Ain’t Choice A Bitch?

Well, sociologists have finally discovered something we argued in the Sears case over thirty years ago. (My long discussion of EEOC v. Sears, Roebuck and Co., 628 F. Supp. 1264 (1986), 839 F.2d 302 (1988), can be found in the last three-fourths of this post.)

Inside Higher Ed reports this morning on a paper by Prof. Donna Bobbitt-Zeher of Ohio State University that

links women’s and men’s college majors with earning gaps by gender, after graduation. And even as the earning gaps nationally have declined, the study says, the share of the gap attributable to college major has grown….

When controlling for all available factors, Bobbitt-Zeher found that the choice of major explained 19 percent of the income gap between college-educated men and women for the high school class of 1999, nearly twice as much of an impact as could be documented for the class that graduated 20 years earlier.

The operative phrase here is “When controlling for all available factors.” I’m going to assume now that you’ve just re-read — or, failing that, just read for the first time — my post on the Sears case linked above. If you have you will know that in that case the EEOC assumed — or more accurately, took as an article of faith — that men and women were equally interested in, qualified for, and available to take all jobs at Sears. Thus it began with an expectation that all positions would split 50-50 between men and women. That assumption, faith, expectation was then qualified by “controlling for available factors,” such as representation in the relevant labor pool, hours available to work, experience, distance willing to travel from home, etc., etc, all of which had the effect of reducing the 50-50 expectation. Yes, all “available factors” reduced the percentage of women one (or at least the EEOC) would “expect” to find in the positions at issue, such as big ticket commission sales.

Significantly, however, the EEOC’s case was built on the residual assumption (faith, expectation) that any remaining gap between the percentage of women in a position that it, after controlling for “all available factors,” expected to find and the actual percentage of women in those positions could be explained only by employer discrimination. The EEOC’s argument, in short, made no concession to the common sense observation that “all available factors” that could be measured by statisticians did not exhaust the universe of factors that could explain why men and women made up different percentages of the employees in different positions.

It’s hard, for example, to do a regression analysis on interest. Sears did, however, present extensive evidence that the distribution of women among the various departments at Sears closely tracked the percentage of women who owned their own businesses — about the same percentage of women sold hardware at Sears, for example, as owned their own hardware stores.

I mention all this ancient history not to suggest that Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer is wrong — on the contrary, I think she is right — but simply to guard against relying too heavily on her numerical conclusion, which sounds more firmly objective than it can be. I’m convinced that a great deal of whatever income gap remains between men and women (and the exact amount, if any, is itself highly controversial, limited as it is by the limited number of “availabe factors” that can be controlled for) can be explained by the majors women choose in college. I’m just not convinced that it’s 19%.

To revert to Sears (you can see why friends who knew me during the five or so years I worked on that case quickly got bored by my incessant discussion of it), Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer actually reminds me a bit of one of the EEOC experts we encountered, even though her analysis here is persuasive and the EEOC expert’s was not. In fact, Sears even presented evidence on choice of college major.

Consider this argument from Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer:

In her presentation, Bobbitt-Zeher acknowledged that it is not possible to know the extent to which women are making a completely free choice about their majors, or whether there are encouragements (or discouragements) that are sending more women in certain directions and more men in others.

In seriously considering the possibility that women are not masters of their own fates, that they do not make “completely free choice[s]” about their major but are channeled into women’s work by forces beyond their control, she echoes the testimony of the EEOC expert witness, historian Alice Kessler Harris. In my Sears post linked above I quoted something on the case that I had written in 1985, which I’m going to quote here because I suspect that, despite my instruction, some of you will have not gone back to read or re-read it. “The EEOC’s position,” I wrote,

was that employer discrimination is the sole explanation for the employment patterns of women. Readers may be forgiven for thinking I exaggerate, but the government’s historian, Alice Kessler-Harris, submitted written testimony actually stating that “where opportunity has existed, women have never failed to take the job offered…. Failure to find women in so-called non-traditional jobs can thus only be interpreted as a consequence of employers’ discrimination.” Kessler-Harris further testified that responsibilities for family and children placed no greater burden on women than men workers, and that women’s own choices and interests have nothing to do with the jobs they take. In fact, she was so hostile to the idea that the system leaves women any room at all to choose that she insisted on placing the terms “choice” and “women’s interests” in quotes, and even went so far as to deny that women themselves choose their own major subjects in college or that women business owners choose the types of businesses they own. [Emphasis added]

Naturally, Prof. Bobbit-Zehrer considers women’s choice (or “choice,” as Alice Kessler Harris and the old and perhaps future EEOC would say) of college major as a problem to be solved.

[Her] paper argues that these patterns — especially given that choice of major is increasingly responsible for economic differences among men and women — need more attention….

…. “[E]ducation still contributes in a meaningful way to social disadvantage for women. Indeed, it contributes more than it did in the past. Of particular concern is the importance of gender segregation in fields of study, which is shown here to increasingly contribute to the gender income gap….”

She noted that efforts by many in higher education to recruit more female students into science programs should help, but she said that these efforts may also need a push by, for example, increasing efforts to hire more women as faculty members in these departments.

Of course, part of the job of getting women into the right majors involves getting more men into the wrong ones.

But she also noted the “complexity” of the situation, and suggested that promoting economic equity for men and women may require changes in attitudes across the board.

“As women go into men’s majors, that’s part of it, but men need to go into other majors, too, and as women go into some majors, men sometimes don’t want those majors anymore,” she said.

I’ve recently said everything I have to say, and more, about social engineers “falling ass over teakettle into the gender gap in science” and other subjects, and don’t really need to add anything to that discussion here. Except one thing: if I were a woman, I would be offended by anyone who assumed I am not capable of making up own mind about what I want to major in, just as, if I were black, I would be offended by those who thought that I need preferential treatment in order to succeed.