Fair Pay for Women
What pay is fair pay? The matter is of crucial importance to women, who earn a fraction of what men get.
A Michigan psychologist has shed some surprising light on the gender-wage gap, which has been narrowing over the past few decades, but at a snail's pace. By 1990, women were earning a mere 68% for every dollar males were taking in--and that was up 8% over 1980.
It's long been known that a person's pay expectations influence both pay offers and satisfaction with salary. And indeed, finds Linda A. Jackson, Ph.D., associate professor of psychology at Michigan State University, women have lower self-pay expectations than do men. The reason, she reports, is not that they think they are worth less; they simply think everybody should be paid less.
Jackson surveyed career expectations of 250 female and 185 male college seniors majoring in male-dominated, female-dominated, or more gender-balanced occupational fields. She found that for both the time they embarked on a career and the time they expected to hit their career peak, women had lower pay expectations for themselves and for others in their field. And they believed that less pay was fair pay all around. The salary-expectation difference between men and women was $1,238 at job entry and a hefty $18,659 at career peak.
