Economic Woman

I’ve been enjoying Economist’s View’s dispatches from the Milken Institute Global Conference. (An aside: Someone should start a website that aggregates blogged accounts of conferences around the world. I don’t have the time or resources to attend nearly as many meetings as I’d like to, so I appreciate reading about them.)

Here’s a bit on a session with Ricardo Hausmann, Myron Scholes, and Maria Eitel, called “Harnessing Growth to Break Poverty’s Grip on the Developing World.” Eitel is the president of the Nike foundation, and she made an argument for more aid to women.

Did you know that only 5 cents on every dollar of development aid is “devoted to improving the economic prospects for women”? The session also touched on the difficulty of investing in women who already provide essential care and insurance.

Even though there are large long-term benefits to helping women, it is in nobody’s short-term interest to take women out of their traditional role in the family and community where they provide water, firewood, and food for the family, care for sick family members, are expected to provide insurance for the family by dropping out of school if the family needs help, and so on.

Click over to the original post for a little more on solutions.

I skipped Blog for Fair Pay Day, partly because I was studying, and partly because it was an American legislative campaign that I don’t feel much connection to. Nonetheless, I have wage gaps on the brain, and I’m still poking through the material released for that initiative.

The central statistic – that American women make 77 cents on the dollar – is almost meaningless. I want to know the breakdown – what proportion of that gap is straightforward discrimination, women simply being paid less than men for equal work? Thomas Sowell says that gap is “trivial.”

Here are some alternative points, from the National Women’s Law Centre:

A 2003 study by U.S. Government Accountability Office (then the General Accounting Office) found that, even when all the key factors that influence earnings are controlled for — demographic factors such as marital status, race, number and age of children, and income, as well as work patterns such as years of work, hours worked, and job tenure — women still earned, on average, only 80% of what men earned in 2000. That is, there remains a 20% pay gap between women and men that cannot be explained or justified.

One extensive study that examined occupational segregation and the pay gap between women and men found that, after controlling for occupational segregation by industry, occupation, place of work, and the jobs held within that place of work (as well as for education, age, and other demographic characteristics), about one-half of the wage gap is due solely to the individual’s sex.

Read the full fact sheet with references here.

I don’t want this site to be, as someone imagined, “all income inequality all the time,” but I have lots more to say right now. Stay tuned.