Feminism, Gender, Money, Women's Issues

Women Getting Screwed When It Comes To Pay

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The U.S. Census Bureau reports that women in legal occupations earn 51% of what men earn.

That is not a typo.

Some people will no doubt say something like “women are secretaries and men are attorneys,” before clubbing their mates into submission. But according to the report:

[T]he salary gap was the largest among judges, magistrates and other judicial workers, with women earning an estimated $69,500, compared to men’s $108,100, or about 64 percent of their salaries.

Women attorneys earned a median of $93,600, or about 78 percent of men’s median earnings of $120,400.

We briefly mentioned yesterday that female paralegals only earn 93% of what their male counterparts make. Given the proportion of females to males that work as paralegals, that income disparity screams of day-to-day sexism.

These additional numbers may speak to larger systematic problems facing women in the legal profession. Lockstep pay should smooth out gender inequality when it comes to salaries, so long as women are getting promoted and making partner on par with their male counterparts. Clearly, this is not happening.

And the “women get pregnant and have babies while men toil away all the live long day” argument is a poor one. Women who have left the profession to start a family are not artificially dragging down the salary numbers, since they are “out” of the profession. And surely we don’t think that women who take a “survival of the species” time-out and then come back to work should be penalized.

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78 cents on the dollar for female attorneys? 51 cents on the dollar for all females in the profession? Those numbers are embarrassing. That is all.

Women in Legal Occupations Earned 51 Percent of Men’s Salaries, Says Study [Law.com]

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