WHY MEN EARN MORE:
A Personal Introduction: How the
Journey Began
by
Warren Farrell, Ph.D. © 2005
My motivations for writing this book include the very personal.
My wife and I are raising two teenage girls, Erin and Alex. They are
technically her daughters and my stepdaughters, but, as their
challenges become ours, they've gotten into my blood and certainly
into my heart. At ages 17 and 18, they are entering the world of
work. It is my hope this book helps them balance the need for money
with the need for fulfillment - to not just make a better living,
but to create a better life.
My journey with Alex and Erin started some 11 years ago. My
tennis partner, Greg, told me his business partner, Liz, had just
completed a divorce. He didn't want to play cupid, but . . .
Liz is now my wife. At the time, Liz was living in a small rental
fixer-upper with Alex and Erin. She was juggling her child-raising
with starting her own little public relations business from a desk
in her home. Working until midnight was not unusual. While some of
Liz's women friends shopped 'til they dropped, Liz juggled 'til she
plopped.
Over the course of the next four years, Liz's dedication had
gradually paid off. Her business was booming, she was winning
clients away from major PR firms . . . she had become a success
story. That was the upside. On the downside, her blood pressure was
dangerously high, and more than once she fell asleep beginning a
sentence about work and woke up ending the sentence.
Now, as we sat down to "enjoy" breakfast, her eyes were already
commuting to work. . . .
"What's happening, honey?"
"Oh, sorry. . . . It's Kristin. She's been seeing how well I've
been doing and wants more money."
"You've already increased her salary a few times, haven't you?"
"Yes, but her landlord has a buyer for the home she's living in.
She's been given her 30-days' notice, and equivalent rentals are
about twice the price. She's panicking."
"It's getting close to Christmas. Do you have another raise
planned for her?"
"Yes, and, as you know, I've given her an incentive for each
media placement, so she makes about twice what she used to make."
"Is there any way for her to make more money than she does?"
"Yes, she could work more hours a week, but I had to persuade her
to work more than 30 hours a week because she wants to have time for
her son, time to exercise, do yoga, meditate, and, as she puts it,
'keep her life in balance.' "
"Sounds like she's making a healthy choice, but if you're paying
people to do yoga, let me know, I'll quit my writing and work for
you! Seriously, what's her perspective on this?"
"Well, she feels her contributions are every bit as valuable as
mine; that as a result of her keeping her life in balance, she
brings the very best of herself to work; that she's very bright,
works hard, has good ideas, a positive attitude, and that,
therefore, there shouldn't be such a big gap between her pay and
mine."
"How do you feel about that?"
"Well, on the one hand, I think everything she says about herself
is true. She's very good, she's gotten much better, she has good
ideas, her confidence is building, and I'd sure hate to lose her.
Besides, I don't want her to have to live in a place she can't
stand. I know that she doesn't have much money, that she doesn't get
child support, and that her parents don't help her. I consider her a
friend - I hate it when she hurts."
"But something is still bugging you. When I looked up from the
melon, your eyes had some hurt in them, almost like you didn't feel
you were being understood."
"Yeah, that's true. I guess I feel that I have basically the same
qualities I had three years ago as a worker, but the reason I'm
making more now is because I took the risk of working for myself
without any security or benefits, without any guarantee of an
income, or without any guarantee that my 50- to 60-hour weeks would
have any payoff."
"Also, you're much more a prisoner of your work," I added. "When
there's a deadline, you work the extra hours no matter what you feel
like doing. And for the first few years we knew each other, you were
generating business everywhere you went. A party, even a
Thanksgiving dinner at friends', was potential business. And even
now, you rarely check out psychologically."
"True. And you know how I hate traveling, especially going to
Minneapolis in midweek, having to rearrange everything with the
kids, leave them, return jet-lag tired, and then deal with the
results of their neglect, including my guilt."
"What I hear you saying, then, is that you want Kristin to know
that there's something more to getting paid and more than being a
good worker who follows directions well, or even who executes
creatively. Is your dilemma that you want to let her know the money
you make comes because of sacrifices she's not willing to make
because she's choosing to live a healthier, more-balanced life, yet
you're afraid to tell her that because you don't want her to feel
you don't value her contribution?"
"Yes. And there's one other thing. I want her to appreciate that
one thing I do with my extra money is to create a security blanket
for her - so that if we suddenly lose two of our clients and
therefore most of our income, I can draw on savings and not have to
let her go."
"So you need a security blanket to give her a security blanket?
And you want her to know there are no free security blankets?"
"Right," Liz laughed.
"I hope you also want enough money so you can begin to cut back
on work, meditate, do yoga, and balance your life the way Kristin
balances hers (hint, hint!)."
Shortly after this discussion with Liz, I was talking with some
people after giving a workshop. A tall, silver-haired man hovered in
the background. His patience was studied, as if calculating the
costs and benefits of waiting. When the group dissipated, he stepped
forward cautiously.
"Listen, I've got a problem. In the past few years, our company
has been sued for sex discrimination three times."
"You must be pretty involved with your company."
"How's that?"
"You use 'I' and 'our company' interchangeably."
"Oh," he laughed, a tad embarrassed. "Well, the lawsuits are
wreaking havoc on the company and me. They're forcing us to put into
legal fees what we should be putting into products and into raises
for people who are working, not suing.
"And the other thing is, it's destroying morale. And not just
among the men. After I gave a speech about the importance of hiring
women, even one of my women managers said, 'I like what you're
saying about hiring women, but the higher up in the company I go,
the more afraid I am to hire a woman for the company, 'cause all
three of the lawsuits we've received have been from women. I'm
afraid of being the one to hire somebody who will sue the company.'
"
I switched to a softer, more of a tell-me-in-confidence tone.
"Tell me . . . off the record. Are you paying women less than men?"
He thought long enough to make me assume the answer was "yes."
Then he surprised me. "No. In reality,
no. But sometimes it appears that we do."
"How so?"
"Sometimes we promote a woman faster than we would a man, giving
her the same job title as a man, but she has fewer years with the
company."
"So you pay her less?"
"Yes. We'd pay anyone with fewer years less, but we move good
women more quickly than we move good men, which is really
discrimination against men, but it ends up looking like
discrimination against women when we pay them less for less
seniority."
"Sort of ironic, huh?"
"Yeah. In fact, it's worse than that. Last year, I asked who was
willing to relocate to bail out two of our problem branches: one in
Alaska and one in Kansas. No one volunteered. So I offered extra
pay. Then one of the men says, 'Maybe. I'll have to check with my
family.' I ask if there are any women who want to go. The reaction
is, 'Are you kidding? To Alaska?' Well, one single woman did perk up
a bit, about there being a lot of single guys there, but then she
unperked when she recalled that the cost of living is higher there.
So I offered even more money to go to Alaska."
I laugh, "I can see it coming. She still says no; he says yes,
but now you've got a guy with the same job title earning much more
than his female colleague."
"Yep, nail on the head. It looks like clear-cut discrimination,
until you realize that anyone with more years would have higher pay,
and that anyone who took that job in Alaska would have higher pay."
"So you want to be fair - even acknowledged for bending over
backwards to promote women - but when you're fair, the men get
higher pay because they make more sacrifices, and even when you
promote women faster, the men sometimes still get higher pay because
they have more years of experience."
"Yes," he said. "And the HR people look at the raw data of men
getting more pay and falsely conclude women are subject to
discrimination. I feel this myself until I look more closely!
Anyway, the result of no one understanding this is a lawsuit, an
aggrieved woman, damaged morale, and even women managers who are
afraid to hire women! Why don't you write a book called What to Do
before You Sue?"
I smile. From the impatience in the night custodian's eyes, our
delay isn't giving him higher pay. As we're "swept away," I promise
to give his situation some thought. That conversation was about 15
years ago. I've given it some thought.
Both Liz and the male executive valued their female employees.
Both credited their competence, intelligence, and effectiveness.
Both respected their decisions to keep their work lives and personal
lives in balance - in fact, Liz was envious of it. Yet both Liz and
the corporate executive were grasping for a way to tell their women
employees what they could do to receive higher pay.
Helping women achieve higher pay is a core goal of this book. But
an even more important goal is helping women understand the
tradeoffs involved - and to determine whether higher pay is worth
the trade-offs. In my research, I have uncovered 25 differences in
the way women and men behave in the workplace. Taken together,
these 25 differences lead to men receiving higher pay and women
having better lives, or at least more balanced lives.
Why Men Earn More gives both sexes many ways to both earn
more money and have even better lives. For example, both men and
women pharmacists average higher pay than doctors, and have both
more control over their schedules and less pressure in their lives.
Similarly, most hazardous professions, such as the armed
services, give a woman the same pay and benefits as a man for only a
fraction of the hazards risked by her male counterpart. On the
surface, this appears to benefit only women. But as men see what
women do to remain safer in hazardous professions, it creates
options for a man's safety as well.
Most of the 25 ways to higher pay offer every family new options.1
For example, we discover in the chapter "Doing Time" that a person
working 45 hours per week averages 44% more income than someone
working 40 hours per week. That's 44% more income for 13% more time.
The implications? If you're a woman interested in both a
high-powered career and healthy children, you'll discover when it
benefits the children for Dad to be a full-time dad while you are
the family's "financial womb."
In brief, Why Men Earn More helps men, women, and families
discover which choices lead to higher pay, which lead to better
lives, and which lead to both higher pay and better lives. Part Two
looks at the contributions women are making to the workplace, how
women's and men's differences can best support each other, and the
continuing role of discrimination against women. The most original
portion of Part Two is the chapters on the best-kept secrets about
discrimination in favor of women (and against men), and the "Genetic
Celebrity Pay Gap."
Woven throughout Why Men Earn More is also this hard news:
The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap (the remainder of the
subtitle, in case you've forgotten!). As we look closely at men's
and women's workplace decisions, it helps us see the gap in pay in a
different light - why, for example, the gap in pay is much greater
between never-married versus married men (62 cents to the dollar)
than it is between women and men (80 cents to the dollar).2
The startling truth behind the pay gap was discovered in the same
journey that uncovered the 25 ways to bridge the gap. It's a journey
that started one day when I was on the board of directors of the
National Organization for Women (NOW) in New York City . . .
What Happened on the Way to the Gap in
Pay?
During the three years I spent on the board of the National
Organization for Women in New York City (from 1970 to 1973), my
colleagues and I often wore a "59¢" pin to call attention to what we
considered to be the pay gap at the time between women and men, and
thus to recruit new members to fight against the embedded societal
discrimination against women we felt this gap symbolized.
I accepted the 59 cents statistic so blindly that it took me two
years to ask myself this question: "If an employer had to pay a
man one dollar for the same work a woman could do for 59 cents, why
would anyone hire a man?"
Put another way, "Wouldn't any employer who hired men for $1.00
soon be put out of business by someone who hired only women for 59
cents?" Few consumers would pay a dollar for the same product they
could buy for 59 cents. In fact, the employer would go out of
business hiring men at any level if women could do the same work for
59 cents.3
I opened my mind to the possibility that, while business
executives certainly did discriminate, business has a built-in
system of punishments for those who do. The punishment is called
"losing money." The penalty for repeat offenders is called "going
out of business."
When I spoke with CEOs of large companies or even small business
owners like Liz and her partner Greg (a.k.a. Cupid), they all felt
they hired women in the hopes they would become successful. A
successful woman is called a return on their investment. Their women
employees' successes helped their own dreams come true. As one CEO
told me, "My female employees' success is my job tenure." Men
executives do not see themselves as threatened by successful women,
but as being in search of successful women. They feel threatened by
unsuccessful women. Ditto for men.
This made a few other things make sense. I knew Jewish and
Japanese workers were subjected to discrimination, yet they earned
more to the dollar than Caucasians.4 Employers who
survived seemed to conquer prejudice for profit. Well, maybe not
conquer prejudice, but at least put prejudice about an employee's
background in one corner, if the employee put profits in their
corner. Those who allowed their prejudice to rule them paid, in
effect, "the discrimination tax."
Well, at least that was the possibility to which I was trying to
open my mind. However, if paying women unequally didn't make
economic sense, what then explained the gap in pay, which - while
decreasing from 59 cents to the dollar to its 2004 gap of 80 cents
to the dollar - was still huge?5 If men are being paid
even a penny more than women for the same work, then that suggests
an attitude of disrespect for women; and it would undermine the
economy by paying men more for work that could be done for less. It
certainly doesn't make sense to outsource if we aren't effectively
using our own resources.
My colleagues in NOW had an answer: "Male bosses are blinded to
the positive contributions women make to productivity so they don't
realize they are hurting themselves." That was among the kinder
answers. And it was a possibility. So I checked it out. What
happened when women didn't have men bosses, or even women bosses who
might be "adapting the rules of the patriarchy in order to become a
boss"? I sought to discover what women who were their own bosses
earned in comparison to men who were their own bosses.
I was at first shocked by the findings. When there was no boss to
"hold women back," women who owned their own businesses netted, at
the time (1970s through 1990s) between 29% and 35% of what men
netted; today, women who own their own businesses net only 49% of
their male counterparts' net earnings.6 This made me ask,
"If male bosses are to blame, why are women netting less than men
when they are their own bosses?"
As I explored businesses owned by women versus men, I discovered
that nowhere is the male-female difference in priorities clearer
than in the difference between these businesses. I discovered how
running one's own business tended either to follow what I came to
call "the high-pay formula" in exchange for lifestyle trade-offs or
to follow "the low-pay formula" in exchange for lifestyle payoffs.
I began to scout around. I discovered that the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics found as long ago as the early 1980s that companies
paid men and women equal money when their titles were the same,
their responsibilities the same, and their responsibilities were of
equal size - for example, both regional buyers for Nordstrom's, not
one a local and one a regional buyer.7 But although this
was published in the official publication of the U.S. Bureau of
Labor Statistics, I had never read of the study in a single paper or
heard of it in the media. To my surprise (in those years of my
innocence), once gender equality was found, the gender comparison
was not only ignored but never updated.
At the same time, a longitudinal survey found that when women and
men started at the same time as engineers; worked in the same
settings; with equal professional experience, training, family
status, and absences; the women engineers received the same pay.8
It too was neither publicized nor updated. I began to see that we
study what gets funded, and what gets funded depends a lot on what's
likely to be found.
"Is it possible," I asked, "that men and women have different
work goals and treat work differently?" If so, would pinpointing
these differences be more helpful to women than assuming men bosses
didn't value them?
As I freed my mind to consider alternative perspectives, I
vaguely recalled a statistic in Jessie Bernard's The Future of
Marriage, one of the favorite books among the early feminists.9
I had half-registered this statistic at the time, but probably
discarded it from full consideration because it created too much
cognitive dissonance with my assumptions of discrimination against
women. I pulled it off the shelf for a second read.
Yes, there it was, in an appendix: Census Bureau figures show
that even during the 1950s (which Alex studies in ancient history
class!) there was less than a 2% pay gap between never-married women
and men; and never-married white women between 45 and 54 earned 106%
of what their never-married white male counterparts made.10
I thought about these findings in relation to affirmative action.
Obviously, this was prior to affirmative action. In fact, this pay
equality had occurred even prior to the Equal Pay Act of 1963. And
prior to the current feminist movement.
I was sure this example, though, was an aberration. I began
checking. Of course, almost all studies showed men earned more, but
as soon as I checked on unmarried women who had worked every year
since leaving school, I found that they too earned slightly more
than their male counterparts, and that was as far back as 1966.11
And in 1969, even as I was claiming discrimination against women
professors while doing my doctorate at NYU, nationwide, women
professors who had never been married and never published earned
145% the income of their counterpart male colleagues.12
This is not a typo: The women earned 45% more than the men.
A feminist colleague objected with a half-smile, "Never-married
women are winners; never-married men are losers." She clarified, "I
mean never-married men are not as educated, are less likely to work
hard. That's why women don't marry them. Never-married women can
take care of themselves, so they don't get married."
I checked. Sure enough, never-married women were more educated.
13 So I checked the latest data among educated men and
women working full-time. The results? The men earn only 85% of
what the women earn; put another way, the women earn 117% of
what the men earn, as Figure 1 on the next page illustrates.14
If all these findings had a common theme, it was "It's marriage
and children, stupid!" Well, with each chapter of Why Men Earn
More, we'll see more about how our paycheck is influenced by our
family role, and how we can use this information to tailor our
family's need for our income versus our time.
When I shared these findings with some of my colleagues, the
response (aside from having fewer colleagues!) from a couple of them
was, "Not so fast . . . it's really the part-time women who are
subject to discrimination." Maybe. So I checked that out, too.
To get 2004 data on part-time workers required obtaining
unpublished Census Bureau data. I was surprised at what it revealed:
A part-time working woman makes $1.10 for every dollar made by
her male counterpart.15 (Men and women who work
part-time both average 20 hours a week.16)
How the Focus on Discrimination Against
Women Is Now Undermining Women
Now I was more curious: If gender discrimination might not
account for the pay gap between the genders, what might?
As soon as I asked "what might?" I took my binoculars away from
"the assumption of discrimination" and freed myself to discover
whether a man earns more because on average his contribution to
raising children is more likely to be raising money, which makes him
more willing to work late whenever needed, more willing to take on
less-desirable assignments, travel more, or move to out-of-the-way
locations. Thus began the discovery of 25 reasons men do earn more,
as well as the search for what each way was worth, the trade-offs,
and which trade-offs the women I interviewed felt were worth it. The
search led to Why Men Earn More.
The years of research for Why Men Earn More made it
increasingly clear that the focus on discrimination against women -
a focus that used to help women - is now undermining women. Here's
an example. When we focus our binoculars on discrimination among
doctors, we see only that young, men physicians earn 41% more than
young, women physicians.17 We will see how this focus
leads a woman to miss opportunities to increase her earnings by
about 54%. Our focus on discrimination against women during the past
30 years has blinded us to such opportunities for women.
Still, I couldn't help but wonder how this could be true if
virtually everyone saw it differently. Had I used the 59 cent
statistic as proof of discrimination, just as everyone in the
fourteenth century used a glance at the horizon as "proof" the world
is flat?
Making full use of the 25 ways to higher pay - the same 25
reasons men earn more - requires absorbing some basic principles,
the first of which is "the pay paradox."
Power and Pay: The Pay Paradox
I define power as "control over one's life." If we become a
doctor to get the approval of our parents, we don't have power, we
have a problem: dependency on approval. Private power that does not
include public power is meaningful; public power that does not
include private power is meaningless. Let's apply this to earning
power . . .
We often hear that men earn more money and therefore have more
power. No. Pay is not about power. Pay is about giving up power
to get the power of pay. Sometimes it is about giving up what
we'd love to do to gain the power to send our daughter to a better
doctor.
Here's the pay paradox that Why Men Earn More explains:
Men earn more money, therefore men have more power; and men earn
more money, therefore men have less power (earning more money as an
obligation, not an option). The opposite is true for women: Women
earn less money, therefore women have less power; and women earn
less money, therefore women have more power (the option to raise
children, or to not take a hazardous job). Obviously, these are only
general patterns - the same general patterns that produce the gap in
pay.
This paradox is woven into each of the 25 ways to increase pay.
That is, each way can either increase or decrease power. If we
become successful at work and a failure at home, we have both
increased and decreased our power. We're in Who's Who In The
World and Who's Nobody At Home.
Low pay makes us feel powerless unless we are conscious of the
decisions we make to accept low pay as a trade-off for the slice of
life we receive in return. Then we feel powerful and happy, rather
than angry because we feel like victims of discrimination.
If earning money feels like power, then each of the 25 ways to
high pay will feel empowering - they're all ways to earn more money.
But if having control over your life feels like power, then picking
and choosing the nuggets that can be tailored to this stage of your
life and your personality will be empowering.
How to Do What You Love and Still Be in
Demand
In Why Men Earn More we discover the economic price women
pay when they seek the careers that are more fulfilling, flexible,
and safe.
Here's the rub. Careers that are fulfilling, flexible, and safe
usually pay less. The pay can be lower because more people compete
to be fulfilled, causing the supply to exceed the demand for the
most fulfilling jobs. Thus a librarian with a master's degree may be
upset if she is paid little more than a garbage collector who
dropped out of high school. But a person wishing to be a librarian
finds herself competing with more people, since more people enjoy
reading books than smelling garbage. Similarly, an art historian
with a Ph.D. earns less on the unemployment line than a coal miner
in the mine, because more people prefer discussing art than
contracting black lung disease. The librarian and art historian work
in safe environments; the garbage collector and coal miner do not.
Since fewer people have a death wish, we pay people more to do work
they aren't dying to do: I call this "the death professions bonus."
How can we do what we love and still be in demand? The first
principle involves checking out whether someone else's idea of bad
news is your idea of good news.
For most people, the bad news is that the highway to high pay is
often a toll road.18 The good news is that what is a toll
to one person may be nirvana to another. I would personally hate to
work as a cook in a hot kitchen; for Erin, my stepdaughter, that's
nirvana. Similarly, most people would prefer to work indoors rather
than being in what I call an "exposure profession" - exposed to the
wind, rain, sleet, and snow. However, many park rangers choose their
jobs exactly because they will be outdoors.
So one use of Why Men Earn More is to select opportunities
that suit you and create higher pay because they don't appeal to
others.
A second, more fascinating principle (in my opinion) is seeking
what you love to do in a field that represents what you hate to do.
Let's say you'd love to be a therapist, but in your town they're a
dime a dozen. You'll be able to discover where therapists are most
needed by looking at professions whose training is the opposite of
that of a therapist - for example, the military.
You check out the military because you know that to prepare
people to die, the military cannot afford to attract large numbers
of people who will be in touch with their feelings and
sensitivities. The motto of military training is, "When the going
gets tough, the tough get going," not "When the going gets tough,
the tough call a therapist." So the military cannot easily draw
people from within its ranks to become therapists.
Exactly for this reason, there's a vacuum in the military to
fulfill the needs a therapist fulfills. Military men and women have
families, and families need feelings. Stuffing feelings leads to
volcanoes of anger, lost tempers, and domestic violence. Thus the
need for a therapist. The lost tempers and domestic violence may
lead to divorces, causing mother-dominated families, and sensitive
sons who feel rejected by a military dad who sees his son's
sensitivity as failure. Thus the need for a therapist.
Once this principle - seeking what you love to do in a field that
represents what you hate - is understood, it can be used by
virtually any personality and tailored to your stage of life. Thus,
if you've been a soldier rather than a therapist, but are tired,
wounded, or no longer wish to risk your life, look to the places
where you despise what is going on. For example, you may be repulsed
by the school system, or by families where you feel the parents have
put their needs first and gotten divorced. You are saddened by
underachieving children brought up without good discipline,
boundaries, or values.
Your military background, then, gives you an understanding of the
need for boundary enforcement, discipline, and the value of pushing
a child to do what she or he didn't think could be done and was too
lazy to try. You hate the words "self-esteem," even as you sense
that a child who is encouraged in this way ultimately feels a lot
better about her- or himself.
By using the principle of seeking what you love to do in a field
that represents what you hate, you'll discover how much you are
needed, for example, to run a school system or to teach in a
boarding school, often with children who have discipline problems.
These children, often from parents unable to enforce boundaries with
consequences, are in need of leaders who learned to always have a
consequence for any violated boundary.
The Challenge of Why Men Earn More
Every complex problem has a simple solution - usually the wrong
one. Whether it's one-week diets or men-on-white-horses, the promise
of magic keeps hope alive, but its failure to work leaves a vacuum
we are seduced to fill by the Sirens of simple solutions. And,
because simple solutions sell well, the Sirens are well employed.
Why Men Earn More challenges those Sirens. Despite this
book's being a source of female empowerment, if you are a woman, you
might nevertheless feel torn between logical agreement and emotional
resistance. Why? It seems like a simpler solution to blame men
for the pay gap than to engineer your own bridge to higher pay.
Here's the underlying seduction: We all feel we should be valued
more than we are: 83% of workers feel they perform above average!19
Which means that when a peer gets promoted first, almost 83% of the
workers are left feeling like victims. But when a man rationalizes,
"I lost the promotion because I'm not as good an ass-kisser as
Harvey," his rationalizing is apparent. Men who claim to be victims
are called whiners and thought of by both sexes as wimps and losers.
This keeps their mouths shut.
Currently, women at least feel validated when they see headlines
about the multi-million-dollar class action lawsuits filed by the
working- class women of Wal-Mart (1.5 million) or the millionaire
women of Wall Street. This makes women feel, "It's obvious,
discrimination is everywhere; men just don't know how to value
women." When a woman sees women win money by filing lawsuits, she
sees a different reality for herself than a man sees for himself:
She often sees victim status creating victim power; he sees victim
status creating loser status.
If Why Men Earn More requires putting the assumption of
victim status "on hold," it also encourages the reader to take it
"off hold" if, after checking out the 25 ways, the conclusion is
"discrimination." At that point the case for being a victim is
viable.
This book may also come easier to men than women because of boys'
early associations with hard data. Lots of boys spend much of their
youth debating which team and which player would do best. The game
and players varied, but one thing was constant: The excitement of
sports gave many boys an incentive to learn how statistics could be
used to assess productivity. First, statistics are used to define
productivity ("Which is better - a 0.333 batting average or a 3.33
ERA?"); second, a boy learned dozens of statistics are needed to get
a fair assessment of which teams and players were the most
productive; and third, perhaps most important, statistics don't
explain everything and everything is debatable. Fortunately, he
didn't know he was learning any of this!
As this boy grows up and he hears that men and women with the
same number of years of experience at the same job should earn the
same money, this doesn't compute for him. For him, only productivity
is marketable for pay. He "gets it" that productivity may not be
limited to competence and goal scoring alone, but also to abilities
like drawing paying crowds.
If men know these things, why don't they speak up? In part,
because these differences are so subtly woven into the web of male
socialization and biology that most men just weave their web almost
as a spider would, not being able to clearly explain how or why -
it's just what they do. But understanding the emotional connection
for men between money and love is crucial for any woman who cares to
understand men.
Historically, just as women raised children, men raised money.
The fathers' Catch-22 was to receive the love of his family by being
away from the love of his family (killing animals, killing the
enemy, or making a killing on Wall Street). Paradoxically, he was
earning money to earn love. Or even more paradoxically, making a
killing to love.
The traditional male journey - the journey to become a hero -
involves slaying dragons, or overcoming obstacles. Each of these
"ways to higher pay" can be seen as an obstacle which must be
overcome, a dragon which must be slain, to achieve higher pay.
A hero had to risk death. He learned the ultimate irony: that he
would be more valued the more he was willing to make himself
disposable. Today, this translates into men's greater willingness to
take on hazardous jobs to provide for their families, resulting in a
workplace in which 92% of deaths occur to men.20
This is why these ways to higher pay are ingrained in male
socialization. But they are also ingrained in male genes. When a
woman finds herself more attracted to the officer and gentleman than
to the private and gentleman, or more attracted to the surgeon than
the man nurse, and thus marries and has children with the officer or
surgeon, she is also making a choice of the genes her children will
become.
But Why Men Earn More offers 25 workplace decisions to
take us beyond both our genes and socialization. These are not
personality characteristics. The highly paid women I interviewed for
this book had many personality characteristics, such as drive and
toughness, and many skills, such as negotiating, that characterize
highly paid people of both sexes. This book has focused less on
these personality characteristics, which are hard to change, than on
25 behaviors that almost anyone can change (without 20 years of
therapy or a lobotomy!).
Today, a middle- or upper-middle-class boy often gets socialized
differently than in the past. He is encouraged to "do what you love"
- to be a human being rather than just a human doing. This is
wonderful, but if he marries and his wife wants the option of
spending more time with the children, she may feel she can exercise
that option only if he accelerates his breadwinning capability. Now
he's in conflict between loving what he does and what he does to
receive love.
This book will help men with this "fulfillment socialization" to
choose among these trade-offs as much as it will help women.
The Uses of Why Men Earn More for
Employers (and the Government)
This is a book to empower employees, help companies both profit
and prevent lawsuits, and help the government prevent
discrimination. Here's why that's a precarious combination . . .
Employers today often feel they are in a precarious relationship
with their female employees. Will the woman submitting her
employment file today be filing a lawsuit tomorrow? Why, when the
gap in male and female pay is at its least, are women's lawsuits
against companies the most?
When there was no societal permission for divorce, husbands
supplied women's income for a lifetime, so a woman who wanted more
income had only her husband to turn to. When divorces became more
common, women were thrust into a world as foreign to them as diapers
at 3 a.m. were to their husbands. The government eased the
transition for women, in some ways becoming a substitute husband.
Instead of men and unions fighting the company, women and the
government began fighting the company. Men had always known how to
fight men, but they had learned to protect women. Now they found
themselves protecting women from sex discrimination and sexual
harassment, while protecting themselves from lawsuits for sex
discrimination and sexual harassment. They were valuing women as a
resource, but weighing that value against demands for maternity
leaves and flextime; for telecommuting, job sharing, health and
dental insurance; for child care facilities and insurance for the
child care. At the same time, they knew that if they supplied these
options for women, they would have to supply them for men, and soon
outsourcing would look very appealing.
Within the company, the human resources division was often
organizing both personnel data and programs to combat everything
from sex discrimination to sexual harassment, often making it easier
for the government to organize its case on behalf of the woman
against the company. That's why, taken together, employers today
often feel in a precarious relationship with their women employees.
When the government is telling companies to both promote women
more quickly and pay women more, companies often feel in a Catch-22:
forced to pay women with less experience the same as men with more
experience. When the company is sued, and realizes that any policies
that benefit women will never compete with the headlines created by
a lunch meeting at Hooters or by the attitudes of some genuinely
sexist bosses, it faces reality: Its day in court is not worth
months of humiliating headlines that undermine company morale,
engender gossip, give incentives for other employees to consider
their experiences from a perspective of being victimized, and scare
future employees from even applying.
How does a company respond? The way anyone in that situation
would - by becoming passive-aggressive: paying lip-service to the
value of women, but being protective and cautious about women,
thereby undermining women's real value.
The goal of Why Men Earn More is to give women ways of
earning more rather than suing more, and to give companies ways of
teaching women how to earn more, and give the government ways of
separating real discrimination from its appearance, thus erasing the
need for companies to become passive-aggressive and undermine women.
Why Men Earn More gives human resource divisions of larger
companies 25 guidelines for measuring contributions, thus shifting
the HR paradigm from a starting assumption of "the higher the
percentage of men, the greater the discrimination against women," to
a starting point of 25 measurements of who is making which
contributions to the company that the company needs when the company
needs it. Thus the employer who promotes according to performance,
rather than the employer who tries to equalize the sexes' pay
without regard to performance, is seen as the true champion of
equality.
Is this idealistic? Quite the opposite. A company creates
opportunities for women because women create opportunities for the
company. A company that thinks like that is a company that you want
to be with, because they'll be profitable enough to keep promoting
you. Any company that just thinks about "opportunities for women" is
being patronizing: You can detect a company's genuine respect for
women when they follow three steps in sequence:
1. They are enthusiastic about opportunities created by women;
2. They are sensitive to how they need to respond to take
advantage of those opportunities; and
3. They are fascinated to see how those adaptations can also be
used by men.
These 25 measurements will ultimately enable the HR divisions to
be more viable. We tend to do what we measure. I believe these 25
ways will assist the transition of HR divisions from being advocates
for women and minorities to mediators focusing equally on the rights
of everyone. The outcome? More communication, less litigation.
Communication creates understanding, and understanding creates
compassion. Few people sue someone for whom they feel compassion.
And few people sue someone from whom they feel compassion.
The Methods, the Data, and the Caveats
One caveat to what you read in this book: I always try to get the
most up-to-date data - often raw and unpublished data. But some data
collection is funded more than others. At this moment in history,
gender- specific research is funded with a consciousness toward
making women in the workplace look equally engaged but unequally
paid. So studies that might predictably uncover why women earn less
- by choosing more fulfilling, flexible, and people-oriented fields;
working fewer hours; working in less hazardous jobs; working
indoors; moving less quickly to less desirable locations; taking
more family leaves; working in subfields that pay less - are studies
less often funded or updated. Perhaps, as this book makes clear the
degree to which women and men, employers and employees, and the
government and corporations are all in the same boat, it will help
make it politically possible to fund the updating of such research.
Perhaps.
A second caveat: Since this book is about pay, "work" refers to
paid work, not work at home: Women's and men's contributions inside
the home are a topic in another book of mine (Women Can't Hear
What Men Don't Say).
Third caveat: There are many ways to increase pay that Why Men
Earn More does not address. I do not address the power of body
language, attitudes, dress, and good communication skills. I ignore
many methods of motivation, like reading biographies, and many ways
of enhancing strategic thinking, such as playing chess. Not only are
these ways already covered by other books, but most are skills men
need to learn from women at least as much as vice versa - therefore
they don't tell us why men earn more.
The society that teaches a woman to focus on ways of earning
rather than discrimination is a society that pioneers the next
evolutionary transition for women: a transition from female "victim
power" to female earning power. Female victim power is engendered by
new affirmative action-type programs and enforcements that expand as
her victim status expands. Women's earning power is expanded by
tailoring to her personal life the 25 ways to higher pay. May this
book allow many Alexes and Erins to have more earning power.
Warren Farrell
Carlsbad, California
http://www.warrenfarrell.com
© 2005 Warren Farrell, Ph.D.
All rights reserved.
Published by AMACOM Books
http://www.amacombooks.org
A Division of the American Management Association
1601 Broadway, New York, NY 10019
To order call: 1-800-262-9699
Dr. Warren Farrell
is the author of many books, including two award-winning
international best-sellers, Why Men Are The Way They Are plus
The Myth of Male Power. His most recent books are Women
Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say, which was a selection of the
Book-of-the-Month Club, and Father and Child Reunion about
how fathers can be successful at both work and home. His latest
book, just published this year, Why Men Earn More: The Startling
Truth Behind the Pay Gap and What Women Can Do About It, helps
both employers and employees understand what makes a company want to
increase an employee’s pay. His books are published in over 50
countries, and in 10 languages.
Dr. Warren Farrell is available for expert
testimony to help fathers stay equally involved in their children's
lives after divorce.
CLICK HERE to contact Dr. Warren Farrell for information.
www.WarrenFarrell.net (Why Men Earn More)
www.WarrenFarrell.biz (Father and Child Reunion)
www.WarrenFarrell.org (The Myth of Male Power)
www.WarrenFarrell.info (Women Can’t Hear What Men Don’t Say)
www.WarrenFarrell.us (Why Men Are The Way They Are)
www.WarrenFarrell.ws (The Liberated Man)
Copyright 2004 Warren Farrell, Ph.D., all rights
reserved
