From Lisa Falkenberg;
Over at the Wall Street Journal, a 25-year newsroom union pay analysis found women earning 13.2 percent less, a finding that prompted the chief executive of parent company Dow Jones and Co. to vow an urgent review of salaries.
Back in Texas last week, Gov. Greg Abbott gave a decidedly less urgent response when a reporter asked about equal pay.
Abbott said it will happen as more women reach top posts in Texas businesses and start enterprises of their own, the Houston Chronicle’s Bobby Cervantes reported.
Ah, but there’s the rub, part of it anyway: promotion. It would have been the perfect moment for the governor to encourage businesses to promote more qualified women. But he failed to make the point, or, to make any sense at all.
“It’s essential that women get more involved in the business arena and that women be able to elevate pay in Texas,” Abbott was quoted as saying. “It’s going to be women who are going to be getting the pay and charting the course.”
Huh. Yeah.
Abbott’s non-answer was particularly hollow given the setting: he was announcing the expansion of his Commission for Women, increasing the number of women on the panel and ordering it to tackle weighty issues such as STEM-based education and access to health care.
Important issues, sure. Missing from the list: equal pay.
[…]
During his campaign against state Sen. Wendy Davis, Abbott acknowledged that he agreed with former Gov. Rick Perry’s decision to veto a state version of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay act. He argued women are already protected federally, but proponents of the legislation said it would have made suing over pay in state courts cheaper and faster for Texans.
Given the bill’s narrow scope, it wouldn’t have made a dent in pay inequity in Texas. But publicly opposing the bill sent a message about the former attorney general’s priorities.
That message came just as the San Antonio Express-News’ Peggy Fikac reported that female assistant attorneys general in Abbott’s office, on average, were paid less than men in the same classification. Abbott’s office cited the men’s experience, but the figures it provided showed there wasn’t always a direct correlation.
As Fikac reported: In several categories, women, on average, had more years of service, had been licensed longer, or both, but were paid less.
Abbott may truly believe there’s nothing government, outside of the courts, can and should do about equal pay. If so, he’s wrong.
The problem has many causes, from men and women choosing different jobs, to women bearing more family responsibilities, to women’s reluctance to negotiate, to real cognitive bias: the perception that women aren’t as competent or don’t work as hard.
Joseph Fishkin, a law professor at the University of Texas who focuses on employment discrimination, also mentions the “maternal wall,” which he describes as “the way we set up jobs and career paths to make it impossible to advance while having serious family responsibilities.”
Fishkin says government could do a lot about the gap if it wanted to. It doesn’t have to be passing the nation’s toughest equal pay law, as California did. Although that would be nice. For one: paid family leave and/or paid sick days, which would allow more women to stay in jobs and advance while caring for family.
Fishkin also mentions supporting a higher minimum wage, which would reduce the pay gap at the bottom, since those workers are overwhelmingly women.
Conveniently enough, Greg Abbott opposes all of those possible remedies. So we could say that he supports equal pay for women the same way he supports improving access to health care by opposing Medicaid expansion.
From the DMN editorial board:
A data crunch by The Morning News’ J. David McSwane this weekend revealed that if you are a woman, you’re making less than the white male colleague sitting right next to you doing a similar job. If you happen to be a minority woman, you’re making even less — particularly in higher-level jobs.
Not only is that blatantly unfair, but it’s been illegal for more than 50 years.
Even more troubling: Over the last decade, Texas’ gender gap has only widened.
Today, women in government make 92 cents for every $1 a white man makes, down 2 cents from 2006, The News’ report showed. Black women make 84 cents, down 2 cents. And Hispanic women make 82 cents, down 5 cents.
It’s obvious what that does to a paycheck today; just imagine how that inequity is compounded over time. And the effect it has on a woman trying to envision long-term career growth.
How’d we get here? The inequities are caused by an economic stew, including that women more often sign up for lower-paying jobs and white men more often get top-paying jobs.
Take a look at the recent recruiting and hiring done at Attorney General Ken Paxton’s office. Instead of posting two of the highest-paid positions in his office — as state law dictates — Paxton personally approached two hand-picked outsiders for the jobs. Both white men.
Paxton, the state’s top law-enforcement official, says the law allowed him the flexibility to simply appoint Jeff Mateer to assistant attorney general and Marc Rylander to communications director without opening the top jobs to others.
That smacks of cronyism. And such an unlevel playing field — where a qualified woman or minority never even had an opportunity to apply — points to one reason women’s paychecks still lag behind.
And hey, great news: Paxton just hired another crony to be his Chief of Staff. Because clearly there was no one within the office of the AG who was qualified for the job. That’s just the way these things work out, you know? But don’t worry, I’m sure the magic of the free market will solve this problem any day now.