Women’s Equality Day earnings data stuff and suffrage note

Tomorrow is Women’s Equality Day, which commemorates the day, in 1920, when U.S. women were granted the right to vote. (Asterisk: White women.)

One historical story

Congress finally passed a Constitutional amendment for women’s suffrage in 1918, after decades of activism. The suffrage movement in the end successfully made a few convincing arguments – and one clarification. The most important may have been that White women had proved their patriotism during the war, and so they finally deserved the vote. I wrote in 1996:

“No one thing connected with the war is of more importance at this time than meeting the reasonable demand of millions of patriotic and Christian women of the Nation that the amendment for woman suffrage be submitted to the states,” declared Representative James Cantrill. And, he added, “Right, justice, liberty and democracy have always been, and will always be, safe in the tender care of American womanhood.”

And you know what he meant by “American womanhood” (an image the mainstream suffrage movement encouraged to various degrees over the years):

American Progress, by John Gast (1872)

The important clarification was that women’s suffrage would absolutely not hurt White supremacy in the South. You know how it is when you just need that Southern vote. I went on:

If reluctant congressmen would only believe in the contribution of white women that was waiting to be made, suffrage advocates explained, the political math was irresistible. “There are more white women of voting age in the South to-day than there are negro men and women together,” [Congress’s only woman, Jeannette] Rankin said. Representative Scott Ferris assured them that poll taxes and literacy tests would remain untouched, so that “for every negro woman so enfranchised there will be hundreds and thousands of intelligent white women enfranchised” (Congressional Record 1918, 779). And Representative Thomas Blanton proclaimed, “So far as State rights are concerned, if this amendment sought to take away from any State the right of fixing the qualifications of its voters, I would be against it first, last, and all the time, but such it does not.” Although states should be allowed to set qualifications for voting, he believed, they could not do so at the expense of undermining true republicanism, and, “if you deny the 14,000,000 white women of this country the right to vote, you are interfering with a republican form of government [Applause]” (786). That day, the House passed the amendment with the required two-thirds vote.

Anyway, rights are rights, America is America, history is history (ha ha).

Some pay gap numbers

Back to nowadays. Today’s numbers come from some analysis of the gender earnings gap I did to support the Council on Contemporary Families brief for Women’s Equality Day. One big story is women’s rising education levels, especially BA completion.

In the active labor force as often described (age 25-54, working at least 20 hours per week and 26 weeks in the previous year), women surpassed men in BA completion in 2002:

That’s very good for women with regard to the earnings gap, because at every level of education men earn more than women. Women’s full-time full-year earnings are between 70% and 80% of men’s at all education levels except the highest, where they diverge: men who are doctors and lawyers earn much more than women, while women PhDs are doing relatively well. Here’s the 2015 breakdown by education:

With the education trend and differentials in mind, consider these multivariate model results. Going back to the sample of 25-54-year-old people working at least half-time and half the year, here are two results. The first line, in blue, shows the gender earnings ratio when only age is controlled. It shows women gaining on men from 2000 to 2016, from 77% to 83%. This is not much progress for 25 years, but it’s the slow pace we’ve come to expect during that time. The other line shows result from a more complete model, which adds controls for education, race/ethnicity, marital status, and presence of children; it shows even less progress.

In the full model (orange line) the relative gains for women are not as great. (Note I don’t include occupation in the “full” model although that’s very important; it’s just also an outcome of gender so I let it be in the gender variable for descriptive purposes.)

In the old days, when women had less education than men, controlling for education shrank the gap; now it appears the opposite is true. I haven’t done the whole decomposition to confirm this, but here’s another way to look at it. The next figure shows the same models, but in two separate samples, with and without BA degrees (and no control for education). The figure shows little progress within education groups. This implies it’s the increase in education for women that is driving the progress seen in the previous figure.

In conclusion: there is a substantial gender earnings gap at every level of education. The limited progress toward equality we’ve seen in the past 25 years may be driven by increases in women’s education.

There is a lot of other research on this — especially about segregation, which I didn’t include here — and a lot more to be done.

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This is a little analysis, but if you’d like to do more, or see how I did what I’ve shown here, I posted the Stata code, data from IPUMS.org, codebook, and spreadsheet file on the Open Science Framework site here. You can use any of it for whatever you like, with a citation that looks like this one the OSF generates:

Cohen, P. N. (2017, August 25). Gender wage gap analysis, 1992-2016. Retrieved from osf.io/mhp3z

Kids these days really know how to throw off a narrative on gender and families

The most important thing is that Stephanie Coontz has written another very good, and very important, New York Times essay. It describes a “slippage” in support for gender equality among young people these days, and warns that without improved work-family policies, progress toward egalitarian family arrangements may be imperiled. The piece also announced a package of short papers in a Council on Contemporary Families symposium, which provided the supporting evidence. (This kind of work, incidentally, is why I’m a proud member, and board member, of CCF.) If you haven’t read Stephanie’s essay, I recommend reading it now, and if you forget to come back here that’s fine.

Anyway, an unfortunate confluence of events created some chaos after the piece came out. First, the NYTimes wrote a headline, “Do Millennial Men Want Stay-at-Home Wives?”, that emphasized only one piece of the evidence. It referred to a figure showing General Social Survey data on the trend in very young men and women (ages 18-25) disagreeing with the statement, “It is much better for everyone involved if the man is the achiever outside the home and the woman takes care of the home and family.” (That is the classic FEFAM question, to GSS fans, asked since 1977. I’ve used it myself, and it figures in the key analysis of stalled gender progress by Cotter, Hermsen, and Vanneman.)

This was the figure, showing a marked divergence between men and women:

The second event was the unfortunate timing: between the time Stephanie wrote the piece and the day it appeared, the General Social Survey released its 2016 round of data (it’s been running every two years). The survey is fickle. It’s very good quality and has many great demographic and attitude items running for 40 years, making it the best source for analyzing many social trends. But it’s not that big. In 2014 it had 2,867 respondents, of whom only 141 were ages 18-25. So it wasn’t surprising that the 2016 numbers were different from the 2014 numbers, but the scale of the blip was shocking, as reported independently by Emily Beam and Neal Caren. Here is what the updated trend looks like:

Yikes. As exciting as it is for survey analysts to see such a wild swing, it’s not what anyone wants to see the day after their NYTimes piece drops. We can’t know yet what happened, but on further inspection, at least we can say that it’s not limited to the youngest group and its small sample. Among men ages 26-54, the percentage disagreement with FEFAM also jumped, from 73.7 to 78.3 (women 26-54 were up one point).* In fact, 2014 may have been as big a blip as 2016, you just wouldn’t notice because it continued the trend.

Anyway, back for a minute to the main point. Joanna Pepin, who co-wrote one of the symposium pieces with David Cotter (and who is also an advisee of mine), has pointed out that the divergence between men and women is secondary to the main trend, which is the reversal of progress on FEFAM for both men and women since the mid-1990s. They used the Monitoring the Future survey, and find a big drop in FEFAM disagreement among high school seniors — regardless of gender. Here’s their key figure, with the FEFAM trend shown in green (their full paper is available on SocArXiv):

So that is the most important news: a big reversal among young adults on attitudes toward homemaker-breadwinner family arrangements.

Now, If you’ve now read Stephanie’s piece, and Joanna’s, and you’re back, here’s a little more on the minor kerfuffle that arose over the new data.

When to call a trend a trend

I don’t think Stephanie was wrong to use the GSS trend, although it might have been better to widen the age range, or pool the data over several years. The bigger problem was the headline selling that divergence as the main story, which it wasn’t in the grand scheme. (The fact that so many jumped on the story shows how good they are at headline writing.) But even that wasn’t really wrong, given the information they had. The Op-Ed staff checked the facts, and the facts were the facts. Until yesterday.

To confirm this, I ran some tests on the gender divergence in the data they used (I started with code that Neal shared; it’s at the bottom). I started at 1994, the last peak of the trend, to look for the divergence after that, which is what Stephanie referred to. First, here is what you get if you run a logistic model that controls for race/ethnicity and individual years of age (two things that changed over the last two decades), and enters the years individually in an interaction with gender (those are 95% confidence intervals).

If you stop at 2014, it looks like men are pulling away from women (in the direction of “traditional” attitudes), but it’s not definitive. And obviously 2016 is an issue. To help with the small samples, I ran a linear test of the year trend, that is, entering year as a continuous variable instead of individual years. I did it ended at 2014 and then through 2016. Here are the results:

In the 1994-2014 model, the Male*Year interaction is statistically significant at conventional levels, which in my opinion means it’s legit to say men were pulling away from women. Of course 2016 ruined that; if you had 2016 and didn’t use it, that would be really wrong. There are other ways to slice it, but at some point we have to call a trend a trend and deal with it. It was a reasonable decision. Of course, new data always comes along (until the last trend of all, whatever that is), no trend lasts forever; it’s just a shame when it comes along the next day. In addition, though I’m not showing it because it’s boring, if you didn’t disaggregate the trends by gender, you would also see a significant decline in FEFAM disagreement after 1994, which gets to Joanna’s point.

Anyway, score one for sociology Twitter. People came up with the data, shared code and results, and discussed interpretations. It got back to Stephanie and the NYTimes editors, and within a day they added an addendum to the original piece:

Update: After this article was posted, 2016 data from the General Social Survey became available, adding some nuance to this analysis. The latest numbers show a rebound in young men’s disagreement with the claim that male-breadwinner families are superior. The trend still confirms a rise in traditionalism among high school seniors and 18-to-25-year-olds, but the new data shows that this rise is no longer driven mainly by young men, as it was in the General Social Survey results from 1994 through 2014.

This is pretty much how it’s supposed to work. As the Car Guys used to say, if you never stall you’re wearing out your clutch (sorry, Millennials). If you never overshoot an analysis of trends you’re probably waiting too long to get the information out.

* Note: I originally accidentally described this as “over 25.” 

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You can get the data here. Here’s the STATA code:

/* recodes */

recode fefam (1/2=0) (3/4=1), gen(fefam_d)
gen young=age>=18&age<=25
recode sex (2=0), gen(male)

/* the model for the figure */

logit fefam_d i.year##i.male i.age i.race if year>=1994 & young==1 [pweight = wtssall]
margins year##male
marginsplot

/* the models for the table */

logit fefam_d c.year##i.male i.age i.race if year>=1994 & young==1 & year<=2014 [pweight = wtssall]
logit fefam_d c.year##i.male i.age i.race if year>=1994 & young==1 [pweight = wtssall]

Sex segregation propositions in 140 characters

In response to an annoying conversation on Twitter about this short paper, which felt very familiar, here is an argument about the sex segregation of work, in the form of unsourced propositions of 140 characters or less. You can find most of these in longer form in various posts under the segregation tag. It’s tweetstorm, in one post!

Many studies show men and women have mean differences in personality and preferences, although there is overlap in the distributions; but

Every respondent in any such study was born and raised in a male-dominated society, because all societies are male dominated.

Most people in the debates I see, being elites, act like everyone is a college graduate who chose their job, or “field” of work; but

We know lots of people are in jobs they didn’t freely choose or didn’t get promoted out of, for reasons related to gender (like pregnancy).

No one knows how much segregation results from differences in choices of workers vs. parent/employer/educator pressure or constraints; and

The level of sex segregation varies across social contexts (across space and time), which means it is not all caused by biology; and

Because segregation causes inequality and constrains human freedom, and we have the means to reduce it, the biology theory is harmful; so

Go ahead and study the biology of sex differences, because society is interesting, but don’t use that as an excuse for inequality.

Gender on the Diane Rehm show in September

The last Media Matters report on the Sunday TV talk shows reported that 73% of guests were men in 2015, a little less than the 75% recorded for the previous two years. (That includes journalists as well as politicos.) I expect my local NPR station, with its liberal audience, to have a better showing for women, and it does. The Diane Rehm Show, which is produced at WAMU but distributed nationally as well as podcasted, had 129 guests in September, and 80 of them (62%) were men, by my manual count. (I’m not counting the hosts, who changed over the month.)

But what has been striking me lately, and the reason I did the count, was how rarely it seems that women are in the majority among the guests, and especially how often there is one woman and more than one man. Without a whole conversation analysis, you can imagine the kind of dynamic that made me think, “sure is a high male/female word-count ratio in this discussion.”

The count confirms this. The show averaged 2.8 guests per episode. So how are the men and women distributed? Of the 46 shows aired in September, 12 featured just one guest, 8 of whom were male. Male guests outnumbered female guests overall in 29 episodes, or 63% of the shows. Female guests outnumbered men in only 8 shows (17%), with the remaining 9 (20%) being gender balanced. What accounts for my annoyance, maybe, was that in those male-dominated shows, more than half (16 of 29) featured just one woman and more than one man. The reverse – one man and more than one woman – happened just three times. Details in the figure.

The most common configuration is one woman and two men. 

My point is just that a 62% / 38% gender split leads to a lot of small-group discussions where men outnumber women, and especially solo-women versus multiple men, which is its own kind of gender situation. I imagine you get this pretty often in cases – say, at an academic conference – where there is some effort to reach gender balance on most panels, but women are less than half altogether. (You can see they were paying attention because there were no all-male panels of four or five.)

I’ll leave it to Media Matters to do their annual report again next year, but I did take a quick look at some of the Sunday shows for September. On Meet the Press I found 62% men, and 75% of the shows were male-dominated. On Fox News Sunday 71% of guests were male, and every show was male-dominated. Face the Nation had 72% male guests but also every one male-dominated. (Incidentally, Face the Nation has a convenient list of every guest so far for the year, so I was able quickly tally the gender of their 348 guests, 73% of whom were men, counting multiple appearances. That’s a tiny bit better than their 2015 total of 76%.)

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Related on gender composition:

• Gender and the sociology faculty
• The most comprehensive analysis ever of the gender of New York Times writers

81 countries made more progress than the USA on women’s representation

The Inter-Parliamentary Union has a great archive of women’s representation in parliaments in most countries, from 1997 to 2016. I made this figure using the numbers for the lower houses (or single houses, if only one), which in the USA is the House of Representatives.

From 1997 to 2016, women rose from 12% to 19% of House members. During that time, for 163 countries, the average rose from 10% to 21%. When I cut the list down to 137, arbitrarily excluding a lot of very small countries, the USA slipped from 54th place to 84th place. Here’s the breakdown of changes in those countries (click to enlarge):

At this rate, in just 36 more years the House will get to the level of women’s representation that Hanna Rosin said Congress was at in 2012.

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Previous posts:

• Women in parliaments, by income
• Marriage and gender inequality in 124 countries
• Fact pattern: Women’s life expectancy advantage

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Note: The code for making this figure in Stata looks like this:

gr twoway scatter rank16 rank97, mlabel(country) mlabposition(0) msymbol(i)

Before tinkering with the appearance and titles in the graph editor.

Why male and female ‘breadwinners’ aren’t equivalent (in one chart)

Here’s a quick addition to some old posts on breadwinners (here and here).

Nowadays, women are much more likely to earn more income than their husbands do. But this is a shift, not a revolution, because very very few women are the kind of breadwinner that men used to be.

Using data on 18-64 year-old married wives (and their husbands*) from Decennial Censuses and the 2014 American Community Survey (via IPUMS.org), here are some facts from 2014:

• In 2014, 25% of wives earn more than their spouses (up from 15% in 1990 and 7% in 1970).
• The average wife-who-earns-more takes home 68% of the couple’s earnings. The average for higher-earning husbands is 82%.
• In 40% of the wife-earns-more couples, she earns less than 60% of the total, compared with 18% for husbands.
• It is almost 9-times more common for a husband to earn all the money than a wife (19.6% versus 2.3%).

Here is the distribution of income in married couples (wife ages 18-64; the bars add to 100%):

Male and female breadwinners are not equivalent; making $.01 more than your spouse doesn’t make you a 1950s breadwinner, or the “primary earner” of the family. (Also, you might call a single mother a breadwinner or primary earner, but not if you’re describing trends from a gender-equality perspective.)

* I forgot that in 0.5% of the 2014 cases the wife’s spouse is also a woman, so it would be more accurate to replace “husband” with “spouse” in the facts that follow.

When the map says race but all you can talk about is fatherhood

Raj Chetty and colleagues have a new paper showing that “childhood environments play an important role in shaping gender gaps in adulthood.” Essentially, boys from poor or or single parents are doing worse. Also, this gender difference is greater in Black and poor places.

The tricky thing with this data, and I don’t blame Chetty et al. for this, although I would like them to say more about it, is that they don’t know the race of the children. The data are from tax records, which allow you to know the income and marital status of the parents, but not the race. But they know where they grew up. So if they have a strong effect of the racial composition of the county kids grow up in, but they don’t know the race of the kids, you have to figure a big part of that is race of the kids — and by “you” I mean someone who knows anything about America.

So here’s their map of the gender difference in employment rates associated with having poor parents:

To help make the point, here is their list of local areas at the top and bottom of the map:

I hope that is enough to make the point for the demographically literate reader.

I credit them in this paper for at least using percent Black as a variable, which they oddly omitted from a previous analysis. This allows the careful reader to see that this is the most important local-area variable — which makes perfect sense because it is doing the work of the individual data, which doesn’t include race.

Wow!

It’s important that these examples are all about employment rates. We know that the penalty for being a Black man is especially large for employment, partly because of the direct effects of mass incarceration, but also because of discrimination, some of which is directly related to incarceration and the rest of which may be affected by its aura. This is not something we measure well. Our employment reporting system does not include prison records. Prisoners are excluded from the Current Population Survey, but then included when they are released. So they show up as jobless (mostly) men.

Whenever you see something about how race affects poor men, you have to think hard about what incarceration is doing there — we can’t just rely on the data in front of us and assume it’s telling the whole story, when we know there is a massive influence not captured in the data.

This is exactly what marriage promoters delight in doing. I give just one example, a blog post by the Brookings Institution’s Richard Reeves, which — amazingly, astoundingly, remarkably, disappointingly, not surprisingly — discusses the effect of growing up poor and “less-educated” in Baltimore (Baltimore!) without once mentioning race or incarceration. Instead, he goes right to this:

Wanted: Fathers

Of course, there is much more to being a man than money: in fact, to define masculinity in breadwinning terms alone is a fatal move. As Barack Obama said on Fathers’ Day seven years ago, fathers are “teachers and coaches. They are mentors and role models.” But as he also said, “too many fathers are missing—missing from too many lives and too many homes.” In its poorest neighborhoods, America faces a fathering deficit, one that will make it even harder for the boys of today to make it as men in the new world.

Fatherhood is important. You could investigate a fathering deficit, but if you really cared about it you want to look at in the context of well-known, massive causes of harm to Black boys in America, chief among them racism and mass incarceration.