to be “risk-takers.”
Blaming women for being unfairly treated? Normally, I have a lot of respect for Koch’s economic analysis but this smacks of sexism to the nth degree. Bias has no place in analysis and my opinion of Dr. Koch just fell a notch or two.
VIVIAN J. PAIGE | All Politics is Local 
Don’t blast Koch, here. He is only paraphrasing the report:
“Further magnifying these gender differences, women expect
less and negotiate less pay for themselves than do men.
Researchers have found that women expect less, see the
world as having fewer negotiable opportunities, and see
themselves as acting for what they care about as opposed to
acting for pay. These learned behaviors and expectations
(which may be based on experiences) tend to minimize
women’s pay (Babcock & Laschever, 2003).” p.30
Come On VJP! Koch is not blaming woman entirely, he said the contributed to the difference. Lets not over react. I agree with anonymous, Koch is paraphrasing.
Sorry VJP, but I disagree as well.
Women don’t (according to the study), put themselves out there as much. That being said, they do not afford themselves as many chances of being recognized and promoted by their superiors.
Now you are accusing companies of… not rewarding under-achieving women for being under-achievers?
Sounds foolish.
I have just finished reading the report. The glaring “madness to the method” (BOC, 1986) is comparing the Class of 1993’s 10-years-after pay gap with the Class of 2000’s one-year-after pay gap, and then saying things are getting worse. Better would be to compare 1993’s one-year-after pay gap to 2000’s one-year-after pay gap. That would tell us if things are getting better or worse.
Of great importance is that, one-year-out, 25% of the $0.20 pay gap was unexplained, and ten-years-out, 40% of the $0.31 pay gap was unexplained. The individuals negotiating skills were not measurable, and are assumed to have some contribution to the gap. Discrimination is also assumed to be a factor. Unfortunately, there is no way to quantify the relative contributions of those causes.
Just because you disagree doesn’t mean he’s wrong. He’s an expert in the area, has reviewed the data, is familiar with the report and he believes SOME of the disparity is due to women negotiating differently and/or taking less risks. How is that even a controversial statement? I assume you have some factual basis to your assertion that he’s wrong and that his statements come from a position of bias rather than reality.
Blast Koch! Early and often. You can’t bash that sort of mentality too hard.
I have to disagree as well, Viv, with your characterization as Koch “blaming women.” He didn’t argue that women are less-qualified or less-capable than their male counterparts or that there’s a legitimate reason for paying a woman less than a man. He is making a characterization that’s difficult to support quantitatively, and that’s problematic; however, if anything his characterization is that women are literally selling themselves short and are capable of exceding their own expectations.
That’s a bad thing?
I couldn’t disagree with Mad Hatter’s (mis)characterization more!
This has nothing to do with women being “under-achievers”.
Twice, in 2 different career fields in Virginia my pay differed significantly from my male counterparts, despite the fact that my performance evaluations exceeded theirs. In both instances I worked with and for men exclusively.
In one position, I was promoted into a recently vacated position that had been held by a male. I had the same qualifications, had been with the company for years, and expected to come in to the position at the same salary that the previous employee had entered the position. Instead, my pay was signficantly less. Why? He couldn’t justify to the board of directors paying a woman the same thing as he paid a man to do the job. How I wish I had THAT on tape!
In the second instance, my performance evaluations were far superior to the men who held the same position I held. My statistics regarding profit and expenditures were also far, far better. And yet, with the same time in (and sometimes more), my salary was 20% less than the men. Why? No explanation could be given. I did notice that the male supervisors and their male subordinates spent a lot of free time playing golf together, though. Needless to say, after I learned how badly I was getting shafted, I headed for greener pastures.
I do think our “training” as girls does contribute in some way to the reason we make less money. Men who are aggressive, know what they want, and are willing to demand it are successful. Women who are aggressive, know what they want, and are willing to demand it are bitches.
I don’t know that I’d say that women are selling themselves short or even that this is a woman’s “fault”. By and large, businesses are run according to the rules of men. Men and women, at least from my generation, have been “trained” differently. I recall one terrific male boss telling me, “it’s not enough for you to DO excellent; you have to TELL everyone you’re excellent – all the time”. I had been taught since I was a little girl to always do an excellent job and to never brag about it. Tooting one’s own horn was seen as disrespectful, boorish behavior. But in many companies, if you want to get ahead, the only way to do so is to tell anyone and everyone who will listen just how great you are.
Although I am male, I, too, was brought up to believe that “tooting one’s own horn” was boorish. I was taught that if you perform well, you will be rewarded. As Dr. Phil might ask, “How has that been working for you?”
Unforunately, it is a hard habit to break. In this screwy world of “self-evaluations,” it doesn’t work very well at all.
Olivia hit almost every point I was going to make. And Virginian – please read what I wrote again: I never said Koch was wrong. I said he was sexist. And he was. Obviously, I’m not the only one who thought that way. Take a look at the comments posted now at the original article.
(AAUW – if you want folks to read your survey, you shouldn’t ask for all that info just to get a link to download it 😡 )
So the report is sexist?
So Koch is sexist for quoting a report you disagree with. That’s rather ignorant, don’t you think?
According to those standards, Vivian, you are sexist – you put snippets of those quotes up.
Olivia – Notice that I included the disclaimer “according to the report.” If you did not read that and understand its significance in relation to the rest of my comment, then I am not surprised that you are not paid as well as other people in your field.
Olivia,
Your own personal experience may serve as the antithesis of Koch’s characterization. In the second instance, you analyzed metrically performance versus compensation. I presume that you attempted to reasonably address the compensation disparity, and upon finding that the inequity could not be satisfactorily resolved, you took a risk and left to find better compensation.
Good for you.
However, I am very much in disagreement about the way you characterize “aggressive” and “demanding” men being successful and “aggressive” women being “bitches,” and I think your characterization goes a long way to proving that women misunderstand men just as much as men often misunderstand women. Men are not raised to “demand” anything–we are simply raised to expect what we deserve. I don’t “demand what I want,” I expect what I want to be given to me. If it’s not, I thank the other participant in a negotiation for the opportunity and the offer but explain that I need more, and if the package is non-negotiable then I need to find another offer.
This could open up to a wider discussion of feminism and the female misunderstanding of the workings of patriarchal culture, which I would find very enlightening. However, it’s probably outside the scope of a comments section on a political blog.
Mad Hatter,
Since you’ve chosen to be insulting, I shall respond in kind.
Clearly you struggle with the English language. You also seem to be unable to separate the data and interpretation presented in the report and by Koch from that of your own. Nowhere did Koch or the report characterize women as “under-achievers”.
You did that. And it is disgusting and insulting.
The report did not make the connection that women are underachievers, thus they receive less money. It did make the connection that females earn less pay than women. And there are a multitude of reasons for that fact.
Anonymous, What you present as “not demanding” but rather simply expecting what you deserve is actually what I was calling “demanding”. I do not mean demanding to mean pushy, nasty, or anything of the kind. I guess it’s a difference in vocabulary interpretation (ah, another issue). Men, by and large, have been taught to say what they want and expect, and walk if they don’t get it. Women (at least of my generation) were more often taught to ask (rather than say and expect), to put politeness before almost all else, and to be deferential. Another difference is that men more frequently speak in the active voice and women in the passive. I think that these, as well as many other things, are all items that over the long term and across thousands of people, add up to women earning less money than men. But unlike the illustrious Mad Hatter above, I will not simply chock up the disparity to women being some sort of pathetic underachievers.
It is interesting that Koch chose to reference that particular part of the study. As an economist, he could have easily discussed the problematic methodology of the study or offered evidence to the contrary found in other studies. Instead, he focused on the portion of the wage differential that MAY be attributed to female behavior. The portion that, as anonymous pointed out, is difficult to quantify.
We reveal our biases by the very choices we make concerning which information we include and which we omit from our discussions. How convenient to be able to get your point across by hiding behind the results of someone else’s study.