Repost: NH gender wage gap higher than national average

PGTI's own Elizabeth Skidmore recently served on a panel discussion about the wide wage gap between men and women in New Hampshire. Check out the article below to learn about the wage equality that's happening in the construction trades and how we can narrow the wage gap for all women.

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Friday, June 28, 2013

By JENNIFER JANIAK

The wage gap between men and women has remained an unresolved social issue for decades, but Granite State women face even greater inequality in the workforce than others across the country.

New Hampshire women earn 77 cents for every dollar New Hampshire men earn, a 5 cent larger gap than the national average, according to the New Hampshire Women’s Initiative.

“It’s clear that there is a growing gap between men and women in the workforce today,” Mark MacKenzie, president of NH AFL-CIO, said Wednesday night at a forum titled “Women, Work, and Wages,” held at Saint Anselm College’s Institute for Politics to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act. “As of the last few years, it’s not had the kind of profile I think it should have. When you talk to the general public about this, it touches everyone.”

Four speakers addressed the wage gap with a variety of statistical findings, mostly focusing on the reason for women’s 23 percent wage loss.

About 14 cents of the loss-per-hour can be attributed to reasons like workforce participation, education attainment, industry and occupation, type of employer, and the preference for flexible work, according to Judy Stadtman of New Hampshire AFL-CIO. For example, Stadtman said that women tend to make up the majority of employees in lower paying sectors, such as elementary and secondary education and certain health care sectors.

“Even the 14 cents that is attributable … to career paths and lifestyle choices, we also need to understand that some of those career paths and lifestyle choices are because of sexism,” Liz Skidmore, one of the speakers, said. “Women grow up and think the only thing they can be is XYZ and … don’t do all the other things.”

However, the remainder of the gap, the other 9 cents, remains unexplained.

Skidmore is a business manager in the Carpenters Local 118 and has worked in carpentry for about 25 years.

Carpentry and construction are among the few job sectors in which women are paid equal to their male peers, she said.

“In union construction, women make exactly the same as men,” Skidmore said. “Starting 35 years ago, when women started getting into construction. Every hour we work, every dollar we get paid, we get paid exactly the same.”

The type of employer chosen by women, another factor Stadtman attributed to the wage gap, also differs from men. More women tend to work for nonprofit organizations and local and state government, while men dominate federal government jobs and the self-employment sector.

In attendance was newly appointed Labor Commissioner James Craig, who asked what can be done to solve the wage gap. While the four speakers offered different solutions, they all agreed that no single, or immediate, solution exists.

“There is no silver bullet to any of this stuff,” Skidmore said. “If there were, we would have solved it already. So what we’ve found is that if you can pull together a group of stake holders from long-term engagement on this … it’s not something that we can solve in one evening, but there absolutely are solutions and when we can bring people together, break down those aisles of expertise, and work toward it, that’s when I think exciting things happen.”

Read the remainder of this article at http://www.nashuatelegraph.com.

Repost: Miss Utah’s Question is Worth Answering

by PATRICIA SHIU on JUNE 20, 2013

Marissa Powell’s comments on the pay gap at the June 16 Miss USA competition have gotten a lot of attention in the news – but for all the wrong reasons.

Gossip sites and even respectable media sources have homed in on her grammatically shaky response, but let’s not duck the question; it is well worth answering again and again.

As judge NeNe Leakes acknowledged and as I’ve noted myself many times in this blog, there is a persistent wage gap in this country, despite the fact that women play an increasingly crucial economic role in America’s families. Leakes asked what the pay gap says about society, and I think it’s an important question. The fact that the pay gap has decreased over the past 50 years shows that our society is open to change – but the fact that it exists at all shows that change is slow and requires constant support.

Workers can take some responsibility by educating themselves about typical pay scales within their industries and the laws that apply to pay equality, particularly Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Equal Pay Act, which was passed 50 years ago this month.

They should also know the federal agencies that are available to assist with education and enforcement, including the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission as well as the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs, which I lead, and its Women’s Bureau. We are constantly updating the department’s equal pay website to ensure that women have the tools and resources they need to level the playing field.

While Ms. Powell’s shaky response reflected the stress of responding to an unexpected question in a public forum, her clarification the next day got right to the heart of the issue: “This is not OK. It needs to be equal pay for equal work; and it’s hard enough already to earn a living, and it shouldn’t be harder just because you’re a woman.”

With her response Sunday night, Ms. Powell inadvertently drew more attention to this important question than she could have with a straight answer. That’s one small flub for a woman, one giant meme for womankind. And it’s a conversation we can all benefit from. After all, the pay gap costs individual women thousands of dollars in lost pay every year – and hundreds of thousands across their working lifetimes.

Closing the pay gap has deeply personal repercussions for women around the nation, but it has even greater resonance for society at large. Equality has long been one of cornerstones of our national culture, and its benefits are widespread.

As the president said on the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, closing the pay gap is “part of a broader agenda to create good jobs and to strengthen middle-class security, to keep rebuilding an economy that works for everybody, that gives every American the chance to get ahead, no matter who you are or what you look like, or what your last name is and who you love.”

Patricia Shiu is the director of the Labor Department’s Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs.

View the original article at http://social.dol.gov/blog.

Repost: Women building careers in construction

Julie Palmer, president of Charlie Allen Restorations, at a condo remodeling project in Cambridge.

When Julie Palmer answered a classified ad for an office manager at Cambridge-based Charlie Allen Restorations in 1999, her management experience was in accounting, not kitchen and bathroom renovations.

But she managed transportation for a book distribution company prior to joining Charlie Allen, so the male-dominated setting didn’t faze her. It’s not unusual for her to be the only female on the job site except possibly for the homeowner, she said.

In February, Palmer was promoted to president of the company, one of only a handful of Boston women who hold leadership positions in the building and renovations industry. For some, this gender divide starts in childhood.

“They’re not always teaching girls how to hammer nails,” said Palmer, who oversees Charlie Allen’s projects that have included the restoration of period homes and several churches.

Palmer is among a few women who have chosen a career in construction, according to the National Association of Women in Construction. Of the 9 million trade workers in the U.S., only about 830,000 or 9 percent are women. The number of females in construction peaked in 2006 at 1.1 million. Gerry-Lynn Darcy, executive officer at the Builders and Remodelers Association of Greater Boston, said she doesn’t have local numbers, but anecdotal evidence suggests women in the industry are on the rise. The national trade group noted that the number of women increased by 2.6 percent in 2011, the most recent year for which data is available.

Allison Quinn Guido, general manager at Hanover-based Almar Building & Remodeling, is a notable exception to the stereotype of girls not using a hammer. Almar is a family business, and Guido’s parents built their house in Hanson when Guido was 10. “The smell of cut wood has always stayed with me,” she said.

While studying theater arts management at West Virginia Wesleyan College, Guido spent summers supervising vinyl-siding crews. After graduating college in 2002, she had planned to work at the family business for a year or two while job hunting. But she liked the work, stayed on and now runs it as a 50/50 partnership with her father, Terry Quinn.

Guido acknowledged the physical challenges. “There are some things that are much more difficult for me as a 5-foot, 2-inch woman as opposed to a 6-foot-tall contractor,” she said

But some clients who don’t want her advice at the beginning of a project wind up asking for her by the end, because she sees the potential in their vision and doesn’t belittle their ideas, she added.

Like Guido, Allison Iantosca studied theater in college and entered the industry through a family business. Iantosca joined her father at Hopkinton-based F.H. Perry Builder Inc. in 2000, initially accompanying clients to showrooms and helping them select materials for home improvement projects. She’s now a partner and works on business development, marketing and strategic planning.

Iantosca sees an increasing number of women getting involved in all levels of building and renovation, thanks, in part, to the focus on craftsmanship at places like the North Bennet Street School in Boston’s North End. “Just about all the companies that I know that we compete with have women involved,” she said.

Women with strong management skills bring valuable insight to the construction site, Palmer said. “We tend to look at a project as more than construction, we approach it as a relationship,” she said. “I also think that without the construction background, it can be easier to understand what a client wants, because I’m not always thinking of the constructability first, but the clients’ wants and needs.”

Article from the Boston Business Journal. View the original at www.bizjournals.com.

Repost: Wage Gap Persists in Most Occupations, Sales Jobs Worst Paying for Women

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Apr 09, 2013

Washington, DC–According to new analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), women earn less than men in nearly all of the 114 most common occupations. Women’s wages are lower than men’s even in occupations dominated by men and women have the worst earnings compared to men in sales occupations, such as insurance and retail sales.

Occupations dominated by women provide lower earnings: Four of the ten most common occupations for women, ‘maids and housekeeping cleaners, ‘waitresses,’ ‘cashiers and ‘nursing, psychiatric and home health aides,’ have median earnings for a full-time week of work that are insufficient to lift a family of four out of poverty. Women are more than twice as likely as men to work in occupations with poverty wages

“The most common occupations for women show how far women have come, with good earnings in many occupations,” said Dr. Heidi Hartmann, President of IWPR. “But they also show the desperate, and all too common, problem of low pay for many women.”

Women ‘insurance sales agents’ face the largest gender wage gap; women’s median weekly earnings of $641 are only 64.3 percent of men’s median weekly earnings of $1026. ‘Retails sales persons,’ among the twenty largest occupations for both women and men, have an earnings ratio for women of 64.3 percent. Latina women’s median earnings in sales occupations are only 45.5 percent of white men’s earnings, the group with the highest median earnings in all sales occupations.

“Year after year, it is occupations with high commission payments that do worst for women,” said Ariane Hegewisch, IWPR Study Director. “Given lack of pay transparency, we have to rely on lawsuit evidence showing that women are not less likely to work hard in these jobs, but are less likely to be given the higher earning accounts or work in the big buck sales departments.”

The fact sheet is updated annually by IWPR and provides median earnings for the twenty largest occupations for women and men and distributions across occupational groups by gender and race, based on weekly earnings data from the U.S. Department of Labor’s Current Population Survey.


The Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) is a 501(c)(3) tax-exempt organization that conducts rigorous research and disseminates its findings to address the needs of women and their families, promote public dialogue, and strengthen communities and societies.

View the original press release and contact IWPR at http://www.iwpr.org/.