Equal pay for equal work has been a cornerstone of federal law for more than half a century — ever since the enactment of the Equal Pay Act of 1963.
But just because it’s a matter of law doesn’t mean it has been put into practice.
The reality, as shown by a new Bizwomen study, is that the gaps between male and female workers can vary dramatically between occupations.
Men and women are reasonably close to being equal in many fields, including food services, education, transportation and light factory work. But they’re far apart in many others, such as heavy industry, law enforcement, nursing and secretarial work.
Bizwomen analyzed 111 major occupational groups, looking for jobs that employ men and women in roughly equal numbers at comparable pay levels. Those two factors — the distribution of jobs and median earnings — drove the formula that determined each field’s final score.
An occupation could earn a perfect score of 100 points only if it were completely balanced. The numbers of full-time male and female employees would need to be identical, as would the median weekly earnings for both genders.
It should come as no surprise that no such perfect occupation exists.
But there is one that comes close. So which job is it?
Food preparation workers are No. 1 in Bizwomen’s rankings, with a gender equity score of 96.67 on a 100-point scale.
There are 398,000 full-time food preparation workers across the country, according to 2013 figures from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). These kitchen helpers don’t cook, but they do handle related tasks, such as preparing cold foods, slicing meat and brewing coffee or tea.
The field doesn’t offer big paychecks, but it is remarkably balanced, as shown by BLS data on employment and earnings:
- Full-time food preparation jobs are almost evenly distributed: 51.9 percent men, 48.1 percent women.
- Median weekly earnings are virtually the same: $392 for males, $380 for females.
The lowest-rated occupation
It’s a much different story for driver/sales workers and truck drivers, the complex name used by BLS to cover pizza delivery people, cement truck operators, moving van drivers and others who drive light or heavy trucks for a living. They’re last in Bizwomen’s rankings with a gender equity score of 55.40.
Men hold 2.48 million jobs in this field, accounting for 95.9 percent of the national base of 2.59 million. The 106,000 women who drive trucks and other delivery vehicles generally receive much smaller paychecks. Median weekly earnings are $738 for men and $583 for women, a disparity of 21 percent.
A few possible explanations
An obvious question is raised by the gap between the top and bottom occupations in Bizwomen’s gender equity rankings: Is this disparity the result of illegal discrimination or natural selection?
Discrimination is cited as the overriding factor by many critics, including The Wage Project Inc., a nonprofit organization dedicated to economic equality.
“The wage gap is the result of a variety of forms of sex discrimination in the workplace, including discrimination in hiring, promotion and pay, sexual harassment, occupational segregation, bias against mothers and other ways in which women workers and women’s work are undervalued,” The Wage Project writes on its website.
But some analysts contend that wage disparities are natural. Men seem more willing to enter technical fields or tackle dangerous jobs that pay well, according to this view, while women are more likely to leave the workforce to care for their families.
“Women tend to trade income for fulfillment, flexibility, family and safety,” writes political scientist Warren Farrell, the author of “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It.”
This debate has raged ever since the federal law was passed half a century ago, and it shows no signs of abating.
Running down the top 10
BLS’ occupational titles can be cumbersome (as noted above) or occasionally vague, but they do provide the best available breakdown of jobs across the country. If you need additional information about any of the classifications below, click here.
The following are the 10 occupations that received the best gender equity scores from Bizwomen:
1. Food preparation workers
2. Electrical, electronics and electromechanical assemblers
3. Packers and packagers, hand
4. Bakers
5. Biological scientists
6. Purchasing managers
7. Compliance officers
8. Wholesale and retail buyers, except farm products
9. Bus drivers
10. Emergency medical technicians and paramedics
Women hold a majority of the jobs in four of these fields, peaking at 55.3 percent for wholesale and retail buyers. Men are most prevalent among emergency medical technicians and paramedics, holding 58.6 percent of those jobs.
Median paychecks are larger for men in eight of the top 10 occupations, with the widest advantage being 10.5 percent among biological scientists and purchasing managers. The exceptions are bakers (where women earn 7.4 percent more) and wholesale and retail buyers (6.8 percent more).
And the bottom 10
At the opposite end of the equity scale are these 10 occupations, beginning with last place:
111. Driver/sales workers and truck drivers
110. First-line supervisors of production and operating workers
109. Miscellaneous agricultural workers
108. Secretaries and administrative assistants
107. Receptionists and information clerks
106. Securities, commodities and financial services sales agents
105. Laborers and freight, stock and material movers
104. Police and sheriff’s patrol officers
103. Personal financial advisers
102. Software developers, applications and systems software
Men enjoy huge edges in employment in eight of the bottom 10 occupations. But women are similarly prominent among secretaries and administrative assistants (94.6 percent of all jobs) and receptionists and information clerks (91.9 percent).
Median earnings are larger for men in all 10 of the lowest-rated occupations. The biggest gap exists among securities, commodities and financial services sales agents, who are more commonly known as stockbrokers. The typical woman in that field earns 37.9 percent less than her male counterpart.
Bizwomen’s study was confined to occupations that draw at least 50,000 workers from each gender. If a field has fewer than 50,000 male or female employees, BLS does not generate earnings data, making it impossible to produce a comprehensive rating.
That means a few heavily unbalanced occupations are not included in the gender equity standings. BLS, for example, found only 2,000 men who are dental hygienists, vastly outnumbered by the 80,000 women in the field. And the federal agency did not identify any female roofers or brickmasons at all.