Tearing Down the Gender-Inequality Obsession

October 15, 2014 Topic: Domestic Politics Region: United States

Tearing Down the Gender-Inequality Obsession

"The Nadella incident, as trifling as it is, offers a good opportunity to look at the so-called gender gap in American private-sector pay. "

When eighteen-year-old William McKinley, future president of the United States, was mustered into the Union army at the dawn of the Civil War, he came under the tutelage of a wizened military veteran who gave him some sterling advice. “Now, William,” he said, “ …you can easily make yourself so valuable to your superior that he cannot get along without you. Do little things not exactly under your supervision. Be conscientious in all your duties, and be faithful, and it will not be long until your superior officer will consider you an indispensable assistant.”

Private McKinley took that counsel to heart—even, on his own initiative, braving a harrowing onslaught of enemy fire during the Antietam battle to transport water and victuals to an army unit pinned down for hours without food or drink. For that act of bravery and initiative, he was commissioned as a lieutenant, and later exploits of a similar nature got him promoted further. He ended the war as a twenty-two-year-old major, well on his way toward a noteworthy career as a lawyer and politician. Nearly forty years later, McKinley offered the same venerable counsel to a nephew entering the military. “Do your whole duty,” he admonished. “Obey all the orders of your superior; be kind to those who are subordinate to you.” That’s the way to get ahead, he suggested.

This small vignette from American history comes to mind with reports of what happened recently to Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella after he expressed similar sentiments at a conference of women in technology. Asked what advice he would give to women who are uncomfortable asking for a raise, he replied in part:

“It’s not really about asking for the raise but 0knowing and having faith that the system will actually give you the right raises as you go along. And that, I think, might be one of the additional superpowers that, quite frankly, women who don’t ask for raises have. Because that’s good karma. It’ll come back. Because somebody’s going to know: ‘That’s the kind of person that I want to really give more responsibility to.’ And in the long-term efficiency, things catch up.”

Within minutes, the victimhood police were on him like a chicken on a June bug. Within hours, Nadella accepted abject humiliation and nullified his previous counsel. He tweeted: “Was inarticulate re how women should ask for raise. Our industry must close gender pay gap so a raise is not needed because of a bias.” Later he sent an email to all Microsoft employees: “I answered that question completely wrong. Without a doubt I wholeheartedly support programs at Microsoft and in the industry that bring more women into technology and close the pay gap….If you think you deserve a raise, you should just ask.”

The Nadella incident, as trifling as it is, offers a good opportunity to look at the so-called gender gap in American private-sector pay. Liberal politicians and activists from President Obama on down insist there is a discriminatory income disparity in America between men and women, that women earn less than their male counterparts for the same work. This perception is embraced with the tenacity of a she-wolf protecting her cubs. It is unshakable, and those who don’t absorb this perception come under withering criticism of the kind that greeted Nadella’s commonplace observation that the best way to get ahead in business is to impress your bosses with high performance.

Now, once upon a time there was indeed widespread discrimination against women in corporate pay policies. This was not because of any conspiratorial evil inherent in men or business executives or bosses. It was a product of attitudes and sensibilities embedded in the culture of the nation. It was thought that women have a primary responsibility for family care, and it seemed natural that societal mores and practices would reflect this. Even after the late 1960s, when feminism became a serious political force and led to new legal sanctions against discrimination, these attitudes and practices dissipated only slowly.

But they did dissipate, and a long-term workplace revolution occurred. More women pursued jobs outside the home, and over time they rose naturally through corporate and organizational hierarchies. Whatever disparities exist now because of lingering effects of the old sensibilities, they are small—and are dissipating further as more and more women supplant more and more men in higher and higher positions.

The statistic seized upon by the issue’s thought police is the 77 percent trope—that women, on average, earn only 77 percent of what men earn. This is a canard. It measures merely the difference between the average earnings of all men and all women working full time. It makes no allowance for differences in occupation, job description, education, job tenure or hours worked per week. Many studies have concluded that, when these factors are thrown in, the differential represents more like 5 to 7 percentage points. As the Washington Post noted in debunking an Obama reference to this pay-disparity “problem,” “There is clearly a wage gap, but differences in the life choices of men and women…make it difficult to make simple comparisons.”

Consider, for example, some of the college-major choices of men and women, as explored by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce. Men overwhelmingly outnumber women in all but three of the ten majors that yield the greatest remuneration (for example, nearly all categories of engineering, naval architecture and computer science), while women far outnumber men in the majors that yield the lowest pay (examples: early childhood education, social work, communication disorders sciences).

The pay-equity ideologues have had to recognize the significance of such differences, but nevertheless labor furiously to negate their meaning. For example, the American Association of University Women, a leading complainant about pay disparities, concedes the point about choices, but insists these choices are “fraught with inequities” because women are “pigeonholed” by society into lesser jobs. The National Association for Women blames sexist stereotypes that “steer” women and men “toward different education, training and career paths.”

But much of this is merely a matter of preferences that betoken (dare I say it?!) different inclinations between the sexes. After all, as Christina Hoff Sommers has written in the Huffington Post, “untold millions of state and federal dollars have been devoted to recruiting young women into engineering and computer technology,” but their interests simply lie elsewhere. (Besides, she adds, it is patronizing to suggest women don’t have sufficient minds of their own to fashion their own life choices.)

And so we come to the other explanation wielded by the pay-disparity cadres—namely, women just aren’t as comfortable as men in asking for raises. Hence, we have the spectacle, according to this view, of men busily promoting themselves through relentless personal marketing in the workplace, while women fall behind through their own unfortunate modesty and reticence. 

That’s the one that snared poor Satya Nadella. In suggesting that women, like men, can rely on their own performance as vehicles of advancement, he ran afoul of the thought police, who remain always on the beat. They can’t afford to let people like Nadella get away with such sentiments, because it remains one of the last reeds they have upon which to base their pay-disparity arguments.

There’s something sad about seeing a man of Nadella’s stature cringing and cowering and groveling, particularly when his offense was merely to express a workplace verity that has served employees—and the nation—well since the beginning of American enterprise. Besides, his advice is more sound than the counsel of activists who are urging women to ask for raises on the basis of presumed discrimination. Writing as a former corporate executive and CEO, I can say with authority that managers don’t like it when employees seek to pressure their bosses with arguments that the bosses have screwed up in assessing their worth to the company.

Now, of course there are times when the executives have screwed up, when they have allowed disparities to emerge with people of similar levels of responsibility for reasons of inattentiveness, sloppy management, factors of tenure or even discriminatory attitudes of various kinds. And employee complaints, if expressed respectfully, should be welcomed in the workplace in such circumstances. But this is a management issue, not a national civic issue. With only 5 to 7 percentage points of disparity nationally that can’t be explained by natural factors, it simply isn’t a matter that justifies a national response.

Besides, recent studies have revealed a powerful development that is going to have a huge impact on gender positioning in the workplace—to the detriment of men. This is the trend toward colleges and universities being filled more by women undergraduates than male undergraduates. In 1994, according to a Pew Research Center study, 63 percent of recent female high school graduates were enrolled in college, compared to 61 percent of recent male high school graduates. By 2012, this disparity had increased to 71 percent for women compared to 61 percent for men. This trend is seen in all ethnic groups—among blacks, Hispanics, whites and Asians (though the trend is less pronounced for Asians). For whites, the disparity in 1994 was 4 percentage points, whereas in 2012, that gap had grown to 10 percentage points.

Project these trends out, say, twenty years, and it is clear that women are building for themselves a significant advantage over men in the workplace. According to a report in Bloomberg Businessweek, current trends suggest that by 2020, 61 percent of all college graduates will be women. The magazine writes that “the education grab by girls is amazing news, which could make the 21st the first female century. Already, women are rapidly closing the M.D. and PhD gap and are on the verge of making up the majority of law students, according to the American Bar Assn.”

None of this generates much public-policy focus or concern. As Andrew Sum, director of the Northeastern University Center for Labor Market Studies, says, “No one wants to speak out on behalf of boys.” He adds that as a social-policy or educational issue, “it’s near nonexistent.”

So here we have the thought police sanctioning a corporate executive for insufficient regard for their gender-inequality obsession when current statistics and long-term trends demonstrate that their obsession represents an entirely bogus issue. Young Will McKinley’s wizened mentor had it right. The best way to get ahead is through consistent performance. Good advice for the country, too.

Robert W. Merry is political editor of The National Interest and the author of books on American history and foreign policy. His most recent book is Where They Stand: The American Presidents in the Eyes of Voters and Historians.

Image: Flickr/Willivolt/CC by 2.0