Fact check: Do young, childless women earn more than men?
Do women earn less than men? That's the conventional wisdom and in Australia, the most recent data shows women earn on average 18.2 per cent less than men - the highest gap in 20 years.
Things are different in the United States for people in their twenties, American academic and commentator Kay Hymowitz said on the ABC's Q&A program on September 1, 2014.
Discussing the awkwardness of men in that age group when socialising with women, Ms Hymowitz said: "Women are often making more money than they are and they're very confused about it."
Challenged by a fellow panellist, she said: "In the United States women in their twenties who are childless - those that don't have kids - are earning more than men."
ABC Fact Check investigates whether young American women are earning more than men.
The research
Fact Check asked Ms Hymowitz on what she based her comments. She referred to a Time magazine report on a 2010 study by American market research company Reach Advisors.
The report said the research showed that in some US cities, childless women under the age of 30 were earning up to 20 per cent more than men. In 147 of the largest 150 cities, the corresponding figure was 8 per cent more than men.
The study, drawn from the 2008 United States census, was not published in full.
According to another report on the study in USA Today, young childless women out-earned men in 39 of the 50 biggest cities in the US. Overall, the median full-time salaries of women without children aged between 22 and 30 and living in a major metropolitan area were 8 per cent higher than men's.
But the research showedthat the results for older women, married women, women with children, and women living outside big cities were different.
"The rest of working women - even those of the same age, but who are married or don't live in a major metropolitan area - are still on the less scenic side of the wage divide," the Time article said.
The significance of education
The Time article said Reach Advisors attributed the "reverse gender gap" overwhelmingly to one factor: education. There were three female graduates for every two male graduates. This pushed up the earnings of all women under 30.
Fact Check asked Reach Advisors for a copy of the research, and if they had updated it since 2010. The company did not release the full research in 2010, and would not provide it to Fact Check.
Instead, theirresponse, from Sally Johnstone, was: "This specific data point refers to median, full-time incomes for single, childless women in their twenties versus median full-time incomes for single, childless men in metropolitan areas.
"The emphasis on those points is because the data doesn't hold up when looking at part-time incomes (young men are typically able to earn more than young women in part-time work)."
The median earnings figures don't compare people who have the same jobs and qualifications. They are an aggregate of the salaries of all people in a particular cohort.
"And it's not that women with the same jobs and educations as men out-earn men. Instead it means that young women are more likely than young men to have the academic credentials to fill the jobs in today's knowledge-based economy," Ms Johnstone said.
More recent research into the gender wage gap was published by the American Pew Research Centre.
Its study, which looked at the issue more broadly, found that "in 2012, among workers ages 25 to 34, women's hourly earnings were 93 per cent those of men".
It also found that the median hourly wage for all women over 16 was 84 per cent that of men.
And the research found the gap was closing, stating that: "Today's young women are the first in modern history to start their work lives at near parity with men".
Like the Reach Advisors study, education was cited as a factor. "Women in the younger age cohort were significantly more likely than their male counterparts to have completed a bachelor's degree - 38 per cent versus 31 per cent in 2013," Pew said.
How Australia compares
While the Pew study indicates the gender pay gap is closing in the US, in Australia it is now at the highest level it has been for 20 years.
New government data, released in August 2014, shows Australian women earn 18.2 per cent less than Australian men. This compares with 14.9 per cent in November 2004 and 16.5 per cent in May 1995.
The data also shows that: "The average gender pay gap between women and men working full-time generally increases with age up to the usual age of retirement (around 65 years of age), when the gap begins to narrow due to reduced income in retirement."
As Reach Advisors found in the US, Australian research shows that women in the same jobs and educations earn less than their male counterparts.
Women make up around 57 per cent of the Australian university population, but graduate salaries are still better for men. Research from private and university-sector funded research body Graduate Careers Australia shows female graduates earn less than male graduates with exactly the same qualifications.
In law, the median salary for female graduates is $62,000. For male graduates it's $70,000. In teaching the median starting salary for male graduates is $2,000 more than for female graduates, despite women making up well over three-quarters of all graduates.
According to Graduate Careers Australia, the median salary for all women university graduates is $58,000 and for men, it's $65,000.
Fact Check's May 2014 examination of graduate earnings shows that over their lifetime, male graduates earn significantly more than female graduates.
The verdict
Research shows that for young women, both in the United States and Australia, the gender wage gap still exists.
One study based on data collected six years ago shows that the median salary for young, unmarried, childless women in big US cities was higher than the median salary for the same group of men.
But this did not apply outside big metropolitan centres, or for women in part-time work.
Broader, more recent research from Pew Research Centre shows that US women aged between 25 and 34 earn 93 per cent of the wage of their male counterparts.
Ms Hymowitz said that in the US women in their twenties who are childless are earning more than men. She did not specify that this only applied to unmarried women in full-time work in big metropolitan centres or how old the research was.
Ms Hymowitz is cherrypicking.
Sources
Q&A, Monday, September 1, 2014
Young, single, childless women out-earn male counterparts, USA Today, September 2, 2010
Workplace Salaries: At Last, Women on Top, Time Magazine, September 1, 2010
Gender Pay Gap Statistics, Workplace Gender Equality Agency, August 2014
On Pay Gap, Millennial Women Near Parity – For Now, Pew Research, December 11, 2013
Grad Jobs and Dollars, Graduate Careers Australia, 2013
