Long Island gender-pay gap shows workplace biases are pervasive
Women on Long Island earn a median wage that's only 80.2% of their male counterparts' salaries, according to state data. Credit: Getty Images/IronHeart
In April 2000, Newsday published results from a poll on the hiring and promoting of women and people of color. It surveyed 97 corporate chief executives and senior managers and sought opinions from more than 2,000 employees in the region.
The results were quite alarming, even if not surprising.
Perhaps most telling: Nearly half the CEOs said nothing prevented women from getting ahead in the workplace. Just one in five female workers in Nassau and Suffolk agreed. Nearly 70% of workers said an "inhospitable corporate culture" contributed to the obstacles women faced. Only one in 10 CEOs agreed.
I've been thinking a lot about that poll, and a series Newsday did at the time called "A White Man's World," in the wake of this week's Newsday analysis of current gender wage gaps.
Twenty-three years after that poll, little has changed. Women on Long Island earn a median wage that's only 80.2% of their male counterparts' salaries, the largest gap for any region in New York, according to state Labor Department data. And while that's an improvement from the 1960s and 1970s, it's unchanged from 2005, when a Hofstra University study put the wage gap for Long Island women at 80%.
The numbers are worse in high-pressure fields like law and finance. Suffolk County women in legal professions earn just 48.3% of what men earn; in Nassau, that number is 67.2%. In finance, female workers make 69.8% of what their male counterparts get in Nassau and 78.9% in Suffolk. At the bottom of the list: health technologists and technicians, where women earn an unforgivable 37.3% of men's salaries in Suffolk and 62.9% in Nassau.
The disparities are even worse for women of color.
The reasons many experts tend to cite also are stubbornly unchanged. Among them: the so-called "motherhood penalty" — the notion that if women leave the workforce to have children, and raise them, they miss the chance to move up the ladder and end up on the "mommy track" rather than the career track.
But that's a tired argument, a relic from a past when there seemed to be only one way to work — in the office, with long days and weekends the norm. And the issue goes far beyond a woman's time out of the workforce. It's based in a history of gender-based assumptions and biases that are sometimes subtle, sometimes overt, but always ugly, that still pervade our workplaces, in job interviews, performance assessments, promotion determinations and even responses to time-off requests for that parent-teacher conference, school concert or family vacation. As parenting responsibilities shift, more men face these challenges, too.
With all the talk of hybrid schedules and flexible workplaces in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, you'd think those attitudes might have shifted. But many top executives and high-powered companies are stuck in that bias-laden past, and gaps in salary and treatment — remain. Yet more women — and men — are beginning to realize that better options do exist, that our assumptions about work can and must shift and that even the tightest of corporate settings can be rethought and remade.
All workers must demand such change, but ultimately only those at the top can make it happen, those who two decades ago, didn't think there was a problem — and perhaps still don't. The message is simple: There was a problem then, there still is one now. But ignoring it is no longer an option. Fixing it is.
Columnist Randi F. Marshall's opinions are her own.
Randi Marshall is a member of the Newsday editorial board.
