I believe that’s an illegal question to ask in an interview. Certainly, when I started to interview candidates at my current job, I was told under equal employment laws, we’re not allowed to ask questions about family status or changes in family status.
I’ve been told the same. But, there are a lot of interviewers who are unaware of this. Could the candidates sue? Certainly. Is it a practical alternative for most of them? No.
So, expand welfare you say?
Your theory is not supported by the conclusions of the empirical study I cited. Provide a citation to a peer-reviewed published study demonstrating no difference in initial salary, or to one that finds dings to females later (above and beyond appropriate dings for interrupted career tenure). If you can’t, or you are unwilling to do so, don’t expect myself and others to ignore empirical evidence in favor of your plausible, but entirely speculative, alternative.
I have yet to see an actual demonstration of how societal expectations actually impact individual choices.
There are experimental studies that provide identical resumes or vitae to actual employers or human resource personnel (not just untrained undergraduates), but alter the name to be either male or female, or more common in whites or blacks. Often, the black and female names are evaluated less favorably for hiring, relative to white or male names.*
IMO, if employers’ societal expectations lead them to offer fewer jobs to blacks and females, the individual choices of these job candidates have been impacted.
*Examples:
-Steinpreis, RE, Ritzke, D, & Anders, KA. (1999). The impact of gender on the review of the curricula vitae of job applicants and tenure candidates: A national empirical study. Sex Roles, 41, 509-528.
-Pager, D, & Quillian, L. (2005). Walking the talk? What employers say versus what they do. American Sociological Review, 70, 355-380.
Not a peer-reviewed study, but it illustrates my point:
Wow, I guess. I didn’t expect this to be controversial.
I appreciate the link. I know little about the legal field, so I have a few questions.
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The link provides a listing of law firms, organized by state, that provide year-by-year income tables for their lawyers. Are these base incomes set in stone? If a listing shows $115k base salary for first-year lawyers, is it the case that every new employee makes this amount, or is it more likely a range from $110k to $120k, subject to negotiation?
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In a sample of moderate to large cities, the number of firms listed ranged from 10-15 (e.g. Sacramento, Cleveland) to 75 (e.g., NYC, LA). Any ideas what proportion of lawyers this covers? In other words, do the firms in this database reflect 25% or 70% of the possible jobs where new lawyers end up?
Why is that? Expectations about future labour market attachment affect an employer’s evaluation of a worker. If worker A has characteristics which are statistically associated with low attachment, then A is on average a less desirable employee, and will make less money, than B. This form of discrimination is called, for obvious reasons, “statistical discrimination.”
As the proportion of females in a given profession increases over time, the financial compensation of that profession relative to others lags, and the profession often is rated as less prestigious by others.
You are assuming, I think, that changes in the proportion of females causes lower pay. But the causation could go the other way around: low pay could cause increased feminization. Or the relationship could be spurious: changes in job characteristics which make the job relatively more desirable, holding pay constant, for people with low labour market attachment would cause both higher feminization and lower pay. For example, if hours become more flexible in some occupation due to changes in technology, we would see wages fall because flexible hours are a non-pecuniary benefit, and we would see more women take these jobs because they on average value flexibility moreso than men.
No it doesn’t. See:
Wood et al (1993) Pay Differences among the Highly Paid: The Male-Female Earnings Gap in Lawyers’ Salaries, J Labor Economics 11(3).
The firms listed tend to be large firms that hire several-to-many law students out of law school each year. The salaries are for most firms set in stone: every first year lawyer in NYC working at Firm X will make salary Y. When I started my career in NYC, the starting base salary was $125,000, and every single person in my starting class made that amount, without exception. (Side note: that amount looks large but isn’t in NYC)
Bonuses too were for the newer lawyers pretty much well set and based on hours billed. As you become more senior (and closer to invitation to partnership) it gets a little more subjective.
At smaller firms that may only hire a couple of grads each year (or may hire none at all), it may be a little different. Of course, there’s a lot of variability in profitability etc as you move down in firm size that affects what they offer starting lawyers.
Point of fact, my link does illustrate my point, specifically that entry-level attorney salary information is readily available and thus difficult to cheat on.
And hey, at least my link was current. You’re citing to a thirteen year old survey (which presumably relied on even more aged data) that may or may not be relevant today.
You didn’t expect suggesting that we pay people who want to have kids instead of participating in the labor force to be controversial?
Technically, you’d only want to pay people who have kids and then return to the labor force, but that was my “well, if that’s your starting point…” extrapolition.
I’m surprise about “women aren’t discriminated against at work”, and “having kids is a lifestyle choice,” which I thought were pretty out-there opinions, especially as a combination. I guess it’s the lots of libertarians on here thing again.
In an attempt to make this less yelly, here’s a couple interesting discussions on “kids are a lifestyle choice” at Crooked Timber and Bitch PHD.
You were responding to Sidd’s suggestion that you “provide a citation to a peer-reviewed published study demonstrating no difference in initial salary.” The list of salaries you provided doesn’t do that. Suppose it is the case that all lawyers at a given firm make the same initial salary. In the presence of gender discrimination, we could still observe sorting across firms such that women make less than observationally equivalent men. And that is one of the results of the paper I cited. The paper could indeed be out of date, but the onus is then on you to provide more recent evidence.
Having kids isn’t a choice?
That’s not just “out there,” that’s just plain nuts. It isn’t even what “Bitch PhD” says: “Yes, individuals can choose not to have children.” Followed and preceded by silliness, but I am not at all sure how to even make sense of an argument that having children isn’t a choice.
Having kids is a choice I hope some folks make, so that those kids can provide me goods and services when I get old.
Even then: why? People who have foregone fifteen years or more of relevant job experience are economically less valuable to the enterprise that is paying them. Why should society be expected to make up the difference?
And why just limit it to people who want to have children? Suppose I want to go on a decade-long trek among Buddhist monastaries, but then return to the workforce. Does society owe me a partner or general counsel’s salary upon my return?
Nice attempt at misdirection, but your point regarding the ease with which one can find attorney salary information is a few steps removed from my original hypothesis, which is that about one-third of the wage gap between men and women can be explained by differences in initial salary offers.
Evidence in support of my position (my own & skedastic’s later cite):
- Findings from a multi-year study at a large firm. Hirings cut across multiple occupational sectors – professional, managerial, sales, & technical jobs. Starting salary was found to differ for male & female hires by 5-10%, even after controlling for multiple human capital variables such as prior experience and education.
-Limitations: Study was published in '90, so might be out of date. Only one firm was used, although multiple occupations were sampled within it, and these occupations provide a reasonable cross-section of occupations in the Fortune 500. - Findings from a sample of law school graduates from the finest law school in the country (go Michigan class of '90). About one-third of the difference in salary between male & female lawyers was unable to be accounted for by gender differences in human capital. While the study didn’t emphasize this finding, it’s noteworthy the starting salary differed for male & female hires by 7%, comparable to the study above.
-Limitations: Study was published in '93, so might be out of date. Findings may only be relevant to attorneys graduating from top law schools, which aren’t representative of the average occupation.
Evidence in support of Damien’s position:
- Evidence that starting salaries at multiple moderate-to-large law firms in many cities are fixed and don’t vary by gender. Starting salaries are quite current.
-Limitations: Findings may only be relevant to attorneys that apply to moderate-to-large firms, a subset of an occupation that isn’t representative of the average American. In addition, the vast majority of the first-year salaries listed on the website are well above $80,000, the median first-year income for lawyers in private practice reported to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This suggests the firms that provide this information aren’t representative of the typical firm that employs lawyers in their first year of practice.
I think we’re both in agreement that more current studies would be helpful. I’m willing to concede that there may be no initial salary gender gap for highly qualified professionals employed at prestigious places, but the 97% of women without a professional or doctorate degree may not have these advantages.
So…all the men end up a Skadden, Arps, all the women at struggling three-lawyer law firms? Gimme a break. All the larger firms care about is numbers: if you made law review at a upper-tier law school (proving both that (i) you are smart and (ii) you are willing to work ungodly hours at mind-numbing grunt work) that’s all they care about. They’re too fucking busy to give a shit about anything else.
That sort of sorting may have been true in Sandra Day O’Conner’s day – she was famously turned away by every major firm in Arizona upon her graduation from Stanford – but it rarely happens at major firms today, for the simple reason that no one can afford it. There’s a limited pool of grads from top schools, and no one wants to tell their clients they took a second-tier schlub just because he was the only one left with a penis.
The rise of the billable hour coupled with word processing and email (allowing drafts to be turned and disseminated quickly) have turned large law firms into factories, and those firms don’t care what the gender of their hires are – they all get ground into dust anyway, so who gives a damn?
(Did I mention how thrilled I am to have bailed into the in-house life?)
I have a personal belief that someone shouldn’t suffer economically based on their involuntary membership in a class associated with higher costs, when not everyone in the class actually incurs the cost. With your logic, it would be economically sound to hire fewer black men, since they are more likely to to be sent to prison and not be available to work. It would also make sense for companies providing health care benefits to discriminate against hiring older workers, since most of them will have higher health costs than younger workers.
As a voter and citizen, I’ll try to shape opinion and laws so that companies using these types of statistical discrimination would incur sanctions. But each person could have his or her own views on this.
You are assuming, I think, that changes in the proportion of females causes lower pay. But the causation could go the other way around: low pay could cause increased feminization. Or the relationship could be spurious: changes in job characteristics which make the job relatively more desirable, holding pay constant, for people with low labour market attachment would cause both higher feminization and lower pay.
You’re accusing me of assuming correlation implies causation? I thought you’d give me more credit than that :) Sorry for the implication. I just wanted to provide evidence that an increasing proportion of females in a field is associated with lower pay. Cause can’t be determined, although the Pfeffer & Davis-Blake study was longitudinal, which makes the low pay -> increased feminization hypothesis less plausible, since the proportion of women increased before the lag in pay was observed. Third variables could still explain the relation.