Why Women’s Wages Are Catching Up to Men’s
And why simply closing the gender pay gap won’t be enough to help families thrive
Blog Post
Feb. 20, 2020
Men in the United States continue to make more money than women at work in general and when in similar roles. Now, new research out of the Pew Research Center shows that women are making gains and that gap is likely to narrow, as women’s wage and job growth out-pace men’s.
The report’s major findings include:
1) Between 1980 and 2018 employment has risen most quickly in jobs where social, fundamental, and analytical skills are listed as most important to completing the job.
2) Women occupy more roles that require in-demand skills and lead on educational attainment compared to men, which contributes to narrowing the gender wage gap.
3) Job industries and roles that require more social and fundamental skills are growing, while jobs that require mostly analytical skills are shrinking, partially due to technology-driven changes in the workplace
So why are women gaining on men? It’s all about skills. The research finds that women’s wages and job growth in fields with in demand skills like social (e.g. negotiation, persuasion), fundamental (e.g. critical thinking, writing), and analytical skills (e.g. science, systems analysis) have increased faster over time. Their research suggests that the shape of the economy is shifting, moving away from jobs that require mechanical skills and toward more complex jobs that require multiple skills, especially those including social skills.
Why does this reshaping of the economy benefit women more than men? Because of the low-wage jobs women have done traditionally like domestic work, teaching, and nursing, they are more likely to already possess the social skills necessary to the jobs of today. In the meantime, they’ve also been achieving greater educational attainment than men, particularly increasing their analytical skills.
Lower paying jobs that used to employ more women, like administrative support and food preparation, are becoming more gender balanced, which means women are leaving these roles while more men are entering them. Men have historically occupied roles where hands-on or mechanical skills are more important, and these fields aren’t growing as much as others.
But even with these gains for women in the workforce, the gender wage gap still persists. There are some measurable factors that continue to exert a downward pressure on women’s wages, like hours worked and industry segregation, and some more difficult to measure factors that contribute to this like gender discrimination, and women leaving the workforce when their families can’t afford childcare, as examples.
Another note of caution on celebrating these gains: These trends in the labor market don’t necessarily point to an expansion of wages or job growth overall, just changes in how women engage with work and a narrowing of jobs that demand mechanical skills. Men and women often occupy the same households, so while gains for women and losses for men narrow the gender wage gap, they might be troubling for families who need good incomes from both partners to get by. It’s also important to keep in mind that men alone won’t feel the losses of the decline in jobs oriented around mechanical jobs—this can have an especially negative impact on women in the trades, although they make up the minority of that industry’s workforce.
The new Pew report represents a bright spot in the long-standing gender wage gap. But gender wage justice will come not just when the pay gap has closed, but also when jobs across the spectrum of skills are accessible to both men and women, and they pay not only equally, but well.