metaMOMphorsis

Image: Kittikun Atsawintarangkul (FreeDigitalPhotos.net)

One thing that continues to baffle me is how secretive the majority of us are about our salaries. Yes, I understand that it is not an appropriate topic to discuss amongst polite company – I totally get that with regard to conversations outside of work. But in the workplace, wouldn’t transparency regarding salaries help to keep all of us honest – employer and employee alike?  There would be less cause to worry about being shortchanged due to gender, race, marital status, parental status, and sexual orientation. Theoretically, we could be reassured that our pay would be directly commensurate with our performance.

I became even more convinced about this position after learning about a recent study regarding pay for women.

It is widely known that the gender wage gap has women earning 77 cents to every dollar their male counterparts make (according to census data).  Many of us have suspected that there is an even deeper discrepancy in wages when comparing the pay of working non-mothers with that of working mothers, but I have not been aware of any solid proof of these wage differences.  That is, until I learnt of a recent study, co-authored by Kate Krause, an economy professor from the University of New Mexico, that found that women who have children now earn 7 to 14 percent less than women who do not have children.

As a society, we have embraced any number of reasons for this discrepancy – mothers tend to opt out of full-time work, they stop trying to climb the corporate ladder, or they begin to accept positions below their skill set, etc.  But what if the commonly accepted reasons do not fully account for the pay discrepancies?  Continue reading →