Sheryl Sandberg: Pay gap holds us all back
A world where women ran half of our companies and countries and men ran half of our homes would be a better world.
Today is Equal Pay Day. This means that on average, women in the United States had to work all of 2016 plus this far into 2017 to catch up to what men earned last year.
In 2016, women on average were paid 80 cents for every dollar men earned. If you break the pay gap down by race and ethnicity, it’s even worse: black women were paid 63 cents; Latinas, 54 cents for every dollar white men made.
Women make up nearly half our workforce. They’re the primary breadwinner in more than 40% of American households with children — and in many families, they’re the only breadwinner. They work hard every day at every kind of work there is. Yet they’re still paid less than men.
We know how important achieving equality is for all of us. A world where women ran half of our companies and countries and men ran half of our homes would be a better world. Our companies would be more successful, our laws more just, and our children would gain from their fathers’ care as much as they do from their mothers’.
The pay gap holds us back from that goal. For millions of women, it’s a cold hard fact from the day they enter the workforce until the day they leave. It exists across occupations and industries, in every region, for part-time and full-time workers, no matter their level of education. In fact, it’s widest for women with college degrees.
Despite its destructive effects, the pay gap persists year after year. One reason is doubt in some circles about whether it’s real. I hear it all the time: Doesn’t the pay gap exist because of women’s choices — to spend more time at home with their families, go into lower-paying fields, not get the degree or ask for the promotion that leads to higher pay? Skeptics ask: Isn’t this a matter of personal choices, not gender discrimination?
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Let’s put this misconception to rest forever. The gender pay gap exists not because women aren’t educated enough or ambitious enough or hardworking enough. It’s about structural barriers we need to dismantle. Cornell University economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn analyzed the pay gap and found that when you control for education and experience, it’s nearly unchanged. Women aren’t earning less because they’re not as educated or experienced as men. Quite the opposite: colleges have been graduating more women than men for over than thirty years.
Blau and Kahn found that a piece of the pay gap is due to “occupation and industry differences.” Fields dominated by women tend to pay less than fields dominated by men. If you control for that, the pay gap shrinks by about half. But it’s worth asking why jobs usually filled by women, like nursing assistants, pay less than jobs usually filled by men, like light truck drivers, even though both require similar qualifications. As more proof of the gender bias that underlies pay, when women move into a predominantly male profession, pay often declines for everyone.
After controlling for education, experience, and occupational and industry differences, the Cornell study found that a gender pay gap of about 8% remains. It can’t be explained away.
The consequences are real and painful. If the pay gap were closed, the average working woman would earn over half a million dollars more in her lifetime. She’d get an annual income bump that would pay for a year and a half of groceries or nearly a full year of rent. The number of working women living in poverty would be cut in half. Men would benefit as well: think of all the struggling two-income couples where the woman getting paid fairly would increase the economic security of the entire family. There are national costs too. Last year, the pay gap in the United States amounted to $513 billion in lost wages. That’s nearly the entire GDP of Sweden.
Like many problems we face, the pay gap will be solved only if we all work together. Our elected officials have a vital role to play in passing and enforcing anti-discrimination laws. They should also, at long last, raise the federal minimum wage. Nearly two-thirds of minimum-wage workers are women. By raising the minimum wage, we’d reduce pay inequality and help a lot of families living in or near poverty.
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Businesses should conduct pay audits by gender and race and ensure fairness in hiring and promotions. They can do this by putting in place clear and consistent criteria, training managers to spot gender bias in their decision making, and tracking outcomes to make sure they’re not systematically passing up women or rating them more harshly.
And all of us — men, women, employers, employees, colleagues — can step up and become stronger allies for women. That includes celebrating women who lead and making sure women get credit for their accomplishments. It also means supporting women when they negotiate for raises and promotions. Women often pay a penalty for negotiating for themselves: they’re told they’re too aggressive, too pushy. That’s a social reality we can help change together.
It’s just plain wrong that so many women are working hard every day for less money. It says we think women are less valuable, less capable, less deserving — notions that go against Americans’ basic values of fairness and equality. Equal pay is about women’s worth in our economy and society. There’s nothing more fundamental than that.
Sheryl Sandberg is the COO of Facebook and founder of LeanIn.Org, which today is launching the #20PercentCounts campaign to highlight the unfairness of the gender pay gap. To learn more, go to leanin.org/equalpay.
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