Wage differences between men and women - sexist or functional?

As we were reading and discussing the job market and the differences in wages between men and women, I really wondered what exactly it was. It seems like after this long, there HAS to be a good reason women get paid so much less than men for the same job. While doing some research, I came across an article that was in Forbes magazine, with the same title as this blog entry. It asked the question about whether or not the wage difference was functional. In the article it explained something called "firm specific skills", which basically means skills that an employee could only get from working at a specific firm. It is more likely for men to be hired, according to this, because they have more of a chance to get firm specific skills. It takes someone a long time to be trained to do specific things. You can't just find someone off the street and show them how to work somewhere. It takes time to be good at a job, which is also getting those firm skills. It explains that women have these skills less because they need to take more time off due to child birth and taking care of children. The article explains that according to that theory, women should get paid less because they have less firm-specific skills. In order to see if that was true though, there had to be research done. Just because women couldn't, in some cases, work as long as men straight through, doesn't mean they don't have the same skills, so there was a study done at temp agencies, where firm specific skill wouldn't matter because all jobs were temporary. Men still make $29.66 on average to a woman's $25.08. This shows that for the same exact job, men still got paid more for no actual reason. So, the article concludes that "firm specific skills" is a good idea to explain the wage gap in theory, but in reality it really doesn't matter. No matter what, women still get paid less than men for the same exact job and there is no reason behind, besides the ones we have discussed in class. I think this article did a really good job of explaining the theory behind it, and the whole idea of the the firm specific made sense. I could understand women getting paid less in certain places because they really are less permanent. If I knew an employee was going to be gone for a year, I would definitely not be as likely to hire them and pay them equally because it would be obvious that the job would not be priority number one. But in every other reason, I think this article is correct.

The article can be found here:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/freekvermeulen/2011/02/28/wage-differences-between-men-and-women-sexist-or-functional/

Elizabeth Kramer