Speaker 1: Hey Max, Hello Becca. So you and I went to
Speaker 1: a bar in downtown Manhattan when it was still extremely
Speaker 1: cold out, and we went to talk to people about
Speaker 1: the gender pay gap. We wanted to hear what the
Speaker 1: average person on the street has to say about this stuff.
Speaker 1: One of the first guys we talked to works for
Speaker 1: the state of New York. At first he told us
Speaker 1: he believed in the pay gap, and even saw him
Speaker 1: one of his previous workplaces. But then after talking to
Speaker 1: him for a little while, he told us what he
Speaker 1: really thought. What I could see in my current position,
Speaker 1: if there's a gap, it's not twenty cents on the dollar.
Speaker 1: But if that was in fact true, Yes, of course
Speaker 1: that's not right. But it is true as far as
Speaker 1: I know, that really is what the data shows. I think,
Speaker 1: yes it is. So this guy knows women are paid less,
Speaker 1: but the number he hears it it just doesn't sound
Speaker 1: right him. He looks around, he sees things getting better
Speaker 1: for women. He just doesn't buy that things could really
Speaker 1: be so bad. I don't think it's a conspiracy um,
Speaker 1: but yes, I think maybe maybe somewhat overlown, especially nowadays,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of different than it was even ten
Speaker 1: years ago. So while I recognize that probably is somewhere
Speaker 1: of a gap, I think that gap is getting smaller.
Speaker 1: I think there's more opportunities for women these days to
Speaker 1: advance in their career. Then he said something that reminded
Speaker 1: me of what I hear in my reporting all the time.
Speaker 1: It's not that the pay up isn't real exactly, but
Speaker 1: that I misunderstanding the data. Basically, the data doesn't show
Speaker 1: what I say it does. You could look at data,
Speaker 1: I could look at data, She could look at data,
Speaker 1: and we could all come up with our own numbers.
Speaker 1: I mean, it's not a black and white thing. There's
Speaker 1: a very great area when you look at the world.
Speaker 1: You know what the population like, where is our place like?
Speaker 1: Where is our value? Will deserve people for equal work?
Speaker 1: This woman, we almost put this gender bias and ourselves,
Speaker 1: and nationwide the median salary for men is greater than
Speaker 1: women in ninety nine point six percent of major occupations women.
Speaker 1: What do very watch? We want to end gender inequality,
Speaker 1: and to do this we need everyone involved. Well, actually
Speaker 1: it's the feminist celebrities and politicians spreading this wage camp
Speaker 1: myth who have the math problems. Ginger Rogers did everything
Speaker 1: that Freda Stare did. She just did it backwards did
Speaker 1: in I Welcome back to the Paycheck. I'm Rebecca Greenfield.
Speaker 1: This week we are going to investigate the gray areas
Speaker 1: in the data. We've heard from listeners who feel like
Speaker 1: the guy from the Bar, and we've also heard from
Speaker 1: people who don't believe in the pay gap at all.
Speaker 1: They say that figure the gap between what women and
Speaker 1: men make in the US is misleading, that it's just
Speaker 1: an average that doesn't control for people in the same
Speaker 1: industries or doing the same job. This is a common
Speaker 1: critique of pay gap reporting. Here's Britt Hume on Fox
Speaker 1: News making that same case. Women make different choices about
Speaker 1: what kinds of jobs they seek in reaction to marriage
Speaker 1: and childbirth when those things have taken into consideration. Studies
Speaker 1: have indicated that the pay gap all but evaporates. That phrase,
Speaker 1: all but evaporates. I heard a lot that the pay
Speaker 1: gap disappears when you control for things like the fields
Speaker 1: women tend to work in and the time they take
Speaker 1: off to care for their families. The pay gap does
Speaker 1: get smaller when you control for certain things. But no
Speaker 1: matter how much Matthew do, it never disappears when you
Speaker 1: control for job title, company, and industry. One study found
Speaker 1: that there's still a five point four percent pay gap
Speaker 1: in the US that's unexplained. We know pay discrimination is
Speaker 1: still happening, and that's not right or fair. But I
Speaker 1: also want to talk about another part of this argument
Speaker 1: that women make choices to focus on family rather than
Speaker 1: work and that's why we earn on average less than men.
Speaker 1: Is that what's really happening. The research does show that
Speaker 1: women start off at near parody with men in their careers,
Speaker 1: but after having a kid the gap widens. Is this
Speaker 1: because women are choosing parenting over working in high paid
Speaker 1: jobs because that's what they value. I think that it's
Speaker 1: a more complicated story than simply that women value family
Speaker 1: more than careers. I think the whole workplace is really
Speaker 1: set up so that it's harder for women to be
Speaker 1: parents than it is for men. That's Robin Ealie. She's
Speaker 1: a business administration professor at Harvard, and she recently co
Speaker 1: wrote an article with Kathy Tinsley, a management professor at Georgetown,
Speaker 1: called What Most People Get Wrong About Men and Women.
Speaker 1: When she talks about how the workplace is set up
Speaker 1: better for men, than women. She's partly talking about the
Speaker 1: rigid nine to five work day and how that makes
Speaker 1: it harder to say, pick up your kids from school.
Speaker 1: It's challenging for anyone, regardless of gender, to work a
Speaker 1: full time job and take care of kids, but we
Speaker 1: expect women more than men to make it work. And
Speaker 1: to make it work, women shift to jobs with fewer demands,
Speaker 1: flexible schedules, or telecommuting options. The culture is telling them
Speaker 1: that once you become a mother, to be a good mother,
Speaker 1: you really need to take those accommodations, whereas for men,
Speaker 1: it's saying, you know, you really shouldn't take those accommodations
Speaker 1: because your role is as the bread winner. So men
Speaker 1: tend to wratch it up after they have kids, and
Speaker 1: women will be more likely to wratch it back. So
Speaker 1: the culture and the organization interpret what people should be
Speaker 1: doing once they have children. This idea that we expect
Speaker 1: women to do less at work when they have a
Speaker 1: child and men to do more. It shows up in
Speaker 1: the data. Women's earnings decrease four then for every child
Speaker 1: she has. Men's earnings actually increase six percent when they
Speaker 1: have kids. These are known as the motherhood penalty and
Speaker 1: the fatherhood bonus. And even when men and women both
Speaker 1: act the same at work, the stereotypes we have about
Speaker 1: women can hurt their earnings. Here's Kathy Tinsley, Robin's co author. So,
Speaker 1: when somebody is absent from a meeting, there's oftentimes uncertainties
Speaker 1: about why that is occurring. Right, you don't have perfect
Speaker 1: information incorporations about what everybody is doing all the time.
Speaker 1: And what happens is when you have imperfect information, your
Speaker 1: brain doesn't really like that in perfect information, and so
Speaker 1: it fills in that imperfect information with assumptions, with educated
Speaker 1: guesses about what that missing information is. And people use
Speaker 1: gender stereotypes as a way of helping them fill in
Speaker 1: missing information. And so, what can happen in any meeting
Speaker 1: where a man may be absent, The assumption is more
Speaker 1: likely to be, oh, he could be at another client meeting,
Speaker 1: or he you know, had some emergency come up that
Speaker 1: was also work related, right, whereas I, if a woman
Speaker 1: is doing it, it would be more likely to be uh,
Speaker 1: family related assumption. So, even if women and men do
Speaker 1: the same things at work, we imagine a woman's work
Speaker 1: is suffering because of her family, whereas we don't assume
Speaker 1: the same thing about a man. Then there's that other
Speaker 1: point that pay gap skeptics make that women make different
Speaker 1: choices about what kinds of jobs we seek. As we've
Speaker 1: talked about on the show before, women do tend to
Speaker 1: work in jobs that pay less, like teaching and secretarial work.
Speaker 1: Last week we showed you that those jobs pay less
Speaker 1: because women do them. But is working in these jobs
Speaker 1: always a choice? Take technology, it's a well paid and
Speaker 1: male dominated field. If women aren't rising to the top
Speaker 1: or succeeding as coders and engineers, some people say it's
Speaker 1: because they're just not interested in it or not good
Speaker 1: at it, and that feeds into this general idea that
Speaker 1: women don't have the aptitude for math, coding, or other
Speaker 1: skills that happen to lead to high paying jobs. We're
Speaker 1: just choosing jobs, lower paying jobs that we just happened
Speaker 1: to be suited for. Well, there's a couple of things
Speaker 1: that are going on there. The first is our women
Speaker 1: as good at math as men, and the answer there
Speaker 1: is yes. Um Shelby Hide has been doing research for
Speaker 1: decades and all of her research shows that the gap
Speaker 1: between men and women in math ability is small to negligible.
Speaker 1: You could call it trivial. Then the question becomes, well,
Speaker 1: if there aren't any inherent differences between men and women
Speaker 1: and math ability, then why is it that women aren't
Speaker 1: entering some fields and men are entering them. One theory
Speaker 1: that Robin brings up is that those fields they aren't
Speaker 1: hospitable to women. That's where you have to look into
Speaker 1: the context. What is it that men and women experience
Speaker 1: arians in the workplace and are they given the same
Speaker 1: opportunity to thrive? That question, are women given the same
Speaker 1: opportunity as men to thrive? We know that women and
Speaker 1: men do have different experiences at work, like women experience
Speaker 1: much higher rates of workplace harassment, and that actually pushes
Speaker 1: them out of the highest paying jobs in fields. Research
Speaker 1: has found that when women get harassed, they go to
Speaker 1: safer jobs, and the more female dominated jobs have much
Speaker 1: fewer reports of workplace harassment, and those jobs they pay less.
Speaker 1: But there are more subtle ways our experiences are different too.
Speaker 1: There are all kinds of messages that tell women they
Speaker 1: don't belong in the higher tiers of a company. Does
Speaker 1: it mean the same thing to strive for a particular job?
Speaker 1: Is it harder on women to perform in a job
Speaker 1: where they have power over other people, probably because the
Speaker 1: stereotype is that women aren't supposed to want to have power,
Speaker 1: they aren't supposed to want to be ambitious and so um.
Speaker 1: So it's just it's just harder to live in those jobs.
Speaker 1: When we talk about the gender pay gap, we're not
Speaker 1: talking about people in power, mostly men, conspiring to pay
Speaker 1: women less. There's no grand conspiracy, just a bunch of
Speaker 1: systems that don't work well for professional women because they
Speaker 1: were never designed to. As hard as the aggregate number
Speaker 1: is to understand, even when we hear stories from individual
Speaker 1: women that are telling us exactly how much less they're making,
Speaker 1: we don't always see it as a part of the
Speaker 1: pay gap. Our next story is about a time a
Speaker 1: woman pointed out something that seemed unfair and the world
Speaker 1: came back at her with a million reasons why she
Speaker 1: can't be mad about it. Earlier this year, comedian and
Speaker 1: actress Monique went public about a salary negotiation with Netflix
Speaker 1: that went south. She said she was offered way less
Speaker 1: to do a comedy special than what famous men and
Speaker 1: white women had been paid it. She asked her fans
Speaker 1: to do something kind of major boycott Netflix. Her story
Speaker 1: went viral, but not in a good way. People didn't
Speaker 1: rally behind Monique like they rallied behind other women in Hollywood.
Speaker 1: They told her she didn't deserve more money to say,
Speaker 1: what kind of reactions was I expecting? I don't. I
Speaker 1: wasn't expecting the reaction of, oh, we'll just do it
Speaker 1: because Monique said it. I was expecting for us to
Speaker 1: research what it is that I'm saying. Jordan Holman spoke
Speaker 1: to Monique about her experience. In January, Monique posted a
Speaker 1: video on Instagram. This was not a typical Monique post.
Speaker 1: Her feed is mostly clips of her working out and dancing,
Speaker 1: or promoting the podcast she does with her husband, Sydney.
Speaker 1: Most of the time, she starts her videos with hey
Speaker 1: my Babies. On that Sunday, she went script, hey my
Speaker 1: loves I am asking that you stand with me and
Speaker 1: Boycotton Netflix for gender bias and color bias. I was
Speaker 1: off for a five dollars dere last week to do
Speaker 1: a comedy special. However, Amy Sheen was offred eleven million dollars,
Speaker 1: Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle twenty million dollars. A popular
Speaker 1: fan revolt from Netflix didn't happen. The general reaction was
Speaker 1: not pro Monique. In blog posts and tweets, comedy fans
Speaker 1: were skeptical about the comedians called to action. Words like delusional, loudmouth,
Speaker 1: and ignorant were being thrown around. A few people defended Monique,
Speaker 1: but most said she was basically stepping outside of her lane.
Speaker 1: Here's Tony Rock, Chris Rock's brother, talking to TMZ. She's
Speaker 1: calling it color bias and gender bias in her words
Speaker 1: on stage long She's been a long time, and I
Speaker 1: thought it was expressly interesting that people were reacting like
Speaker 1: this is to Monique. At the start of this year,
Speaker 1: which was also at the height of the Me too movement,
Speaker 1: the public was learning that other big name actresses like
Speaker 1: Michelle Williams and Claire Foy from the Netflix series The
Speaker 1: Crown were paid less than their male co stars, But
Speaker 1: the audience response to those Hollywood pay gaps was very different.
Speaker 1: People got really mad about it. Claire for it even
Speaker 1: ended up getting back pay. I talked to Monique about
Speaker 1: all of this in March. Hello, Hi, this is Jordan's
Speaker 1: Hey Joean not are you doing baby? It's Monique? Good.
Speaker 1: How are you today? I'm wonderful I'm so glad. I
Speaker 1: asked her if she was surprised that people seemed to
Speaker 1: respond differently to her pay gap than those other actresses.
Speaker 1: It didn't surprise me because of what the package looks
Speaker 1: like in Monique, it's a problem. And those subsists that
Speaker 1: you named their white women. Correct, yes, right. So when
Speaker 1: our wife used to say, listen, this is not right,
Speaker 1: we listen, and we should and we should. Now if
Speaker 1: I'm a fat black woman, so people are really looking
Speaker 1: at me like have you lost your mind? You should
Speaker 1: just be grateful they let you in because you've got
Speaker 1: three strikes going against you. You're a woman, you black,
Speaker 1: and you fat, and you want to take a stand girl.
Speaker 1: Monique is one of the most famous black female comedians
Speaker 1: in America, but even before this Instagram post, she has
Speaker 1: always been the type of celebrity that you either love
Speaker 1: or hate. She has a huge personality in her comedy
Speaker 1: Isn't for everyone. Black women don't give a we don't
Speaker 1: give a we don't give a about we don't give
Speaker 1: a we don't give a Girl. You're gonna work them off, girl,
Speaker 1: that y'all. In the early two thousand's, she was everywhere.
Speaker 1: She had the Monique Show. She wrote books, she appeared
Speaker 1: on sitcoms, but what I know her from is The Parkers,
Speaker 1: her number one hit sitcom on the UPN network about
Speaker 1: a single mother and her dizzy daughter. If you were
Speaker 1: a black girl like me, it was Appointment TV. Monique
Speaker 1: moved to l A to pursue acting. When she was thirty,
Speaker 1: she got the offer to start on her own show,
Speaker 1: The Parkers. After only ninety days in Hollywood. When they
Speaker 1: told her how much she'd be making, she felt like
Speaker 1: a kid in the candy shop. So I was a
Speaker 1: little girl. I didn't know the egg question. I didn't
Speaker 1: know to say what's ratings because no one told it
Speaker 1: to me. So when they told me I would be
Speaker 1: making a week, what you mean every you mean every week?
Speaker 1: I would I would give this. Well, that's more money,
Speaker 1: Jordan than my parents made. Monique star kept rising, and
Speaker 1: in two thousand nine she landed something very rare for
Speaker 1: a black woman, an Oscar nomination, not for her comedy,
Speaker 1: but for her role in the serious drama Pruscious. And
Speaker 1: that's when something happened that earned her reputation as a
Speaker 1: troublemaker in Hollywood. See winning an Oscar involves its own
Speaker 1: separate kind of side job. You don't just sit back
Speaker 1: and let the Academy honor you. You have to do
Speaker 1: something called an Oscar campaign. It involves going on junkets,
Speaker 1: doing interviews and pressed lunches, and sometimes being on the
Speaker 1: road for months. Monique she refused to do all of that.
Speaker 1: She says she was busy with her family. She was
Speaker 1: raising two young twins during the Oscar season for Pruscious,
Speaker 1: she wanted to stay home with them and watched Curious George.
Speaker 1: She says, the directors and producers didn't care. Everything was
Speaker 1: simply about the business. We hear all of that, but
Speaker 1: we need you here, and I understand that because at
Speaker 1: the time we were coming from three people that have
Speaker 1: no families. Monique won the Oscar anyway, making her one
Speaker 1: of only eight black women to ever when an acting
Speaker 1: Oscar first. I would like to thank the Academy for
Speaker 1: showing that it can be about the performance and not
Speaker 1: the politics. But looking back, Monique says that even though
Speaker 1: she won the Oscar, refusing to do that Oscar campaign
Speaker 1: that hurt her career. I got labeled as difficult and demanding.
Speaker 1: It's hard to know how much that difficult and demanding
Speaker 1: label hurt her, but after Pressures, the jobs definitely slowed down.
Speaker 1: She's only done two stand up specials in the past decade.
Speaker 1: She's been in a handful of movies since Pressures, but
Speaker 1: none of them have been nearly as big. So that
Speaker 1: brings us to the beginning of when she gets this
Speaker 1: offer from Netflix. Even though she hadn't had a big
Speaker 1: hit in a while, the amount they were offering, five
Speaker 1: hundred thousand dollars, sounded really low to her compared to
Speaker 1: the tens of millions she knew other comedians were offered.
Speaker 1: She says that her team, which includes her attorney, Ricky Anderson,
Speaker 1: and her husband's Sidney Hicks, who is also her manager,
Speaker 1: had to fight to even get Netflix VP Robbie Prawe
Speaker 1: on the phone to talk about the offer. Netflix declined
Speaker 1: to speak on this podcast, saying that they do not
Speaker 1: comment on contract negotiations, but the conversation Monique describes once
Speaker 1: they eventually did have a conference call with the studio
Speaker 1: shows you just how difficult it can be to prove
Speaker 1: your value as an entertainer. Monique and her team felt
Speaker 1: like they could make a case that she was worth
Speaker 1: more by any standard Robbie Praue could I'm up with
Speaker 1: but whenever they made their case, he would just change
Speaker 1: the standard. Monique's people said she was worth more than
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand dollars because of things like her oscar.
Speaker 1: Robbie Prau said, that was Monique's resume, and they didn't
Speaker 1: look at resumes. They asked why Amy schumers steel was
Speaker 1: so much bigger, and he said, well, she sold out
Speaker 1: Madison Square Garden twice and she had a big hit
Speaker 1: over the summer. So Sydney said, is that not Amy
Speaker 1: Schuma's resume? And you know how quiet it is right now?
Speaker 1: Jordan's yes, that's how quiet it was. On the phone.
Speaker 1: We talked about the gender pay gap a lot, but
Speaker 1: if you're a black woman, you also face a racial
Speaker 1: pay gap. It's really tricky to know which one affects
Speaker 1: you more. We know women make eighty cents to the
Speaker 1: dollar on average, but if you're a black woman, you
Speaker 1: get sixty three cents to a white man's dollar and
Speaker 1: ninety three cents compared to black men. Here is Monique
Speaker 1: being told that the market value for her entertainment was less,
Speaker 1: way less than a white woman or a black man
Speaker 1: was it her qualifications, her race, her gender. It's impossible
Speaker 1: to ever say for sure. And that's what's so crazy
Speaker 1: for anyone who's ever been in a negotiation like this.
Speaker 1: If you're one of those people who knows Monique as
Speaker 1: a comedian and you're just not into her jokes, you
Speaker 1: might think she's ridiculous for comparing herself to Amy Schumer
Speaker 1: or Dave Chappelle. But a few people had her back.
Speaker 1: But then you have those other people saying you better
Speaker 1: not sit down, you better keep standing, you better keep
Speaker 1: speaking up and speaking out. After all, she says, Schumer
Speaker 1: and Chappelle were offered twenty two times more and forty
Speaker 1: times more respectively than she was for a similar job,
Speaker 1: or they worth that much more than her. Comedian Wanda
Speaker 1: Sykes thankful Nique for sharing what Netflix seemed to be
Speaker 1: offering black women compared to men in white women. Wanda Sykes,
Speaker 1: she said Netflix offered her two hundred and fifty dollars
Speaker 1: for her own comedy special. And when I called for
Speaker 1: that boycott, there have been people that have said calling
Speaker 1: for a boycott was extreme, and I want to be
Speaker 1: the first to tell people calling for a boycott is extreme.
Speaker 1: It was extremely extreme. However, isn't inequality extreme, injustice is extreme.
Speaker 1: Some people might hear Monique story and say hers was
Speaker 1: obviously not a case of discrimination. She had barely worked
Speaker 1: in comedy since the Carker's and some just don't find
Speaker 1: her appealing, but take the reason since why she hasn't
Speaker 1: worked and why she's not always appealing, her gender, her race,
Speaker 1: and even her size are all part of it. That's
Speaker 1: how a lot of the gender pay gap plays out.
Speaker 1: Women make less than men for what seemed like innocent reasons,
Speaker 1: but when you dig deeper, the real reasons have everything
Speaker 1: to do with the fact that they're women. Next week,
Speaker 1: on The Paycheck, we'll go to a country that thinks
Speaker 1: it knows how to fix the pay gap, how by
Speaker 1: forcing big business to come clean. Thanks for listening to
Speaker 1: The Paycheck. If you like the show, head on over
Speaker 1: to Apple Podcasts and rate, review and subscribe. We appreciate
Speaker 1: all feedback, even those one star reviews from people who
Speaker 1: don't believe in the pay gap. This episode of The
Speaker 1: Paycheck was reported by Jordan Holman Max Abelson and hosted
Speaker 1: and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was edited by
Speaker 1: Francesca Levi and produced by Liz Smith. We also had
Speaker 1: helped from Magnus Hendrickson, Gillian Goodman, and Janet Paskin. Our
Speaker 1: original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie vander Riott did
Speaker 1: the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
Speaker 1: at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck. Francesco Levy is Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: head of podcasts