The Girly Gap? It's A Gap For All

When my law partner and I first opened our office all those many years ago, I remember we caused quite a stir because we set our hourly rates at the mid-range level for business and domestic cases.  We opened our doors charging just as much as the male lawyers in town.

We were two women just out of law school -- as in within a year out of law school -- when we opened our firm.  It was enough of a shock to have two women open a law firm on their own in our little town.

But even more so, it was jarring for some folks that we clearly felt we were just as good as the men, because we charged as much as they did.

Funny how times haven't really changed:

Elementary education, special education, social work and child and family studies were recently tallied among the 20 college degrees in the country that lead to the lowest salaries.

As one online discussion of girly jobs explains, some women may just like these jobs despite the low pay....

What’s striking is the high cost of femininity. Many traits that contribute to women’s success in finding a male partner don’t pay off in the labor market – and vice versa. As one economic analysis of a speed-dating experiment puts it, “Men do not value women’s intelligence or ambition when it exceeds their own.” By contrast, intelligence and ambition contribute to men’s success in both the “dating market” and the labor market.


But men’s attitudes toward women (which are changing, albeit slowly) don’t tell the whole story. Another factor is women’s affinity for services that aren’t rewarded by a market-based economy.

When I graduated from Smith College way back in the Stone Age ('91), women were making around 77 cents on the male dollar for similar jobs nationwide. Know how much they are making now? Yup, 77 cents.

As a society, we clearly "value" what education and a great teacher can do for us, what a social worker can do to help abused children out of a horrid situation and into a better one, or any number of other areas where women dominate a so-called "caring" field.

But we don't pay them nearly what the value of what they are doing is worth.  Not even close.

We give lip service in this country all the time to the importance of family and good parenting and education and...blah blah blah...but when it comes time to put dollar values on them?  We rarely put our money where our publicly fronted values are.

The next time some puffed up political candidate blathers on about family values and better education?  Ask him or her why teachers aren't paid what they are worth, given how much more "parenting" they end up doing in the classroom these days as far too many busy parents can't always be bothered.  (My mom was a teacher for 30+ years, and believe me, it is not an easy job.)  Ask why social workers who stand on the front lines between a horrendous childhood and its connection to a life of crime, misery, and/or despair, get paid less than a part-time worker at McDonalds.

And, most importantly, ask why we so rarely put our money in at the front end when children really can be shaped into good citizens with a love of learning, when good nutrition and a little care can make a huge, huge difference in their lives?  Why are we so ready to pay through the nose when things have gone badly to warehouse the failures as adults instead of trying to fix these problems on the front end when it is cheaper and more effective?

It's all one piece.  I used to work in the middle of that maelstrom, every single day, at the courthouse.  We do everything backward, including placing little to no value on the things that really matter.

"Girly" work is incredibly important.

Not just to small children, but to all of us whether or not we have kids or family members needing care at the moment.   The sheer number of tax dollars alone that go into police protection and incarceration costs in your community ought to open your eyes to just how important good, early intervention can be.

Early education and intervention for an at risk child, for example, is one of the things that really matters in terms of development, which then leads to healthier, more productive adults who produce healthier, more productive children.

Too often, families get trapped in a cycle of abuse and/or grinding poverty that passes through every generation.  Stopping that cycle can make an enormous difference for generations to come -- and for all of the rest of us in a community who then do not have to pay the costs along with them of long-term failures and violence and sexual abuse and...well, you get the picture.

Children do not ask to be born into a broken family.  They certainly don't ask to be born into a family where they have little food and little else, day in and day out.  Who would?

Why are we content, then, to leave them there to become broken themselves with the "not my problem" attitude?  Isn't there some feeling of social contract left in this country that says "that simply isn't good enough, we have to do better" for all of us?

What we need to realize is that this is truly a case where the rising tide cannot lift all the boats without some help getting some of them floating again.  That help comes, primarily, from women who work in these caring professions who clearly get the message that what they are doing isn't valued by society as a whole because they are paid so little do their very important jobs.

It's an ugly cycle, and one for which I have no ready answers.  But one which is ripe for some serious, public conversation.  So I throw this out to the group:  how do we start putting our money where our mouths and our values say we are publicly?  How do we reduce the hypocrisy factor on these issues and, more importantly, find a way to do better?

What say you?

(Great, evocative photo via scrunchleface.  Love the color!)