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 from 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 overmown, 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'm 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 they want? 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 cap
Speaker 1: myth who have the math problem. Ginger Rogers did everything
Speaker 1: that Freda Stare did, She just did it backward 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 u US that's unexplained. We know pay discrimination
Speaker 1: is still happening, and that's not right or fair. But
Speaker 1: I also want to talk about another part of this
Speaker 1: argument that women make choices to focus on family rather
Speaker 1: than work and that's why we earn on average less
Speaker 1: than men. Is that what's really happening. The research does
Speaker 1: show that women start off at near parity with men
Speaker 1: in their careers, but after having a kid the gap widens.
Speaker 1: Is this because women are choosing parenting over working in
Speaker 1: high paid jobs because that's what they value. I think
Speaker 1: that it's a more complicated story than simply that women
Speaker 1: value family more than careers. I think the whole workplace
Speaker 1: is really set up so that it's harder for women
Speaker 1: to be parents than it is for men. That's Robin Eale.
Speaker 1: She's a business administration professor at Harvard, and she recently
Speaker 1: co wrote an article with Kathy Tinsley, a management professor
Speaker 1: at Georgetown, called What Most People Get Wrong About Men
Speaker 1: and Women. When she talks about how the workplace is
Speaker 1: set up better for men than women. She's partly talking
Speaker 1: about the rigid nine to five work day and how
Speaker 1: that makes it harder to say, pick up your kids
Speaker 1: from school. It's challenging for anyone, regardless of gender, to
Speaker 1: work a full time job and take care of kids,
Speaker 1: but we expect women more than men to make it work.
Speaker 1: And to make it work, women shift to jobs with
Speaker 1: fewer demands, flexible schedules, or telecommuting options. The culture is
Speaker 1: telling them that once you become a mother, to be
Speaker 1: a good mother, you really need to take those accommodations,
Speaker 1: whereas for men, it's saying, you know, you really shouldn't
Speaker 1: take those accommodations because your role is as the breadwinner.
Speaker 1: So men tend to wratch it up after they have kids,
Speaker 1: and women will be more likely to wratch it back.
Speaker 1: So the culture and the organization interpret what people should
Speaker 1: be doing once they have children. This idea that we
Speaker 1: expect women to do less at work when they have
Speaker 1: a child and men to do more. It shows up
Speaker 1: in the data. Women's earnings decrease four then for every
Speaker 1: child she has. Men's earnings actually increase six percent when
Speaker 1: they have kids. These are known as the motherhood penalty
Speaker 1: and the fatherhood bonus. And even when men and women
Speaker 1: both act the same at work, the stereotypes we have
Speaker 1: about women can hurt their earnings. Here's Kathy Tinsley, Robin's
Speaker 1: co author. So when somebody is absent from a meeting,
Speaker 1: there's oftentimes uncertainties about why that is occurring. Right, you
Speaker 1: don't have perfect information and corporations about what everybody is
Speaker 1: doing all the time. And what happens is when you
Speaker 1: have imperfect information, your brain doesn't really like that i
Speaker 1: perfect information, and so it fills in that imperfect information
Speaker 1: with assumptions, with educated guesses about what that missing information is.
Speaker 1: And people use gender stereotypes as a way of helping
Speaker 1: them fill in missing information. And So what can happen
Speaker 1: in any meeting where a man may be absent, The
Speaker 1: assumption is more likely to be, oh, he could be
Speaker 1: at another client meeting, or he you know, had some
Speaker 1: emergency come up that was also work related, right, Whereas
Speaker 1: if if a woman is doing it, it would be
Speaker 1: more likely to be a family related assumption. So, even
Speaker 1: if women and men do the same things at work,
Speaker 1: we imagine a woman's work is suffering because of her family,
Speaker 1: whereas we don't assume the same thing about a man.
Speaker 1: Then there's that other point that paygap skeptics make that
Speaker 1: women make different choices about what kinds of jobs we seek.
Speaker 1: As we've talked about on the show before, women do
Speaker 1: tend to work in jobs that pay less, like teaching
Speaker 1: and secretarial work. Last week we showed you that those
Speaker 1: jobs pay less because women do them. But is working
Speaker 1: in these jobs always a choice? Take technology, it's a
Speaker 1: well paid and male dominated field. If women aren't rising
Speaker 1: to the top or succeeding as coders and engineers, some
Speaker 1: people say it's because they're just not interested in it
Speaker 1: or not good at it, and that feeds into this
Speaker 1: general idea that women don't have the aptitude for math, coding,
Speaker 1: or other skills that happen to lead to high paying jobs.
Speaker 1: We're just choosing jobs, lower paying jobs that we just
Speaker 1: happened to be suited for. Well, there's a couple of
Speaker 1: things that are going on there. The first is our
Speaker 1: women as good at math as men, and the answer
Speaker 1: there is yes. Um Shelby Hide has been doing research
Speaker 1: for decades, and all of her research shows that the
Speaker 1: gap between men and women in math ability is small
Speaker 1: to negligible. 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 experire
Speaker 1: riants 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
Speaker 1: m So it's just it's just harder to live in
Speaker 1: those jobs. When we talk about the gender pay gap,
Speaker 1: we're not talking about people in power, mostly men, conspiring
Speaker 1: to pay women less. There's no grand conspiracy, just a
Speaker 1: bunch of systems that don't work well for professional women
Speaker 1: because they were never designed to. As hard as the
Speaker 1: aggregate number is to understand, even when we hear stories
Speaker 1: from individual women that are telling us exactly how much
Speaker 1: less they're making, we don't always see it as a
Speaker 1: part of the pay gap. Our next story is about
Speaker 1: a time a woman pointed out something that seemed unfair
Speaker 1: and the world came back at her with a million
Speaker 1: reasons why she can't be mad about it. Earlier this year,
Speaker 1: comedian and actress Monique went public about a salary negotiation
Speaker 1: with Netflix that went south. She said she was offered
Speaker 1: way less to do a comedy special than what famous
Speaker 1: men and white women had been paid it. She asked
Speaker 1: her fans to do something kind of major boycott Netflix.
Speaker 1: Her story went viral, but not in a good way.
Speaker 1: People didn't rally behind Monique like they rallied behind other
Speaker 1: women in Hollywood. They told her she didn't deserve more money.
Speaker 1: I say, what kind of reactions was I expecting. I don't.
Speaker 1: I wasn't expecting the reaction of, oh, we'll just do
Speaker 1: it because Monique said it. I was expecting for us
Speaker 1: to research what it is that I'm saying. Jordan Holman
Speaker 1: spoke to Monique about her experience. In January, Monique posted
Speaker 1: a 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 she stand with me and
Speaker 1: boycott Nextflix for gender bias and color bias. It was
Speaker 1: all for a five d dollars deal last week to
Speaker 1: do a comedy special. However, Amy she was afread eleven
Speaker 1: million dollars, Chris Rock and Dave Chappelle twenty million dollars.
Speaker 1: A popular fan revolt from Netflix didn't happen. The general
Speaker 1: reaction was not pro Monique. In blog posts and tweets,
Speaker 1: comedy fans were skeptical about the comedians called to action.
Speaker 1: Words like delusional, loudmouth, and ignorant were being thrown around.
Speaker 1: A few people defended Monique, but most said she was
Speaker 1: basically stepping outside of her lane. Here's Tony Rock, Chris
Speaker 1: Rock's brother talking to TMZ. She's calling it color bias
Speaker 1: and gender bias. In her words, not believe the stage
Speaker 1: and how long people. She's been sta A long long time,
Speaker 1: And I thought it was expressly interesting that people were
Speaker 1: reacting like this is to Monique. At the start of
Speaker 1: this year, which was also at the height of the
Speaker 1: Me too movement, the public was learning that other big
Speaker 1: name actresses like Michelle Williams and Claire Foy from the
Speaker 1: Netflix series The Crown were paid less than their male
Speaker 1: co stars, But the audience response to those Hollywood pay
Speaker 1: gapps was very different. People got really mad about it.
Speaker 1: Claire Foy even ended up getting back pay. I talked
Speaker 1: to Monique about all of this in March. Hello, Hi,
Speaker 1: this is Jordan's Hey Joean, Now you're doing baby, It's
Speaker 1: Monique good. How are you today. I'm wonderful. I'm so glad,
Speaker 1: I asked her if she was surprised that people seemed
Speaker 1: to respond differently to her pay gap then 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 sports that
Speaker 1: you named their white women correct. Yes, right. So when
Speaker 1: our wife to say listen, this is not right, we listen,
Speaker 1: and we should and we should. Now, if I'm a
Speaker 1: fat black woman, well people are really looking at me
Speaker 1: like have you lost your mind? You should just be
Speaker 1: grateful they let you in because you've got three strikes
Speaker 1: going against you. You're a woman, you black, and you fat,
Speaker 1: and you want to take a stand girl. Monique is
Speaker 1: one of the most famous black female comedians in America,
Speaker 1: but even before this Instagram post, she has always been
Speaker 1: the type of celebrity that you either love or hate.
Speaker 1: She has a huge personality in her comedy. Isn't for everyone.
Speaker 1: Black women. Don't give a we don't give a we
Speaker 1: don't give a about, we don't give a way, don't
Speaker 1: give a fun. Girl, You're gonna work them all, 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 eggs questions. I didn't
Speaker 1: know to say what's rating 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 troublemaker.
Speaker 1: In Hollywood. See, winning an Oscar involves its own separate
Speaker 1: kind of side job. You don't just sit back and
Speaker 1: let the Academy honor you. You have to do something
Speaker 1: called an Oscar campaign. It involves going on junkets, doing
Speaker 1: interviews and pressed lunches, and sometimes being on the road
Speaker 1: 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 it was 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
Speaker 1: demanding It's hard to know how much that difficult and
Speaker 1: demanding label hurt her, but after Pressures, the jobs definitely
Speaker 1: slowed down. She's only done two stand up specials in
Speaker 1: the past decade. She's been in a handful of movies
Speaker 1: since Pressures, but none of them have been nearly as big.
Speaker 1: So that brings us to the beginning of when she
Speaker 1: gets this offer from Netflix. Even though she hadn't had
Speaker 1: a big hit in a while, the amount they were offering,
Speaker 1: five hundred thousand dollars, sounded really low to her compared
Speaker 1: to 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 come 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 Schumer 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 Sidney 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
Speaker 1: less 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 every 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 are they worth that much more than her? Comedian
Speaker 1: Wanda Sykes thankful Nique for sharing what Netflix seemed to
Speaker 1: be offering black women compared to men in white women.
Speaker 1: Wanda Sykes, she said Netflix offered her two hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty dollars for her own comedy special, and when I
Speaker 1: called for that boycott, there have been people that have
Speaker 1: said calling for a boycott was extreme, and I want
Speaker 1: to be the first to tell people calling for a
Speaker 1: boycott is extreme. It was extremely extreme. However, isn't inequality extreme?
Speaker 1: Injustice is extreme. Some people might hear Monique story and
Speaker 1: say hers was obviously not a case of discrimination. She
Speaker 1: had barely worked in comedy since the Parker's and some
Speaker 1: just don't find her appealing, but take the reason since
Speaker 1: why she hasn't worked and why she's not always appealing,
Speaker 1: Her gender, her race, and even her size are all
Speaker 1: part of it. That's how a lot of the gender
Speaker 1: pay gap plays out. Women make less than men for
Speaker 1: what seemed like innocent reasons, but when you dig deeper,
Speaker 1: the real reasons have everything to do with the fact
Speaker 1: that they're women. Next week, on the Paycheck, we'll go
Speaker 1: to a country that thinks it knows how to fix
Speaker 1: the pay gap, how by forcing big business to come clean.
Speaker 1: Thanks for listening to The Paychecks. If you like the show,
Speaker 1: head on over to Apple Podcasts and rate, review and subscribe.
Speaker 1: We appreciate all feedback, even those one star reviews from
Speaker 1: people who don't believe in the pay gap. This episode
Speaker 1: of The Paycheck was reported by Jordan Holman, Max Abelson
Speaker 1: and hosted and reported by me Rebecca Greenfield. It was
Speaker 1: edited by Francesca Levi and produced by Liz Smith. We
Speaker 1: also had helped from Magnus Henrickson, Gillian Goodman, and Janet Paskin.
Speaker 1: Our original music is by Leo Sidron. Carrie Vanderriott did
Speaker 1: the illustrations on our show page, which you can find
Speaker 1: at bloomberg dot com slash paycheck branchesca Levy is Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: head of podcasts