discrimination

It sucks to be a lady in France, and other findings from the WEF Global Gender Gap report

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Until recently, I thought French women had it good. They'd invented a magic diet whereby cheese makes them skinnier, and they get all the free maternity care a woman could want. Then the DSK scandal broke this year, unleashing some ugly truths about chauvinism in France. It was perhaps in that "aha!" spirit that a fair amount of the press coverage of the World Economic Forum's Global Gender Gap 2011 report, which was released today, honed in gleefully on the fact that France is #48 out 135, four places behind Kyrgyzstan where, if I have my misogynistic traditional customs GPS tuned right, bride kidnapping is still kind of a big thing. (Although some might argue that repeated alleged sexual assault charges share some similarities with the taking of a bride by force.) From the NYT/IHT piece:

France poses even more questions. Although it is at the top in education and health, it ranks only middling on women’s economic and political influence. Saadia Zahidi of the World Economic Forum, a co-author of the report, explained in an interview that France scored 3.48 on a scale of 1 to 7 in the ability of Frenchwomen to rise to positions of enterprise leadership.

That, she said, suggested that France had a “corporate culture that does not encourage the rise of women” and was an indicator that helping women to move up the ladder “is not a major part of corporate policies.”

Then there are the Scandinavian frontrunners. These results surprise me like a pre-revolutionary Egyptian election result: "Iceland claimed the No. 1 position for the third year in a row, followed by Norway, Finland and Sweden." (Bloomberg)

Then, sadly, there's the MENA region, clinging stubbornly to its collectively lousy rankings while the world's other regions sail by:

In the Arab world, the gender gap is so wide that the United Arab Emirates enjoys the best record with a lowly rank of 103, while Saudi Arabia and Yemen hug the bottom rungs. (NYT)

Regrettably, I missed this morning's press briefing in New York, but here's a roundup of today's coverage of the 375-page report, written by Professor Ricardo Hausmann, Director, Center for International Development at Harvard, Professor Laura D. Tyson S.K. and Angela Chan Professor of Global Management at Stanford, and Saadia Zahidi, Senior Director Women Leaders and Gender Parity program at the WEF. Hats off to all of them for this gigantic annual undertaking.

It's interesting that almost all of the headlines focus on the negative.

What the report (and many other similar lists) cannot, by its nature, account for is the deep inequality of experience and opportunity between women in a given country. Jesse Ellison at Newsweek/The Daily Beast put this well in an article about their own rankings:
Declaring that one country is better than another in the way that it treats more than half its citizens means relying on broad strokes and generalities. (The experience of a domestic servant can hardly be compared with that of an executive with an M.B.A., even if their citizenship is the same.)
Particularly in the developing world, inequality between women and the consciousness level and commitment by those with resources and influence are CRITICAL factors in how the struggle for gender equality evolves, since inequality is often even more acute. I've lived in a few countries in the developing world, and noticed that, for all sorts of obvious reasons, it is often the most privileged women who have the greatest opportunities to work on behalf of women's rights.
As a junior studying abroad in Morocco, my mind was blown by the editor of the fashion magazine Femmes du Maroc, who devoted a substantial portion of her pages to things like legal issues, political protests against the discriminatory family law, etc. She also ran a literacy program for the young rural women who come to Morocco's cities and become domestic workers. I tried to imagine her American counterpart, Anna Wintour, doing anything of the sort. This woman was hands-on. Contrast this to Lebanon, where a lot of the wealthier women kinda have no idea that there are poor women. (There are other reasons why the Lebanese feminist movement is hamstrung, more on those later when I can find a great essay on it by I think Jean Said Makdisi.)
The other interesting thing to do, which I will undertake after I've survived a midterm on Thursday, would be to compare this ranking with the Reuters Trust rankings that came out earlier this year and which took a lot of heat for being based on perceptions of people surveyed, rather than statistics and a clean, verifiable methodology. I mean, in the end, would I rather be a woman in France (#48), or in Lesotho (#9)?  Come on, now. Pass the cheese.

By the way, here's what I did this morning while I wasn't at the press briefing: I ran around Bobst Library doing a scavenger hunt and coming down with a severe case of Library Syndrome, in which I daydream intensely of retiring at 30 and spending the rest of my days checking out books and reading them in bed. There's an amazing cookbook section that begs for a daylong visit on a snowy day over winter break.

Is the gender pay gap sort of like a unicorn?

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I ask because my macroeconomics professor at the Stern School of Business at NYU, Michael Waugh, doesn't seem to think it exists. Maybe he's kidding, or maybe he's pretending he doesn't believe me so I can work harder to prove my ideas (I'm hoping this is the case), or maybe he's in deep denial, because our class discussions and after-class discussions go something like this:

Him: I don't believe the government should mandate equal pay for men and women.

Me: But women earn an average of 23% less for performing the same work as men.

Him: How do you know it's the same work?

Me: [Sputter in disbelief]

Him: Can you prove it? If women were really so much more productive, firms would hire them away from the companies that are underpaying them. The market would solve it.

I'm going to go ahead and take the not-very-radical step of asserting that the gender pay gap does, in fact, exist, and that its root cause is discrimination, and not that women are, across the board, 23% less productive and efficient than their male co-workers.

The longtime feminist economist blogger Echidne (with whom I hope to do a Shoulder Pads interview in the near future) has meticulously documented and explained not only its existence, but the myths surrounding it, here. She neatly does away with the rudimentary objections voiced by my professor, which Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber called "Stone Age labor economics," or rather, "Stone Age labour economics," because he's British.

I asked some finance people, wonks and feminists about this, and drew really excellent responses.  Since they said it way better than I could, I quote/excerpt them here [all emphases mine]:

From public policy whiz Kathleen Geier:

Even if there is no discrimination against young women, the fact that there still is a substantial pay gap among older workers, and that so few women make it to the top ranks of corporate America, politics, etc., is compelling prima facie evidence that a lot of discrimination is still going on.

The best studies on the gender gap in pay have all shown that such a gap definitely exists, *even when* you control for every observable factor like education, experience, hours worked, type of work, etc. Now, there are two ways you can explain that. One is simply that there is some discrimination going on. The other is that there is some difference in unobservable characteristics between men and women -- e.g., that men are harder working, or more motivated, or more intelligent or more able in ways that are not outwardly observable but which quickly reveal themselves on the job.

Which scenario seems more plausible to you? Many free market economist types have a bias toward believing that markets function efficiently almost all the time, so they're not going to think that discrimination is happening and that any group is getting paid less, or more, than it is worth. So they're going to go with the "unobservable skill differential" story. But "unobservable skill differential" is basically a polite way of saying, straight up, that women are innately inferior to men. That's basically what Larry Summers implied in his notorious remarks, when he mentioned biological differences as a possible explanation for women's underrepresentation in the hard sciences.

Biological differences, or "unobservable skill differential," or what have you, basically amounts to saying that women are biologically inferior. Aside from the fact that that's a profoundly ugly aspersion to be casting, there's not very much empirical evidence for it. Whereas there is literally mountains of evidence that women have been discriminated against -- tons of excellent, scientifically rigorous studies have shown this.

We know very well what equal work is, in a legal sense. (Oh yeah, the law!  That old thing! - ALS)

From Daniel Davies of Crooked Timber:

For some purposes (including, probably some macroeconomics) it makes sense to think of the labour market as a continuous spot auction in this way but a labour market like that has never really existed (the docks in Liverpool at the start of the 19th century probably closest). Economists really often need to take a step back and say "if I was a business, how would I actually do that?"  In any deep and realistic model of the labour market, search costs and recruitment costs would eat you alive if you tried to arbitrage away the gender pay gap.  In general, people in economics departments are much too quick to help themselves to arguments which assume that various versions of the law of one price will hold - I was inoculated against this at an early age when I sat next to a guy who spent all day trying to arb Royal Dutch against Shell.

From Katha Pollitt, feminist writer and thinker par excellence:

Anyone who's ever had a job knows the best person doesn't always get hired or promoted. I'm sure your prof can think of examples in his own department!   There's collegiality, nepotism, old boy networks, sexism and racism. People don't always like working with people who are 'different.'  Just ask a black guy. There are also huge assumptions about who is good at what, who the customers want to see, who suppliers can deal with easily --assumptions that usually favor white men. For example, if socializing with customers and clients includes visits to strip clubs and other male playgrounds, then being a man becomes an unacknowledged job qualification.

Katha also added this very important point:

etc! 

Thank you, everyone, for your contributions and readers -- please, please weigh in with thoughts and resources on this one.