If women and men do the same work, that does not mean that they are paid the same: so many millions of women workers worldwide have already experienced this that it has long since become commonplace. The most recent study by the US analysis and opinion research institute Pew Research, which deals with the earnings of women and men under the age of 30, does not come to any different conclusions overall – and yet it makes you sit up and take notice: in 16 of the 250 US metropolitan areas , which the experts took a closer look at, namely that there is indeed a wage gap, but not at the expense of it, on the contrary in favor of young women.
The disparity is clearest, according to the research, in the Wenatchee area of northwestern Washington state, where female full-time workers under 30 earn an average of 120 percent of what their male counterparts bring home. In the Morgantown area in West Virginia it is 114 percent, in the area around Naples on Florida’s Gulf Coast it is 108 percent. With the New York metropolitan area and the capital Washington DC, there are also two real metropolises in which young women earn higher salaries than men – in both cases the lead is small, but still measurable at 102 percent. In Los Angeles and five other metropolitan areas, both sexes earn exactly the same on average.
So why is it that the situation in these specific cases is so much better than is generally the case? Richard Fry, the author of the study, suspects that the phenomenon has several causes. The most important is probably that women are simply better educated on average: they make up almost 60 percent of the student body in the United States and graduate more frequently and with better grades and academic degrees than their male counterparts. That’s why they have a head start in regions where there are above-average jobs that require a college degree — New York and Washington, for example, where far more lawyers, economists, business economists and other academics work than in many other parts of the country.
On a national average, young women earn 93 percent of men’s salaries
However – and that brings us back to the sad part of the situation description: In the other 228 regions that Fry looked at, women under 30 also earn less than men of the same age, the national average is just 93 percent. In some places, things are even worse, such as in Elkhart-Goshen, Indiana, Beaumont-Port Arthur, Texas, or Odessa, Texas, where female workers earn less than 70 percent of the wage levels of their male colleagues. And perhaps even worse: Even in the 22 metropolitan areas with good starting conditions, the situation reverses as the women get older.
Blame it on what scientists call the “motherhood price” workers pay when they commit to a partner, have children, and stay at home, at least part of the time. While men often even received a kind of “marriage bonus” in the form of a salary increase in the years after marriage, it is exactly the opposite with their partners, says Fry: “These women suffer an earnings disadvantage when they have children – and this disadvantage becomes getting bigger with each additional child”. As a result, even a salary advantage quickly turns into a deficit.
After all, since New York, Los Angeles and Washington, some of the major US metropolitan areas are among the exceptional regions of the Pew study, the proportion of young women who live in regions with higher salaries for women is 16 percent nationwide. For Fry and other experts, this is where the job ends. Entrepreneurs, managers and politicians now have to answer the question of what can be done to ensure pay equity not just for a few but for all American women.