by Race in the Workplace special correspondent Adina Ba

Author of Getting Even: Why Women Don’t Get Paid Like Men – And What to Do About It, Evelyn Murphy earned a BA from Duke University in mathematics; a MA in economics from Columbia University; and a PhD in economics from Duke University. She has served as Massachusetts Secretary of Environmental Affairs, Secretary of Economic Affairs, and became the first woman in Massachusetts to hold constitutional office when elected Lt. Governor in 1986. Evelyn Murphy is President of The WAGE Project, Inc., a national organization to end wage discrimination against working women, and Resident Scholar in the Women’s Studies Research Center at Brandeis University, where she has researched and authored Getting Even. You can find more Race in the Workplace interviews in our archives.

Why you have chosen to dedicate yourself to the project of equality of women in the workplace?

When I started working in the 60’s with a PhD in Economics, women were earning an average of 59 cents on every dollar men were earning. I was the only college graduate in my family, and it became more popular for women to go to college. I assumed pay inequality only had to do with merit. Eyeballing society, I’d assume we’d catch up over time. I worked my entire adult life and in the mid 90’s, we were up to 77 cents on the dollar. When the economy was booming, the wage gap got bigger. Something was wrong with this picture. Graduates of any sex have the same education. Women work as hard, need just as much money. I’ve watched the wage gap professionally and personally. Intellectually, I couldn’t understand it.

Secondly, when I held different positions in public office in the state of Massachusetts, I started to see what governments can and cannot do. It’s been illegal to discriminate for over forty years, but the government has never funded EEOC in ways that it should. No administration either democrat or republican has had any affect on this issue.

I went into the corporate world and learned that CEOs of companies have the power and responsibility to eliminate discrimination in the workplace. Women need to make this known to their CEOs for any possible change to come about. From the decades of my being an economist, I looked at the gender wage gap from the public sector view, the private sector view, and the womens stance. CEOs have a legal responsibility to fix this and any other discriminations in the workplace.

How can the EEOC (Equal Employment Opportunity Commission) be held responsible for making sure that all employees are being paid fairly and equally?

EEOC is held responsible only if President/Congress create a substantial budget to carry out enforcements and responsibilities it has under the law. The EEOC is underfunded, and keeps cutting back on enforcement with less litigation, less mediation services, and less advising of companies. But the reality is that unless the EEOC has threatened litigation against guilty employers, than all the constructive changes don’t happen because employers generally do not believe they’re guilty of discrimination. They don’t believe discrimination in their companies’ exists. Unless they’re forced to analyze the numbers, they’re going to continue to believe they’re not doing anything wrong. Status quo is always easier than change.

The only way the EEOC can defend discrimination is when priorities for funding change because all the laws are already there. There is a new Paycheck Fairness Act coming out now. In the end, budget and National Priorities need to stand behind enforcement of this issue.

I enjoyed learning more about how social scientists explain the wage gap by discriminatory characteristics. Can you explain a bit about this? Have any scientists taken the stance that the wage gap is a problem? If not, why?

They differ on this. There are some sociolgists who look at patterns and persistence of stereotyping. If women/men were being interviewed for a job behind screen, then you’d find the gender biases that kick in visually aren’t there. They’ve done important analysis of how visual stimuli really start to kick in who is more limited/ less qualified/ more emotional, etc. Then there are social scientists that are more numbers driven. They look at the correlation between pay and explanatory factors such as age, education, experience, and other unexplained aspects. Statisticians keep saying, “the part we can’t explain isn’t neccessarily discrimination, it can be many different factors.” There’s a lot of auto-correlation where discrimination is embedded so that if you were a more discerning analyst and you believed there was discrimination in workplace, you’d have a greater critique. 1/3 of unexplained of 23 cents difference cannot be explained by age, education, or other factors. The reasons are limited because the census data is limited. People don’t discriminate, workplaces discriminate. Scientists cannot correlate workplace discrimination/salary difference because they don’t have the data to do so. They need data on workplace, not workers. These patterns of behavior continue today, but they can’t quantify it.

[Note from Adina: This seems problematic because if employers do not see themselves as discriminating, the data they give can be skewed. Although the scientist could always ask more dimentional questions and interpret the data beyond the basics of what the employers are giving them.]

In the Washington Post’s article of July 30, Shankar Vedantam writes about a research study done at Kennedy School of Government by Linda C. Babcock and Hannah Riley Bowles which found that the problem was not as simple as men being more aggressive than women in negotiating salary increases. Bowles says “Yes, there is an economic rationale to negotiate, but you have to weigh that against social risks of negotiating. What we show is those risks are higher for women than for men.” Do you have any comments to these research findings?

This is very important analysis by very credible academics about the biases which have gotten more sophisticated. Please see Women Don’t Ask, a book by Linda Babcock. These issues cost women and people of color money. When the risks are higher to be paid fairly, people are going to be more reticent because they don’t want to lose their job. This is a sophisticated argument of what some discrimination is all about today.

Beyond the personal stories and research, the most inspiring part of Getting Even is the “Responsibility Steps” that readers are suggested to take. Many people are aware that discrimination exists, but they need basic steps and community to help make change. Please explain the community that has come together on wageproject.org. What has it accomplished so far, and what do you hope to achieve in the future?

1. We are helping to support women when they start talking about money. For women to talk about what they earn is the most intimate conversation that they have. We’ve all been socialized not to talk about money. I’ve been in investment clubs which include women of all backgrounds. We would talk about investing in detail, but never what we earned. The WAGE project is trying to get women to talk about what we earn in a non-work community environment, if we’re paid fairly, etc. It takes a while to get comfortable with this language.
2. We are drawing on womens’ organizations that already exist and leverage their reach into the community. We work with YWCA, AAUW, NOW, and others. We become part of their programs. This fall, we’re going to twelve campuses with Start Smart workshops, where female students are learning how to benchmark their starting salaries for jobs. They need to figure out the going wage rate for that area of the country so they are prepared. It helps women immediately because the wage gap starts with the first job and the consequences grow over time. Starting from the first job through retirement, there is a 1.2 million dollar wage gap. It may start with a 3-4 thousand difference at the beginning, but over time, men will earn more and more and more. That is something that needs to be acknowledged.
3. We are targeting women reentering the workplace after a long break because of personal or family reasons to help them benchmark their salaries.
4. We are working with women that are already in the workforce.
5. We are working with women in specific sectors to help cater specific needs: Librarians, Scientists, Acadamics, etc. All of this is immediately helpful to narrow the personal wage gap.

Women need to get together and talk about what they earn.

WAGEhubs in Chicago meet monthly to figure out how they will use these workshops in the next year. They decide what programs they need to fight discrimination and the wage gap. Their main agenda is to be paid and treated fairly wherever they work. This is a grassroots movement.

Employers will hear about this work and will start to look under their roofs or get pressured from employees. Institutional biases and discrimination will have to change.

As this is a blog dedicated to Race in the Workplace, can you see your book being transferable to other minorities in the workplace? Can you suggest other guides like this that are dedicated to race inequities? Do you think all workplace minorities can find a way to work together for change?

People often get scared and paralyzed on these issues. When I was running for office, my campaign manager Joe was ten years younger and previously a football player in college. He told me that running for office reminded him of playing football. First you get out, you haven’t been hit yet and you’re a bit timid. Then, you get hit so many times that you start to throw your body at things anticipating the impact.

Once you throw yourself into the game of activism and start with some small projects for change, if you have the right kind of values at heart, it’ll workout. The similarities between race and gender discrimination are so close that here’s the exciting part to me.

This insight comes from the state of Minnesota. They pay women 97 cents for every dollar they pay men. They passed a law in 1980’s, equal pay for equal work, which forced the state to take every job and evaluate and rank them by experience you need, technology background, education, degree of danger. They compared a nurse with a snow plow driver, a university professor and state park ranger. You pay for the job, not who does the job. That concept eliminates the wage gap for all minorities when you’re not making those distinctions anymore. That’s a solution everywhere. Titles were changed, principles were changed. If every employer of all sectors paid for job and not who does the job, it would erase the wage gap today. It can be constructive if employers take responsibility to take the steps to do this today and not wait for messy litigation. It requires leadership, talking, and understanding. In public forums, I face reticence. But in Minnesota, not one man lost a penny when they brought womens’ salaries up. If you go at this deliberately, after a couple years, nobody gets rich off this, it’s just small adjustments. Over time, everybody feels treated fairly. The psychological affects of this could be a major point to getting American jobs competitive in the global market.

I am on the road every day usually giving two presentations a day. I may be loony, but I get traction when I leave, and the echoes start coming back to me over time.