Women who want to make more money than their male counterparts in New Hampshire might consider construction and mining, because their pay will be an average of 29 percent higher than men’s.
If you are slightly dubious of this claim, feeling that construction and what are called “extraction occupations” are an unlikely place for such an accomplishment, you are on to something. While the above fact is correct, it is also misleading and demonstrates the complexity of comparing pay.
According to the 2014 American Community Survey from the Census Bureau, New Hampshire women in construction and mining had a median income of $60,286 in 2014, compared with men’s median income of $46,744 – a 29 percent difference.
That’s the biggest advantage for women among all 32 different occupational categories analyzed by the Census Bureau survey.
So what’s the catch? Hardly any women actually work in construction and mining.
In the data, 99.3 percent of almost 26,000 New Hampshire employees in this field in 2014 were men – meaning that data from only about 180 women were used in the analysis. With such a small population, it takes only a few highly paid female executives to skew the results, especially since introductory and thus low-paying jobs in labor-intensive fields are more likely to be held by men.
So does this result mean that industries with few women have less gender pay disparity? Not necessarily.
Consider the category “farming, fishing and forestry,” where New Hampshire men outnumber women more than 4-to-1. In that field, women barely make half as much as men: 58 percent.
Then how about the opposite conclusion? Maybe having lots of women in an industry will overcome pay disparity.
Again, the answer is sometimes yes and sometimes no.
In the category “health technologists,” for example, women outnumber men more than 3-to-1 and also outearn the men, by about 24 percent.
But in the category “legal occupations,” women outnumber men by more than 35 percent, yet make barely half as much: 56 percent.
Similarly, in “personal care and service occupations” there were three times as many women as men, yet on average men made 39 percent more, while in “health care support occupations” there were six times as many women as men, and the women made 14 percent more on average.
Note that this comparison doesn’t take into account absolute pay rates. Historically, pay in occupations dominated by women are lower than similar occupations dominated by men, regardless of relative rates between genders.
It also doesn’t explain why these differences exist. Perhaps in “legal occupations,” for example, men are more likely to be lawyers while women are paralegals, while in “health care support” women are more likely to be nurses and men to be orderlies. Or perhaps the genders have roughly the same roles yet a discrepancy exists anyway for deeper reasons.
The American Community Survey is an ongoing survey sent by the Census Bureau to 295,000 addresses monthly across the country, to supplement the once-every-decade census.
(David Brooks can be reached at 369-3313, dbrooks@cmonitor.com or on Twitter @GraniteGeek.)
