How the Gender Pay Gap Works

The gender pay gap is the amount of time into the next year a woman must work to earn as much as a man did the previous year. And it's narrowing at a snail's pace.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This episode is brought to you by square Space. Start
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square Space. Set your website apart. Welcome to Stuff you
Should Know from House Stuff Works dot com. Hey, and

(00:22):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark. There's Charles W
Chuck Bryant, and Jerry. So it's stuff you should Know.
Oh is this coming out on Equal pay Day? I
don't think so. Well. Equal pay Day may have come
and gone by now, but it was April twelve, two
thousand sixteen, that's right. And do you remember when we

(00:44):
did our this Day in History weirdo series or video
series that was pretty great? It was a little odd.
It was Lynch I in I was, but one of
the one of the ones that we did was on
um uh Lily Ladbetter. Yeah, and I think it was
on Equal pay Day. I think I remember it. Um.

(01:06):
But Equal pay Day, for those of you not in
the know, is a day in the United States UM
where working women who work full time, year round would
have to work until to get the equal amount of
pay that their male counterparts got for the year before. Right,
So it is two thousand sixteen. So take our pay

(01:28):
for two thousand fifteen, and we'll don't take our pay.
We want to keep that. But take a man's pay,
a real man's pay from a woman in the same
position would have to work. I mean it changes every year, right,
the date, Uh, if the amount of pay changes, are
the paid disparity changes, right, But the significance of that

(01:49):
date would be like a woman has to work until
April whatever to the following year to make as much
as the man made in the previous year. Right. I
think I just basically said the same thing you said,
just in a weird way. And this is this is
nothing new. Actually, this idea that there is a disparity,
a pay gap, if you will, between men and women

(02:10):
in the United States, and actually it's around the world, um.
And the idea behind it is that women's work is
just inherently less valued than men's work. Um. And there's
a lot of debate over this. Barack Obama in the
State of the Union address in I don't remember the year,
said it might have been his last one where he said, um,

(02:33):
women make of what men make, and that's not okay.
We need to do something about that. Kind of sounded
like Obama, thanks man, thanks look at you like I
looked up for a minute. I was like, your President
Obama in the room. You really did look up. You
guys couldn't see it, but Chuck really did look up.
That was good. Uh. This Uh, the National Committee on

(02:54):
Pay Equity is who um, who began holding equal pay
day right in but UM apparently was it in a
nineteen fifty is when they started kind of gathering data
on this. Yeah. I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics
really started looking at it hard in the fifties. But
the paid disparity goes back way further than that, basically

(03:17):
to the beginning of the country. Yeah, so when people
started working and earning money, and when women were even
allowed to work. We need to do an episode just
on wage labor in the origin of it, the history
of it. Yeah, it's super fascinating interesting. So go back
in time, some things used to be a lot worse.
Believe it or not. UM. Women earned thirty cents on

(03:39):
the dollar in the early at the dawn of America, UM,
when we were farming mainly UM. During the Industrial Revolution,
things got a little bit better about fifty UM up
to UM. But here's the distressing thing. Um, in nineteen
sixty three, Congress pass the Equal Pay Act, and since

(04:01):
then it was about six for a little while, but
in the eighties they climbed up to and then thirty
years later it's only climbed up four percent. It's basically stagnated.
It's very much leveled off. And the sad thing is
is what you're seeing then is as men's wages grow,
women's wages aren't growing. Then, Um, it's a it's and

(04:25):
it's a big deal. It's a big problem because, um,
women are losing out on a tremendous amount of money
over their lifetimes. Um, just for what seems to be
gender discrimination. And I want to say now before anybody
just loses their mind, there are a lot of theories
behind this, and gender discrimination is one of them, but

(04:46):
none of them are actually proven necessarily. No, And like
most things, I think it's probably a combination of many,
many things, most likely. But as I was saying, whatever
the cause, women are losing out on a lot of money. So,
for examp, will check in two thousand eleven, five year
old woman earned about five grand less per year than
her male counterpart. And this is just woman who worked

(05:09):
full time, year round, man who worked full time, year round,
age five and in five grand, you're like, yeah, that's
that's a lot. You can see a lot of movies
with five grand. But when you add it up over
the woman's career and by the time she makes us
the sixty five, she will have lost out on four
hundred and thirty thousand dollars in wages compared to her

(05:30):
male counterpart. Yeah. That if if that remains consistent throughout
her career, that's a lot of dough. That's a lot
of movies. Uh. And this is uh, these are white women.
It gets much worse if you go across the races. Um,
an African American woman, the figure dips to sixty percent
sixty point five. Hispanic females even worse. Uh. And by

(05:52):
the way, we can say male and female because we're
talking about studies here. Yeah, layoff, um fifty four percent
fifty four point six for Hispanic women, and only Asian
women did better than white women, uh, with eighty three
point five percent of what their white male counterparts made. Yeah.
And I openingly, if you look at the earners in

(06:13):
the United States, white men are not the top Asian
men are actually the top earners. They earn on average
in two thousand, fourteen hundred and thirteen point five percent
more than white men. Uh huh. Interesting. Um, And there's
I want to say something to also the equal pay
day where a woman would have to work too to

(06:33):
make the way. Just that's a white woman would have
to work to April twelve. If you are an African
American woman, you would have to work until June to
make the what the average or the median pay of
a white man for the year before Latino woman all
the way into October. Yeah, so it's like it almost
I mean it's almost like twice as long. Alright. So

(06:55):
here is um, here's how it's determined. And this is
one of the one the problems with trying to get
behind the reasons because it's one thing to to talk
about this stuff, but what unless you can make change
and help this out, then it's just talking about it,
like to make a difference, you need to really understand
the underlying problems. Oh yeah, yeah yeah. But I think

(07:17):
step one is what's being done now and has been
done since shining a spotlight on absolutely and I think
step one is being undertaken still that we're trying to
understand it. But yeah, it's definitely it's definitely not settled. Like,
here's the problem, right, So one of the problems and
trying to is data and getting really good data. Um.

(07:37):
The way they get the pay gap figure is they
take all the women working full time, year round, find
their median salary. It's not an average median is in
the middle, um. And then they take that same calculation
for men and they say, well, subtract us too, and
this is the wage gap. Okay, so that's actually the
the earnings ratio. Right, So when you see something, uh,

(08:00):
women make sevent of what men make, it's very frequently
in this article does it all over the place, it's
called the wage gap. That's not the wage gap. That's
the earnings ratio. The wage gap would be yeah, yeah,
you know what I mean. But it's it's confusing, like
because if you think about you're like, wow, the wage
cap is sev the wage gap is. The earnings ratio

(08:21):
is seventy. But people tend to use that bigger number
because it's more eye popping when you're a media mogul, right,
you know what I mean? Absolutely, uh So a lot
of people will say that that just that calculation is
too broad to draw a conclusion, and it probably is.
You need better data for sure. Um. And this article

(08:42):
even points out that, you know, you can't take that
one statistic and and say this is all you need
to know about pay inequality. Like, I don't think anyone's
saying that, no, well, dummies. So but the one thing
that does so unfortunately is it gives critics a chance
to holes in it and dismiss it outright. Um, you know, yeah,

(09:04):
because they're saying, okay, let's let's take a step back here.
You're taking the median salary for all of the men
who worked in the United States full time, and then
you're taking the median salary for all the women who
worked full time in the United States throughout the entirety
of two thousand and that's comparing apples to oranges, they say.

(09:28):
And one, there's a number of reasons why they say
you're actually comparing apples oranges. There's a lot of different
um jobs that are being done, there's a lot of
varying educational backgrounds, there's a lot of different experience backgrounds,
and you just can't compare the two. So let's not
talk about this again. Okay, right now? What this the
follow up should be. So let's drill down further and

(09:50):
get better data and talk about it even in a
more detailed way, which some people are doing, which we'll
get to. Um. This was fascinating to me about job
clustering or occupational clustering. I know about job clustering. Uh,
of all working women are employed in just twenty fields. Uh,

(10:11):
it's crazy. It is crazy. Um. If you look at
men um, about thirty to thirty work in the top
twenty occupations for males, which are you know, we're talking
a lot of times managerial and supervisional roles, but also
roles that are more physically demanding two and may pay
more yeah, or more dangerous sometimes, Like they make the

(10:32):
point that you'll probably find a man uh working as
like a long haul trucker, although we've heard from quite
a few women who who are doing it. Large March.
Have you not seen Big Adventure? Have you seen the
new one yet? Not yet? Is it good? I haven't
seen it yet. I can't wait. I'm kind of afraid to.
I did see Stitches the Clown though, and it's got
like a one star rating and usually on Netflix that

(10:53):
means like stay away for real, but for you it
means dig in. Well I read I read about it
online too. It may be kind of interested. I don't
think I know what that is. It's an Irish black
comedy horror movie. Um, about a clown that was murdered
that comes back from the dead to take his revenge
in the most gruesome and gory ways. Problem Taylor made

(11:14):
for Josh Clark. But it's it's hilarious too, Like it's
meant to be tongue in cheek to check that out. Um,
we're talking about how, uh some women are in the
trucking industry. That's right, but the cluster of occupations for women, um,
generally speaking pay less than the cluster of occupations uh

(11:34):
that men prefer. Yeah, here's the thing. When you take
a woman in the trucking industry salary and compared to
a man in the trucking industry salary, it's it's still
going to be less. And then conversely, when you look
at a man who who has entered a female dominated field,
say like nursing, they're still gonna probably make more than

(11:56):
their female counterparts. Yeah, elementary school cheach as human resources administrators.
The pay gap is only one per cent um, but
it's still there. No, exactly, it's still there. Like literally,
if they compared same experience, same uh, same job, working
the same amount of hours, almost always across the board,

(12:16):
men will still make more. Even like you said, if
it's nursing, which historically people might think is a job
that more women prefer. Uh. What you're talking about the
chuck is called occupational gender segregation, and that in and
of itself is a big problem here. It's saying, um,
but we here in the United States really tend to
value the work that women do less than the work

(12:38):
that men do. Just by saying these jobs that are
traditionally women women staffed are um just traditionally paid less.
That whole field is yeah, and it's and it's not
like the nineteen thirties and forties and fifties where it's
like you just go be a secretary now and we'll
take care of the business. But there's still it's still
there to a certain degree. I mean, there are more

(13:00):
women who work as secretaries and men um But I
just want to get back to that stat real quick.
When we were talking about the even when you compared
apples to apples, men still made more. I mean it's
it's like, you know, two to um five and thirty
four occupations tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and
seven out of the five thirty four paid women more

(13:22):
than men. Yeah, seven seven, Uh, and apparently the most lucrative.
If you're a woman, you want to make more than
a man, Uh, you should be a respiratory therapist, because
their salaries are six point four percent higher than men's
in their field. Should we take a break, yes, all right,
we'll be back with more staggering stats. So chuck, you said, um,

(14:01):
if you compare apples apples, it's a few percent. The
beer of Labor statistics. Um, they like to throw a
little wrench in the works. They surveyed like five hundred
and thirty four occupations, you said, um. And when they
do their statistics, they use weekly salaries rather than um
annual salaries, and they actually come up with a less
pay less of a pay gap. But one of the

(14:23):
things the internet has given us, one of the great things,
is crowdsourcing. And um, there are a lot of companies
that crewe data as almost like a byproduct or maybe
the real under the table product of what they're doing.
One of those companies is glass Door, where you can
go look for job listings but also rate your employer,
rate the company, and it's basically the masses UM reviewing employers.

(14:48):
You know, it's a pretty cool idea. UM and glass
Door did a study in two sixteens, just came out
this month as a matter of fact, and they surveyed
five hundred and five thousand employee The last few of
labor statistics thing I saw was like fifty people. This
is like half a million employees and their salary reports

(15:08):
and found that if you compared women who are equally
qualified in the same position at the same company as
a man, uh, they still made on average five percent
less and in among computer scientists, which I guess as
developers and stuff. Um, the pay gap was the worst

(15:31):
for a woman in the same position equally qualified at
the same company as a man. And this is like
brand new data that just came out. Well. One of
the reasons they say, um, this is ongoing is that, uh,
maybe women don't know that they're not making as much
as their male counterparts because we still are in a
I guess society, or at least a work environment most

(15:53):
times where you're not only not encouraged to talk about
your pay, but some companies like prohibited. Yeah, you can't
talk about your pay your fellow employees, right, And I mean,
I guess, as draconian as it is, you can kind
of understand where the company is coming from because they
want to get away paying their workforce as little as possible,
so they don't want their workforce comparing salaries and realizing

(16:15):
that people are being paid substantially different stuff. Right. Still,
it's mean to to say, like, no, you can't talk
about your salary that we pay you to this other person.
Be quiet, you know. And there's been a lot of
reform that we'll talk about it as far as that's concerned.
But that's a big thing is there appears to be
among a lot of women this idea and I'm sure

(16:38):
a lot of men too don't realize this as well,
that there there is a gender paid disparity. And part
of the reason why is because of a lack of transparency. Yeah. Um,
last year, um, last May, those woman named Lauren voss
Winkle got on Twitter and said, here's a new hashtag,
um talk pay t a l k P A y

(16:59):
and said eat out your job titles, how experienced you are,
where you've been in life, and what your salary is. Uh.
And then at talk pay ann came out, which is
a probably smarter way. It's it's anonymous UM and about Well,
there were a lot of tweets, but most of them were,
of course, people just you know, complaining, and I'm sure

(17:19):
there were plenty of rolls too, but just you know,
complaining about the situation, which is fine. But about actually
tweeted their actual salary. UH. And a lot of people say,
this is kind of one of the first steps is
at least getting the information out there. UH. So a
woman might say, wait a minute, you make four thousand
dollars more than me for no reason at all. And

(17:40):
there are websites to um where you can compare things.
There's one called uh pay scale and one called comparably.
It's a little awkward title. It's beautiful. It makes sense.
I believe you mentioned some of the things that are doing. Uh,
the the government is doing um. President Obama signed an

(18:03):
executive order in two thousand fourteen, so that's when, as
you stay the union address must have come UM. He
barred federal contractors from punishing an employee for comparing their salary,
and a memorandum on those same contractors to submit data
compensation data if there was any to see if there

(18:26):
was any wage discrimination going on. Right, So, if you
worked at a company that was a government contractor and
you're a woman who suddenly got an unexpected raise and pay,
you may have had something to do with that maybe.
So UM. California actually also is leaning the way on this.
They uh, what is his name, Jerry Brown, the governor
the second time around UM he signed into law this

(18:49):
this UM Act that prevents companies from punishing employees for
talking about their pay, their salaries UM. And it mandates
at first man dated same pay for the same work,
which is actually the language in UM the Civil Rights Act.
Title seven of the Civil Rights Act says you have

(19:09):
to pay people the same pay for the same work,
regardless of their UM gender, of their UM race, of
their religion, any of that. They still have to get
the same pay. Uh. And women are protected by that
as well. But you know that was nineteen sixty three,
I think. And the specificity of the language same work

(19:32):
for same pay is it's it's so specific that it's
just easy to get around you just say, well, it's
not the same work. I'm not going to give these
people the same title or whatever. Um with the California
legislation kind of opened that and said you have the
same pay for the substantially same work, you know. Yeah,
and the Equal Pay Act of nineteen sixty three specifically

(19:55):
says employers may not pay unequal way just to men
and women who perform job that requires substantially equal skill,
effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working
to conditions within the same establishment. And then it goes
down to break down what is defined as skill effort, responsibilities,
working conditions, and establishment. So it definitely gets like way

(20:17):
more specific, which is good. And apparently the reason why
California is leading the way on this is because Silicon
Valley is one of the worst defenders out of all
of them. That's where that's California, that's sure. They also
signed a fifteen dollar minimum wage into law recently too. Yeah,
should we talk more about Lily lead Better, Yeah, because

(20:38):
I mean, if you want to talk uh wage equality law,
you've got to talk Lily lad Better. So she worked
for good Year Tire and over the years, I think
she worked there for nineteen years. She was given low
rankings and annual performance in salary reviews pretty consistently in
low raises compared to her fellow ployees. So she sued them,

(21:02):
and a jury initially said you win three point five
million dollars and then a district year was like, what,
we can't afford that, Uh, goodyear, I'm sorry. UM. District
judge later said, let's reduce that from three point five
million to three hundred and sixty thousand, and good year

(21:22):
was like still, well they did because they appealed UM.
Basically what they did was they cited a title a
Title seven provision. They said any discrimination complaint needs to
be made within a hundred eighty days of the of
the bad deed, basically of the conduct of yes of you.
They give you your first paycheck and it's discriminatory pay

(21:47):
then you have a hundred and eighty days. So this
lady worked for eighteen and a half years longer then
she could have submitted a Title seven complaint, which is
b s that's right. And they basically eventually said, well,
what you can do is you can only sue for
the last days worth of discriminatory conduct and then it

(22:10):
went to the Supreme Court of the United States and
she lost by five four vote. Uh, basically holding to
that claim that it was time sensitive. Yeah, it's just
I mean the idea that, like you get your first
paycheck and you just immediately go, well, this is discriminatory.
Even that stick. Right. This woman worked for nineteen years

(22:32):
without realizing it, and the reason why she finally did
come to understand it was because a coworker passed her
an anonymous note um telling her so at a retirement Basically,
so she had been played for a sap basically by
good year as far as the lower courts are concerned,
for nineteen years. But because nineteen years earlier, in nineteen

(22:53):
seventy nine, she didn't immediately recognize that she was getting
less pay. So, like you have to basically be inspector
Cluseau the first time you get paid to to get
a successful Title seven complaint cleared by the court. It's
just ridiculous. Uh. In descent, I love reading the Supreme Court,

(23:14):
like when they actually, you know, write why they find
it in favor or not. It's really interesting stuff. Uh.
Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her descent called it out
of tune with the realities of wage discrimination and quote
a cramped interpretation of Title seven incompatible with the statutes
broad remedial purpose end quote. So basically, like the whole

(23:35):
purpose of this, like, you're just shirking the whole purpose
of the strant to begin with. Yeah, the purpose isn't
to protect corporations from lawsuits. It's so that you keep
employees from getting screwed over by their employers. So again
Obama came in with another thing signed into law of
the Lily Ledbetter Act, which said, we'll stick to the
hundred and eighty days thing. But that's from the last

(23:57):
discriminatory paycheck. So she could have found out at her retirement, um,
gotten her last paycheck and had six months to sue
for the whole shebang, her whole career basically, and probably
would have one had that law been an effect at
the time. All right, well, let's take another break and
um we'll talk a little bit more about this right
after this. All right, So, uh, what are the reasons

(24:39):
behind this? They're myriad, They're myriad, They're myriad, and um,
the thing is, critics of the gender pay gap say
this is not a discrimination, like employers are not saying
like you're a woman, I'm gonna just you know, treat
you poorly compared to your male counterparts. That doesn't happen.
It may happen, but it's not happening on a systemic scale.

(25:01):
But if you look at the explanations for this, and
economists have investigated this and thought long and hard about
it and argued over it and really drilled down into
it rather than stop talking about it, right, um, it
would be what's still going on is still ultimately gender discrimination.
It's just not this nefarious handlebar mustache version of it

(25:24):
that people look for because everyone wants a smoking gun
or a gotcha moment, you know what I mean. But
when you look at the explanations and the reasons behind
purportedly the gender discrimination gap or the gender pay gap,
it is still discrimination based on gender most likely and
race too. Like we we shouldn't. We don't mean to

(25:45):
undermine that or diminish that at all, Like it's even
worse based on race. You know. Um, there was a
Freakonomics podcast episode. Mr Dubner did a great episode in
January of this year, um that I listened to and
he got um and you know, fre economics. It seems
like they kind of get to the real reasons behind things.

(26:07):
This was called the True Story of the Gender Pay
Gap UH, and he sat down with a few people.
One of them was Claudia Golden. She's a econ professor
at Harvard. So the long and short of it is,
after reading UH and listening to this, was that Claudia
Golden and others economists have tried to compare apples to
apples more and found that there are many, many reasons

(26:31):
why there is a pay gap um, but they can't
prove that discrimination is the leading cause, and they think
that it's probably one of the minor causes. Well, yeah,
it's most likely not a major cause at all. Like
when you look at that that mind boggling gap ratio um,

(26:53):
when you start comparing apples to apples, most of it vanishes,
but there is a mysterious three four five that can't
be accounted for by things like experience or educational background
or what have you. Well, yeah, and that's three. I
mean that's too much, you know, any percent is too much.

(27:14):
Like if there is, if if there is gender discrimination,
going zero exactly, Thank you, you just said it so succinctly. Um. So,
one of the theories that people say, um, is that
men are better at bargaining for their salary and asking
for raises and getting tough in that room and demanding

(27:34):
the raise and valuing their work more. In valuing their work. Um.
And there may be some truth to that. But um.
This economist from Harvard says, well, if that were true,
then you would be able to look at men and
women right out of college with the same degree getting
the same job. The men should be making more money.
And she said when you look at that, they actually

(27:56):
make almost the same thing. Right. The gender pay gap
is less earlier on in the career. Right. But even
if there is that small bit right there at the beginning,
if you start out lower, your raises over time and
your promotions over time are gonna be lower. Two. And
that can actually accrue and make the gap wider by

(28:18):
the end of the career, which is what you see, right. Yeah,
And what she contends. And this other woman and Marie
Slaughter who is a public policy scholar who wrote a
book called Unfinished Business, and Mr Dubner sat down with
her too, and they kind of peg it down to
it seems like two things. Um. And Mary Slaughter calls
one of them the care penalty. Um. And it's not

(28:40):
just having a baby and staying home with a baby.
It's women are more likely to care for their parents
when they get old. Um. Of a sibling that needs help,
like you know, they they have cancer and they need
to come live with you. And I need to take
time on work to care for my brother's sister, and
especially children when when you have kids. Um, there is

(29:00):
most assuredly a care penalty because they found that men
sometimes work even harder after they have a baby. Right,
they're staying away from home, maybe staying away from home,
or maybe it hits them like I need to work
harder to make more money now, whereas women falls to
more like you know, I want to care for this child. So, UM,
I'm gonna select a job that will pay less because

(29:22):
it's either part time or it offers more flexibility. Um.
And then I saw another interview with um Golden right
is their name? Um, and she pointed out that, uh,
if women are if women are more likely to get
a job that's closer to home that's more fulfilling, say
than um, something a man is looking for, then there's

(29:44):
going to be more competition for those jobs, which is
going to drive wages down just from supply and demand theory. Yeah,
she calls it temporal flexibility women. Men tend to favor
income growth way more than women do, whereas women tend
to favorite temporal flexibility more. I want to be near

(30:04):
the house so I'm not stuck in my car, so
I can be around my family more, so I can
be you know, a better member, a better family member
basically overall, which is you know, it seems like men
don't care as much about that, right and and I
mean the most overt example of this is childcare, where

(30:25):
especially in the US, um you're lucky to get X
number of days off as a father, as a as
a woman, you're you're you get a guaranteed three months off,
twelve weeks off by federal law. Men there's no guarantee whatsoever,
so you may get zero off. And that reflects this again,

(30:47):
this gender bias, if not outright gender discrimination, that does
tend to set some women back because even if they're
just out for three months or something, they're they're missing
out of the flow of their career. And there you
couldn't go on work trip, so we're gonna send uh,
you know exactly, So they're missing out on future promotions,
future raises UM and future experience and all of those

(31:09):
things count for future um income wages. Yeah, and I
want to rephrase what I just said that men don't
care as much about being a good family member. What
I meant to say is men might have a different
outlook on what is being a better family member, and
in that case, it's going out and working harder to

(31:30):
make more money. Oh yeah, does that make sense? Sure?
Because I get roughed up for being too hard on
white men, right, I do. We get emails all the time, Chuck,
why do you hate white men? I don't know. I
don't hate what I'm I am a white man, and
it's not self loathing. No. I love myself and I
love you, thanks man. Uh. And it's just kind of
warm in here. So temporal flexibility is one of the

(31:52):
big things. And um and actually Golden says that if
women were allowed to work flexible hours of their choosing,
then the she believes that the the gender pay gap
might actually vanish right well, and um a Marie Slaughter said,
if you if you take the other big one is

(32:13):
the care penalty. If you take that off the table
and you don't have any caregiving obligations at all. Uh,
it climbs to about but there's still that five right,
you know, Like, where is that coming from? I think
that's it. I think it's got to be discrimination. I
can't remember her name, but I was reading an interview
in the Atlantic with a Cornell economist who studies this,

(32:37):
and she was saying, um, that if you look at Europe,
there they're much more um even they're equal with their
um their paternity leaving their maternity to leave actually and um,
I don't know that it's it's old enough to have
like had a demonstrable effect. But um, I wonder if

(32:59):
if having something like that here in the US, where
I don't remember the country she cited some skin and
even country obviously. UM. But the the men are given
like a family is given an a lotted amount of
paternity or maternity time, and X amount of it has
to be paternity, and the dad can either use it

(33:21):
or not, but the mom can't take that on. So
it's kind of like you're gonna spend some time with
your kids or not. But to you, um, and so
there's a lot more guys taking that than there was before,
and so there's a lot more equality and caregiving. Which
if it's gonna be, you know which ways America is
gonna go. Is it gonna be women need to spend

(33:42):
less time at home and get into the workforce more
or men need to spend more time at home caring
for the kids and make the whole thing more of
an equal thing, you know, and then maybe that will
erase some of the pay gap for sure. They m
in the same fre Economics episode. They kind of close
with asking Ms Golden what her like, what kind of

(34:02):
legislation would like, how can you fix this? Like more laws,
more laws, And she had a pretty good idea. She
was like, you need to start at like the school level,
because you send your kids off to school, and what
happens is they get out at two or three o'clock
and unless you have you know, I want your kid
to be a latch key kid, someone's gonna need to
be home with them. Uh. And then there are a

(34:24):
lot of times out, like for a couple of months
during the summer, so someone needs to be there. Then,
so she argues for lengthenings, extending school days in school,
the school year such that it doesn't require that one
of the family members to have to like take off
work or take a part time job, yeah, instead of
a full time job. Well, I remember when I was

(34:45):
a little kid, my mom was home and until I
entered I guess kindergarten. Yeah, my mom quit teaching to
raise all three of her kids up until I was
like fifteen, and then she went back to work as
a and then so I mean, how much further back
can her in their careers where our moms staying home hugely,
You should not be penalized for raising two stellar sons. Yeah,

(35:08):
and I have to say in a stellar daughter, Um,
it's kind of personal. But like my parents got divorced,
and so divorce proceedings can get ugly, and a woman
in a divorce court says, well, I took off uh
like eighteen years to raise my children, and now I'm
going back to school at a much lower wage than

(35:29):
I would have because like that needs to be valued.
And uh, it's tough, man, you know it is. It
is tough. Like we said, if there's any percentage it's
based on gender discrimination or race discrimination, that's too much. Agreed. Uh, Yeah,
I don't know what to do what the answer is.

(35:50):
And I guess the reason why we can't say here's
the answer because we don't fully understand which of these
factors it is or what combination. You know, yet, we
should just go sit down with all our fellow podcasts
are and talk about what we all make right. We
should um, there's something else I know as to chuck
um if we keep going at the same rate. So
there's actually a huge jump from nineteen eight and nine

(36:14):
of the pay gap that had been there before vanished,
And it was because women that had entered the workforce
starting in the sixties gained the kind of experience to
where like their wages were reflecting those of men. That
was that's one theory behind it. But then after that
it's stagnated. It's been stagnant pretty much the last decade
or so UM and apparently at the pace that it's

(36:34):
going now is when um parody for white women will
be reached. It's very frequently called like women won't reach
gender or gender parody until that's white women. If you
are African American, it would be sometime towards the end
of the next next century for an African American woman

(36:55):
to reach parody with white men, and around the world
this is an issue as well. Apparently women around the
world make on average half of what men do around
the world half half Eddie, Yeah, half, and so the
average woman in the world by three um would eat

(37:18):
would reach pay parody. Uh. Well, I have one final
stat here, just depending on what state you live in,
it's gonna make a big difference. Washington, d C leads
the way as far as the smallest gender pay gap. Um,
they're earnings ratio. Women are at of men. Okay, Georgia.

(37:42):
Our own state of Georgia is on the list, and
if you are a woman living in Louisiana, you have
the distinction of living in the worst state in the
United States at the scant earnings ratio. Wow, pretty low
SOT pay gap there. Uh and huge thanks to uh

(38:07):
for I was able to lean on that fre Economics
episode so heavily. To Stephen Dubna, that was a really
good episode. Yeah, that was nice of him to send
you a gold thumb drive with it. That was very nice, guys, Stubbs. Yeah.
Uh Well, if you want to learn more about this
kind of stuff, you know, gender pay gaps and pay

(38:29):
disparity and wages, that kind of thing that tickles economists fancies.
You can type those words into the search bar at
how staff works dot com. Since I said search parts
time for listener. Now, I think it was a little
clumsy in that one, So apologies to people what I
just felt that was a little clumsy in that if
that's how I felt in the Tornadoes episode. Really, there

(38:51):
was a lot of points I wanted to get across
the right way, and that's usually when I find myself
saying things exactly the wrong way. Well, you corrected yourself
on that one thing, right, Well I tried. Um, all right,
I'm gonna call this, uh nostalgia immediate nostalgia. Oh yeah,
from Jason Tardy. O. Wait, hey, guys, I was recently

(39:12):
listening to The Nostalgia Show while going on a trail run.
I didn't get a chance to finish it, and later
I went to listen to the podcast again. I started
over from the beginning and I skipped ahead to find
where I left off, and I was hit with instant
nostalgia of that trail run. Certain phrases I heard you
say during my run, We're tied with images of the
beautiful trail every time I skipped ahead, I saw a

(39:33):
different image and could remember exactly where I was when
I had previously heard you say that phrase had brought
up warm feelings of happiness of the trail while listening
to you, guys, I don't know if that's nostalgia. Thanks
for everything you do. I wish you all the best.
You've been a great distraction while training for my marathon,
driving long hours on the road as a performance artist,

(39:53):
in keeping me sane during the craziness of having my
wife go through breast cancer while still keeping the house
clean with two kids. So, Jason Tardy of Auburn, Maine,
hats off to you, sir, and best of luck to
your wife and good luck hearing for those kids. Yeah,
best wishes, guys. Yeah, we will instantly nostalgize you whenever

(40:15):
you want nice. If you want to get in touch
with us, like Jason did, you can tweet to us
at s Y s K podcast. You can join us
on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You
can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how
Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at
home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com

(40:39):
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