The Gray Areas

really thought. What I could see in my current position, if there's a gap, it's not twenty cents on the dollar. But if that was in fact true, Yes, of course that's not right. But it is true as far as I know, that really is what the data shows. I think, yes it is. So this guy knows women are paid less, but the number he hears it it just doesn't sound right him. He looks around, he sees things getting better for women. He just doesn't buy that things could really

be so bad. I don't think it's a conspiracy um, but yes, I think maybe maybe somewhat overlown, especially nowadays, it's a lot of different than it was even ten years ago. So while I recognize that probably is somewhere of a gap, I think that gap is getting smaller. I think there's more opportunities for women these days to advance in their career. Then he said something that reminded me of what I hear in my reporting all the time. It's not that the pay up isn't real exactly, but

that I misunderstanding the data. Basically, the data doesn't show what I say it does. You could look at data, I could look at data, She could look at data, and we could all come up with our own numbers. I mean, it's not a black and white thing. There's a very great area when you look at the world. You know what the population like, where is our place like? Where is our value? Will deserve people for equal work?

This woman, we almost put this gender bias and ourselves, and nationwide the median salary for men is greater than women in ninety nine point six percent of major occupations women. What do very watch? We want to end gender inequality, and to do this we need everyone involved. Well, actually it's the feminist celebrities and politicians spreading this wage camp myth who have the math problems. Ginger Rogers did everything that Freda Stare did. She just did it backwards did

in I Welcome back to the Paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield. This week we are going to investigate the gray areas in the data. We've heard from listeners who feel like the guy from the Bar, and we've also heard from people who don't believe in the pay gap at all. They say that figure the gap between what women and men make in the US is misleading, that it's just an average that doesn't control for people in the same industries or doing the same job. This is a common

critique of pay gap reporting. Here's Britt Hume on Fox News making that same case. Women make different choices about what kinds of jobs they seek in reaction to marriage and childbirth when those things have taken into consideration. Studies have indicated that the pay gap all but evaporates. That phrase, all but evaporates. I heard a lot that the pay gap disappears when you control for things like the fields women tend to work in and the time they take

off to care for their families. The pay gap does get smaller when you control for certain things. But no matter how much Matthew do, it never disappears when you control for job title, company, and industry. One study found that there's still a five point four percent pay gap in the US that's unexplained. We know pay discrimination is

still happening, and that's not right or fair. But I also want to talk about another part of this argument that women make choices to focus on family rather than work and that's why we earn on average less than men. Is that what's really happening. The research does show that women start off at near parody with men in their careers, but after having a kid the gap widens. Is this because women are choosing parenting over working in high paid

jobs because that's what they value. I think that it's a more complicated story than simply that women value family more than careers. I think the whole workplace is really set up so that it's harder for women to be parents than it is for men. That's Robin Ealie. She's a business administration professor at Harvard, and she recently co wrote an article with Kathy Tinsley, a management professor at Georgetown, called What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women.

When she talks about how the workplace is set up better for men, than women. She's partly talking about the rigid nine to five work day and how that makes it harder to say, pick up your kids from school. It's challenging for anyone, regardless of gender, to work a full time job and take care of kids, but we expect women more than men to make it work. And to make it work, women shift to jobs with fewer demands,

flexible schedules, or telecommuting options. The culture is telling them that once you become a mother, to be a good mother, you really need to take those accommodations, whereas for men, it's saying, you know, you really shouldn't take those accommodations because your role is as the bread winner. So men tend to wratch it up after they have kids, and women will be more likely to wratch it back. So the culture and the organization interpret what people should be

doing once they have children. This idea that we expect women to do less at work when they have a child and men to do more. It shows up in the data. Women's earnings decrease four then for every child she has. Men's earnings actually increase six percent when they have kids. These are known as the motherhood penalty and the fatherhood bonus. And even when men and women both act the same at work, the stereotypes we have about

women can hurt their earnings. Here's Kathy Tinsley, Robin's co author. So, when somebody is absent from a meeting, there's oftentimes uncertainties about why that is occurring. Right, you don't have perfect information incorporations about what everybody is doing all the time. And what happens is when you have imperfect information, your brain doesn't really like that in perfect information, and so it fills in that imperfect information with assumptions, with educated

guesses about what that missing information is. And people use gender stereotypes as a way of helping them fill in missing information. And so, what can happen in any meeting where a man may be absent, The assumption is more likely to be, oh, he could be at another client meeting, or he you know, had some emergency come up that was also work related, right, whereas I, if a woman is doing it, it would be more likely to be uh,

family related assumption. So, even if women and men do the same things at work, we imagine a woman's work is suffering because of her family, whereas we don't assume the same thing about a man. Then there's that other point that pay gap skeptics make that women make different choices about what kinds of jobs we seek. As we've talked about on the show before, women do tend to work in jobs that pay less, like teaching and secretarial work. Last week we showed you that those jobs pay less

because women do them. But is working in these jobs always a choice? Take technology, it's a well paid and male dominated field. If women aren't rising to the top or succeeding as coders and engineers, some people say it's because they're just not interested in it or not good at it, and that feeds into this general idea that women don't have the aptitude for math, coding, or other skills that happen to lead to high paying jobs. We're just choosing jobs, lower paying jobs that we just happened

to be suited for. Well, there's a couple of things that are going on there. The first is our women as good at math as men, and the answer there is yes. Um Shelby Hide has been doing research for decades and all of her research shows that the gap between men and women in math ability is small to negligible. You could call it trivial. Then the question becomes, well, if there aren't any inherent differences between men and women and math ability, then why is it that women aren't

entering some fields and men are entering them. One theory that Robin brings up is that those fields they aren't hospitable to women. That's where you have to look into the context. What is it that men and women experience arians in the workplace and are they given the same opportunity to thrive? That question, are women given the same

opportunity as men to thrive? We know that women and men do have different experiences at work, like women experience much higher rates of workplace harassment, and that actually pushes them out of the highest paying jobs in fields. Research has found that when women get harassed, they go to safer jobs, and the more female dominated jobs have much fewer reports of workplace harassment, and those jobs they pay less. But there are more subtle ways our experiences are different too.

There are all kinds of messages that tell women they don't belong in the higher tiers of a company. Does it mean the same thing to strive for a particular job? Is it harder on women to perform in a job where they have power over other people, probably because the stereotype is that women aren't supposed to want to have power, they aren't supposed to want to be ambitious and so um. So it's just it's just harder to live in those jobs.

When we talk about the gender pay gap, we're not talking about people in power, mostly men, conspiring to pay women less. There's no grand conspiracy, just a bunch of systems that don't work well for professional women because they were never designed to. As hard as the aggregate number is to understand, even when we hear stories from individual women that are telling us exactly how much less they're making, we don't always see it as a part of the

pay gap. Our next story is about a time a woman pointed out something that seemed unfair and the world came back at her with a million reasons why she can't be mad about it. Earlier this year, comedian and actress Monique went public about a salary negotiation with Netflix that went south. She said she was offered way less to do a comedy special than what famous men and white women had been paid it. She asked her fans to do something kind of major boycott Netflix. Her story

went viral, but not in a good way. People didn't rally behind Monique like they rallied behind other women in Hollywood. They told her she didn't deserve more money to say, what kind of reactions was I expecting? I don't. I wasn't expecting the reaction of, oh, we'll just do it because Monique said it. I was expecting for us to research what it is that I'm saying. Jordan Holman spoke to Monique about her experience. In January, Monique posted a

video on Instagram. This was not a typical Monique post. Her feed is mostly clips of her working out and dancing, or promoting the podcast she does with her husband, Sydney. Most of the time, she starts her videos with hey my Babies. On that Sunday, she went script, hey my loves I am asking that you stand with me and Boycotton Netflix for gender bias and color bias. I was off for a five dollars dere last week to do a comedy special. However, Amy Sheen was offred eleven million dollars,

Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle twenty million dollars. A popular fan revolt from Netflix didn't happen. The general reaction was not pro Monique. In blog posts and tweets, comedy fans were skeptical about the comedians called to action. Words like delusional, loudmouth, and ignorant were being thrown around. A few people defended Monique, but most said she was basically stepping outside of her lane.

Here's Tony Rock, Chris Rock's brother, talking to TMZ. She's calling it color bias and gender bias in her words on stage long She's been a long time, and I thought it was expressly interesting that people were reacting like

this is to Monique. At the start of this year, which was also at the height of the Me too movement, the public was learning that other big name actresses like Michelle Williams and Claire Foy from the Netflix series The Crown were paid less than their male co stars, But the audience response to those Hollywood pay gaps was very different. People got really mad about it. Claire for it even ended up getting back pay. I talked to Monique about all of this in March. Hello, Hi, this is Jordan's

Hey Joean not are you doing baby? It's Monique? Good. How are you today? I'm wonderful I'm so glad. I asked her if she was surprised that people seemed to respond differently to her pay gap than those other actresses. It didn't surprise me because of what the package looks like in Monique, it's a problem. And those subsists that you named their white women. Correct, yes, right. So when our wife used to say, listen, this is not right,

we listen, and we should and we should. Now if I'm a fat black woman, so people are really looking at me like have you lost your mind? You should just be grateful they let you in because you've got three strikes going against you. You're a woman, you black, and you fat, and you want to take a stand girl. Monique is one of the most famous black female comedians in America, but even before this Instagram post, she has always been the type of celebrity that you either love

or hate. She has a huge personality in her comedy Isn't for everyone. Black women don't give a we don't give a we don't give a about we don't give a we don't give a Girl. You're gonna work them off, girl, that y'all. In the early two thousand's, she was everywhere. She had the Monique Show. She wrote books, she appeared on sitcoms, but what I know her from is The Parkers, her number one hit sitcom on the UPN network about a single mother and her dizzy daughter. If you were

a black girl like me, it was Appointment TV. Monique moved to l A to pursue acting. When she was thirty, she got the offer to start on her own show, The Parkers. After only ninety days in Hollywood. When they told her how much she'd be making, she felt like a kid in the candy shop. So I was a little girl. I didn't know the egg question. I didn't know to say what's ratings because no one told it to me. So when they told me I would be making a week, what you mean every you mean every week?

I would I would give this. Well, that's more money, Jordan than my parents made. Monique star kept rising, and in two thousand nine she landed something very rare for a black woman, an Oscar nomination, not for her comedy, but for her role in the serious drama Pruscious. And that's when something happened that earned her reputation as a troublemaker in Hollywood. See winning an Oscar involves its own separate kind of side job. You don't just sit back and let the Academy honor you. You have to do

something called an Oscar campaign. It involves going on junkets, doing interviews and pressed lunches, and sometimes being on the road for months. Monique she refused to do all of that. She says she was busy with her family. She was raising two young twins during the Oscar season for Pruscious, she wanted to stay home with them and watched Curious George. She says, the directors and producers didn't care. Everything was

simply about the business. We hear all of that, but we need you here, and I understand that because at the time we were coming from three people that have no families. Monique won the Oscar anyway, making her one of only eight black women to ever when an acting Oscar first. I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics. But looking back, Monique says that even though she won the Oscar, refusing to do that Oscar campaign

that hurt her career. I got labeled as difficult and demanding. It's hard to know how much that difficult and demanding label hurt her, but after Pressures, the jobs definitely slowed down. She's only done two stand up specials in the past decade. She's been in a handful of movies since Pressures, but none of them have been nearly as big. So that brings us to the beginning of when she gets this

offer from Netflix. Even though she hadn't had a big hit in a while, the amount they were offering, five hundred thousand dollars, sounded really low to her compared to the tens of millions she knew other comedians were offered. She says that her team, which includes her attorney, Ricky Anderson, and her husband's Sidney Hicks, who is also her manager, had to fight to even get Netflix VP Robbie Prawe

on the phone to talk about the offer. Netflix declined to speak on this podcast, saying that they do not comment on contract negotiations, but the conversation Monique describes once they eventually did have a conference call with the studio shows you just how difficult it can be to prove your value as an entertainer. Monique and her team felt like they could make a case that she was worth more by any standard Robbie Praue could I'm up with but whenever they made their case, he would just change

the standard. Monique's people said she was worth more than five hundred thousand dollars because of things like her oscar. Robbie Prau said, that was Monique's resume, and they didn't look at resumes. They asked why Amy schumers steel was so much bigger, and he said, well, she sold out Madison Square Garden twice and she had a big hit over the summer. So Sydney said, is that not Amy Schuma's resume? And you know how quiet it is right now? Jordan's yes, that's how quiet it was. On the phone.

We talked about the gender pay gap a lot, but if you're a black woman, you also face a racial pay gap. It's really tricky to know which one affects you more. We know women make eighty cents to the dollar on average, but if you're a black woman, you get sixty three cents to a white man's dollar and ninety three cents compared to black men. Here is Monique being told that the market value for her entertainment was less, way less than a white woman or a black man

was it her qualifications, her race, her gender. It's impossible to ever say for sure. And that's what's so crazy for anyone who's ever been in a negotiation like this. If you're one of those people who knows Monique as a comedian and you're just not into her jokes, you might think she's ridiculous for comparing herself to Amy Schumer or Dave Chappelle. But a few people had her back. But then you have those other people saying you better not sit down, you better keep standing, you better keep

speaking up and speaking out. After all, she says, Schumer and Chappelle were offered twenty two times more and forty times more respectively than she was for a similar job, or they worth that much more than her. Comedian Wanda Sykes thankful Nique for sharing what Netflix seemed to be offering black women compared to men in white women. Wanda Sykes, she said Netflix offered her two hundred and fifty dollars

for her own comedy special. And when I called for that boycott, there have been people that have said calling for a boycott was extreme, and I want to be the first to tell people calling for a boycott is extreme. It was extremely extreme. However, isn't inequality extreme, injustice is extreme. Some people might hear Monique story and say hers was

obviously not a case of discrimination. She had barely worked in comedy since the Carker's and some just don't find her appealing, but take the reason since why she hasn't worked and why she's not always appealing, her gender, her race, and even her size are all part of it. That's how a lot of the gender pay gap plays out. Women make less than men for what seemed like innocent reasons, but when you dig deeper, the real reasons have everything

to do with the fact that they're women. Next week, on The Paycheck, we'll go to a country that thinks it knows how to fix the pay gap, how by forcing big business to come clean. Thanks for listening to The Paycheck. If you like the show, head on over to Apple Podcasts and rate, review and subscribe. We appreciate all feedback, even those one star reviews from people who don't believe in the pay gap. This episode of The Paycheck was reported by Jordan Holman Max Abelson and hosted

and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was edited by Francesca Levi and produced by Liz Smith. We also had helped from Magnus Hendrickson, Gillian Goodman, and Janet Paskin. Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie vander Riott did the illustrations on our show page, which you can find at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck. Francesco Levy is Bloomberg's head of podcasts