Kindly Póg Mo Thóin

I’m inclined to think that the recent study showing that young single women in certain cities outearn men is not really an indication that the pay gap is closing for certain people. I knew it just from the picture caption:

Melissa J. Manfro, center, theorizes that young female lawyers outearn male peers because they begin earlier, to prepare for starting families.

Here’s the thing: if young female lawyers start earlier than their male peers, then those aren’t really their peers in terms of pay. Law firms, especially the big ones, are wedded to a system of hiring, pay and promotion for associates that’s based on your class year, which rises in lockstep. So all first-year associates at a firm earn the same thing, and they all get the same raise when the next year’s class starts and they become second-year associates. So your peer group at a law firm is the other people in your class year at the firm, not people your age, or people you graduated law school with who took a year off to travel before starting at the firm and thus are a year behind you in seniority.

And lo and behold, the study doesn’t compare actual peers, but groups of age peers:

The analysis was prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College, who first reported his findings in Gotham Gazette, published online by the Citizens Union Foundation. It shows that women of all educational levels from 21 to 30 living in New York City and working full time made 117 percent of men’s wages, and even more in Dallas, 120 percent. Nationwide, that group of women made much less: 89 percent of the average full-time pay for men.

Not that the study isn’t interesting in that it shows that the young women who flock to cities after graduation find greater opportunity there than in the suburbs, and that one of the factors in holding suburban women back may be the earlier average age of marriage there:

Just why young women at all educational levels in New York and other big cities have fared better than their peers elsewhere is a matter of some debate. But a major reason, experts say, is that women have been graduating from college in larger numbers than men, and that many of those women seem to be gravitating toward major urban areas.

In 2005, 53 percent of women in their 20s working in New York were college graduates, compared with only 38 percent of men of that age. And many of those women are not marrying right after college, leaving them freer to focus on building careers, experts said.

“Citified college-women are more likely to be nonmarried and childless, compared with their suburban sisters, so they can and do devote themselves to their careers,” said Andrew Hacker, a Queens College sociologist and the author of “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women.”

Of course, that makes it sound like suburban women’s lower pay relative to men is a function not of structural inequities but of simple lack of dedication to the work. And it tells us nothing of what happens to “citified” women when they marry and/or have kids; presumably, they get mommy-tracked and penalized while their husbands get a benefit.

It is not clear whether this is the front edge of a trend in which women will gradually move ahead of men in all age groups. Typically, women have fallen further behind men in earnings as they get older. That is because some women stop working altogether, work only part time or encounter a glass ceiling in promotions and raises.

And young men in the city are outearning women in some jobs, including some traditionally-female jobs:

Young men in the city still make more than young women in a number of jobs, including psychologist, registered nurse, high school teacher, bank teller and bartender.

Again, I’m not sure if that’s a function of comparing all people from 21-30 in those jobs, or comparing men and women of similar education and experience. It just seems that this is the kind of thing that should be controlled for if these findings are going to be worth anything.

See also Ann and Bean.