What female students opt to study helps explain why gender pay gap persists—but their choices are changing
Over the past six decades, women have enrolled in college in greater and greater numbers. Those born in the mid-1980s are 22% more likely to hold a bachelor’s degree than men. Yet they still see lower wages.
That may have something to do with what women study and the jobs they take once they graduate, choices that are slowly shifting, according to new research by a trio of economists set to be published next week.
Female students tend to major in fields that lead to lower-paying jobs than their male counterparts, according to the paper by Carolyn Sloane of the University of California, Riverside, and Erik Hurst and Dan Black of the University of Chicago. And even when they do major in traditionally male-dominated fields, they often end up in jobs with lower potential salaries.
Why they make those choices will be the subject of future research, Ms. Sloane said.
The new research helps explain why the earnings gap between men and women in the labor force remains pronounced despite the rising number of women with college degrees.
Using data from the census, the researchers found that college-educated women earn about 23.3% less than college-educated men, after taking demographic factors such as age or race into account. About half of that gap comes from the choices that men and women make in college majors and, when they major in the same topics, from the occupations they pursue.
“There’s an important thing that happens in schooling and that is the specialization,” Ms. Sloane said. “It’s not just whether you’re getting more B.A.s, but where did you put your efforts in terms of your training.”
The researchers grouped college graduates in 10-year birth cohorts and tracked how their choices of college majors changed over the years, as well as the professions in which they ended up.
They found that while women have started to move into traditionally higher-paying and male-dominated majors, they still are more likely to graduate with degrees in areas associated with lower-paying jobs.
Women born in the 1950s chose majors with potential wages that were 12.5% lower than potential wages for majors picked by men. Those born in the 1990s picked majors with potential wages that were 9.5% lower than men did, suggesting the gap has shrunk slightly.
But even when women majored in traditionally male-dominated topics such as engineering or business, they tended to end up in professions with lower potential wages. For instance, women born between 1955 and 1965 who majored in those fields worked in professions where the potential wage was 12% below those chosen by their male counterparts. For women born between 1975 and 1985, that gap had narrowed to 6%.
In part, the difference in potential earnings has to do with women working in jobs with lower hours requirements. Across all age cohorts and college majors, the researchers found that women work at jobs that require 3% fewer hours worked than men do.
Employers often aim to hire people they think will be a good fit, but their efforts can easily veer into a ditch where new hires all look, think and act alike
What happens when a boss tries to foster a more inviting workplace, but not everyone feels invited?
Employers often aim to hire people they think will be a good “cultural fit,” with attributes that will mesh with a company’s goals and values. But their efforts can easily veer into a ditch where new hires all look, think and act alike. That’s bad for anyone who cares about an office with a mix of races, genders and points of view.
“What most people mean by culture fit is hiring people they’d like to have a beer with,” says Patty McCord, a human-resources consultant and former chief talent officer at Netflix. “You end up with this big, homogenous culture where everybody looks alike, everybody thinks alike, and everybody likes drinking beer at 3 o’clock in the afternoon with the bros,” she says.
Human-resources consultant Patty McCord says some employers err in trying to attract top talent by offering such frills as office ping pong or the latest craft beer.PHOTO: DEVI PRIDE
An alluring culture is a coveted prize in today’s tight labor market, surging to first from fifth place in the last five years as the most important factor in recruiting top talent, according to a 2018 Korn Ferry survey of 1,100 hiring managers. But there’s a difference between cultural frills like office ping pong and craft beer, and deeper ones that mean more. To employees, it means loving a job for more than just the paycheck. And to employers, it means employees will keep working hard even when no one is watching.
Making a good match can be difficult. In a pattern researchers call looking-glass merit, hirers tend to look for traits in candidates that make them feel good about themselves. These may be more nuanced than race or gender. A manager who got bad grades as a college freshman is likely to warm to an applicant who also got off to a rough start, research shows. Or a hirer who attended a low-prestige school may favor applicants who did the same.
“What most interviewers are looking for and acting on is more of an intuitive sense of, ‘Would I get along with this person?’ and that often isn’t very reliable,” says Kirsta Anderson, global head of culture transformation in London for Korn Ferry.
Employees err in taking a job because it offers office ping pong, free lunches or heated toilet seats. Ms. McCord recently met an HR executive who claimed to keep employees happy by serving up the latest craft beers. “Well, that sounds like a fun vacation. I’d probably go to that resort. But that’s not what you’re here to do,” says Ms. McCord, author of “Powerful,” a book on building workplace cultures.
Hiring managers need to go deeper and figure out whether applicants are in sync with more fundamental elements of their culture, Ms. Anderson says. Are they excited about how the company innovates, serves customers or makes a social impact? Will they mesh with the way individuals and teams at the company work, by collaborating or competing? And will they naturally make decisions the way the employer wants—individually or as a group, embracing or avoiding risk?
It isn’t easy to suss out those traits in an interview. Jeanne Leasure, a human-resources executive, recalls interviewing applicants for a job that gave employees a lot of autonomy. She was looking for recruits who were self-starters, but wound up hiring one who turned out to be a lovable slacker. “We hit it off, we had similar personalities,” and the applicant gave convincing answers when she asked him about past accomplishments, she says. But on the job, he didn’t have as much drive as she’d hoped, says Ms. Leasure, who was recently named senior vice president, people, at SpotX, an ad-tech company based in Broomfield, Colo. She has begun asking more probing questions, such as, “What was your work ethic like as a teenager?”
Ad-agency founder Ed Mitzen looks for recruits who are empathetic and at ease in his company’s flat, no-titles, team-based culture. PHOTO:FINGERPAINT
Fingerpaint Marketing is a flat organization with no lofty job titles, and its teams must work smoothly together on tight deadlines. When Ed Mitzen, founder of the Saratoga Springs, N.Y., agency, interviews candidates, he explores whether they’ll be kind to everyone regardless of status, and pleasant to work with. If teammates enjoy working with them, he reasons the team will get more done and do better work.
He screens out big egos partly by asking drivers for his company’s car service how candidates treated them en route to and from the interview. “If they’re a jerk to the car-service guy, that’s a warning sign,” Mr. Mitzen says. He once rejected an applicant partly because he put on airs with the driver and expected him to open the door for him.
“Really? You’re applying for a $150,000-a-year job,” Mr. Mitzen says. “You’re not applying to be ambassador to France. Take it easy.”
The best hires find the company’s business goals motivational, Ms. McCord says. “A big filter for hiring people at Netflix was, were they interested in our goal of making the customer happy?” Ms. McCord says. She invited applicants to see the customer as someone like their mom—not the engineer at the next desk, she says.
Many employers post their cultural values on the wall but fail to make them explicit to job applicants, says S. Chris Edmonds, author of “The Culture Engine.” This can easily lead to misfires. Some 7% of workers ages 24 to 36 say they dislike their employer’s culture so much that they intend to quit their jobs in the next two years, according to a 2019 survey by Deloitte of 13,416 millennial employees.
More young workers are holding employers accountable for their values, and insisting that their companies stand for something, Mr. Edmonds says. Some 32% of millennials say businesses should try to reduce inequality and support better education, but only 16% of the employees say companies are actually doing so, the Deloitte survey shows. And while 27% of millennials think businesses should protect the environment, only 12% believe they’re doing so.
The growing employee activism is marked by walkouts protesting employers’ stance on the environment, immigration policy or use of their technology for military drone strikes. Some 38% of developers have approached their leadership with such misgivings or concerns, according to a recent HackerRank survey of 71,000 software developers.
All that promises to put more CEOs on the hot seat. As employees become more vocal, “C-suite leaders will have to listen,” Mr. Edmonds says. And that, he says, is a good thing: “It helps employers get clearer about, ‘This is what we stand for.’ ”
Mr. Netanyahu only confirmed an unspoken truth. And yet something has changed.
RAMALLAH, West Bank — Last week, ahead of the parliamentary elections in Israel this Tuesday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu promised that if re-elected, he would annex up to one-third of the occupied West Bank.
His announcement prompted widespread international condemnation. But for most Palestinians such declarations mean nothing. We’ve heard many statements of support over the years, and nothing ever changes. Cynicism is widespread; by now, many of us would prefer straight talk. As Gideon Levy, a columnist for Haaretz, wrote recently, referring to Mr. Netanyahu’s plan: “Let him turn the reality in this territory into a political reality, without hiding it any longer. The time has come for truth.”
Israel already is reaping all the benefits of annexation in the West Bank, and without having to bear any responsibility for the welfare of the Palestinians living here.
Mr. Netanyahu made this promise, on the eve of an election, only to please his right-wing supporters. Formal annexation won’t bring about any real change or extra benefits for the Israelis who live in the occupied areas. For all intents and purposes, the Israeli government already treats them as though they were living in Israel proper (extending Israeli law to them), and gives them perks (cheap mortgages and tax relief).
That’s one reason that many Palestinians I know have come to believe in a one-state solution: After all, with so many Israeli settlements in the West Bank by now, a two-state solution would be impossible to implement. That’s not to say, however, that many Palestinians welcome Mr. Netanyahu’s formal annexation plan as a step forward toward that goal.
Israel has always wanted this land — without its people. And the territory Mr. Netanyahu is promising to annex is sparsely populated with Palestinians. Most Palestinians living in the areas slated for annexation have already lost their land and they would not get it back. They would simply be condemned to remaining laborers in the service of Israeli usurpers.
But Mr. Netanyahu’s move would, at least, have the virtue of being clarifying: If implemented, it would confirm the demise of the 1993 Oslo Accords — a development that many Palestinians would welcome because they have been disappointed by the agreement. Under the accords, the permanent status of the territories in the West Bank was to be negotiated between Israel and the Palestine Liberation Organization; outright annexation, as Mr. Netanyahu is now proposing, would be a clear violation.
For a time, the agreement was expected to bring about a negotiated peace between the two sides and freedom for the Palestinians. Instead, over the years it has enabled Israel to keep exploiting Palestinians economically, control much of their resources and exercise total dominion over their borders.
Mr. Netanyahu was an avowed opponent of the Oslo Accords when he was in the political opposition, before 1996, the year he first became prime minister. By now, after his various stints as Israel’s leader, he can claim credit among his supporters for having shrewdly managed the occupation of the West Bank until the time he could fully annex the territory. He furthered this goal with his unfettered encouragement of more and more Jewish settlements being built in the West Bank.
Palestinians have little interest in the elections in Israel this week. I’m not sure if that’s the result of their experience of living under an occupation that has morphed into ravenous colonial rule or of the economic hardships they suffer. Either way, I think few Palestinians believe that it will make much difference to them who is elected. None of the candidates is expressing a clear position on the future of Israeli-Palestinian relations; those simply are not on the campaign agenda. I wrote nearly the same thing half a year ago, before the previous election.
What does stand out is the ever-growing discrepancy in power between Israel and the Palestinians. When Mr. Netanyahu declares that he will annex about one-third of the West Bank, everyone knows he has the power to do so. When Mahmoud Abbas, the president of the Palestinian Authority, declares that he will cancel the divisions of the West Bank created by the Oslo Accords — into so-called Areas A, B and C — which gave Israel power over more than 60 percent of the area, everyone knows he is powerless to implement that announcement.
Israeli flags in front of an Israeli settlement on the southern outskirts of the West Bank city of Bethlehem.CreditThomas Coex/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
Worse, it is possible that Mr. Netanyahu is shrewd enough to carry out his promise of annexation and then manage to weather all the criticism and the consequences. He would probably justify the measure as being necessary for the defense of his country: He recently said to his voters in a Facebook post that Arabs “want to annihilate us all — women, children and men.” (Facebook then temporarily suspended some features of the account, as a penalty for violating the company’s hate-speech policy.) This hardly augurs well for the prospect of peace between our two nations if Mr. Netanyahu is re-elected.
Then again, it’s not like his main opponent, Benny Gantz, a former military chief, is better disposed toward us Palestinians. Short of being a Saudi billionaire, Mr. Gantz said last week, “the best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is in Israel” — as though Palestinians in Israel were treated like Israelis’ equals. “And the second-best place to be an Arab in the Middle East is the West Bank.” As though Palestinians — or anyone — could be happy living under foreign occupation for half a century. How deep can denial go?
Mr. Netanyahu is shameless. Mr. Gantz is blind. Palestinians see no prospect in this election. How could they?
