Folks:
Apologies for cross-postings to those of you on the Feminist
Approaches to Bioethics listerv, as well.
To all, below, please find the full text of an
extraordinarily fascinating article which pertains to the effects of
sex/gender differentials in wage-earning to post-operative MTF and FTM
transsexual persons.
Best,
Alison Reiheld
Alison Reiheld
History, Philosophy, & Sociology of Science
Lyman Briggs College
Michigan State University
Co-editor, Questions: Philosophy for Young People
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If Women Were More Like Men: Why Females Earn Less By
John Cloud Friday, Oct. 03, 2008 http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1847194,00.html
One of the oldest debates in contemporary social science
is why women earn less than men. Conservatives tend to argue that because women
anticipate taking time off to raise children, they have fewer incentives to
work hard in school, and they choose careers where on-the-job training and long
hours are less important. Liberals tend to focus on sex discrimination as the
explanation. Obviously some mixture of those factors is at work, but academics
have long been frustrated when they try to estimate which force is
greater: women's choices or men's discrimination.
A new study looks at this problem in a wonderfully
inventive way. In previous studies, academics have looked at variables like
years of education and the effects of outside forces such as nondiscrimination
policies. But gender was always the constant. What if it didn't have to be?
What if you could construct an experiment in which a random sample of adults
unexpectedly changes sexes before work one day? Kristen Schilt, a sociologist
at the University of Chicago and Matthew Wiswall, an economist at New York
University, couldn't quite pull off that study. But they have come up with the
first systematic analysis of the experiences of transgender people in the labor
force. And what they found suggests that raw discrimination remains potent in
U.S. companies.
Schilt and Wiswall found that women who become men (known
as FTMs) do significantly better than men who become women (MTFs). MTFs in the
study earned, on average, 32% less after they transitioned from male to female,
even after the authors controlled for factors like education levels. FTMs
earned an average of 1.5% more. The study was just published in the Berkeley
Electronic Press' peer-reviewed Journal of Economic Analysis & Policy.
The men and women in the study had already gone to school
and made their career choices. Some of them changed jobs after they
transitioned, and some stayed in the same jobs. Some were out to their
employers; others started completely new lives as members of the opposite sex.
Regardless, the overall pattern was very clear: newly minted women were
punished, and newly minted men got a little bump-up in pay.
Still, the paper is complex, so it's useful to step back
first and look at where the larger debate over the gender wage gap stands.
After all, isn't that gap narrowing to the point of obscurity? Actually, no.
The Russell Sage Foundation published the most authoritative work on the gender
wage gap in 2006, The Declining Significance of Gender?. In the book, Francine
Blau and Lawrence Kahn, both Cornell economists, show that the average
full-time female worker in the U.S. earns about 79% of what the average
full-time male worker makes. Women employed full-time actually tend to have
slightly more education than men, but women are still more likely to work in
clerical and service jobs. Blau and Kahn say women do make different choices
when they decide on college majors and jobs even highly educated women more
often choose "female" occupations that pay less but the authors
also note that discrimination persists. As one example, they cite a 2000 study
which found that when symphony orchestras switched to blind auditions those
in which the musicians play behind a screen women had a significantly better
chance of being hired.
The good news is that the gender wage gap has narrowed.
In 1978, full-time women workers earned just 61% of what full-time men did,
compared to 79% now. But what to make of the big difference in the experiences
of those transgenders who have become women versus those who have become men?
Schilt, one of the authors of the new article, interviewed a female-to-male
transgender attorney a few years ago. As a younger attorney, the lawyer had
been Susan; now he was Thomas. He told Schilt that after he transitioned from
female to male, another lawyer mistakenly believed that Susan had been fired
and replaced by Thomas. The other lawyer commended the firm's boss for the
replacement. He said Susan had been incompetent; "the new guy," he
added, was "just delightful." (Later, Ben Barres, an FTM neurobiology
professor at Stanford, told The Wall Street Journal of a similar experience.
An attendee at one of his lectures leaned over to a
colleague and said, "Ben Barres' work is much better than his sister's.")
Such stories help explain an interesting feature of
transgender life: men who want to change outward gender wait an average of 10
years longer to transition than women, according to the new article by Schilt
and Wiswall.
"MTFs attempt to preserve their male advantage at work
for as long as possible," they write, "whereas FTMs may seek to shed
their female gender identity more quickly." It should be noted that many
transgender men do experience discrimination, especially if they are short and
if they don't look convincingly male. Also, it's harder for MTFs to pass than
FTMs: men who become women still have large hands and bigger frames. The
less-convincing appearance of MTFs probably explains part of the reason they
earn so much less after they transition. Still, the new paper suggests an
entirely new vein of research in the field. It also suggests that if you're
thinking about changing sexes, you should carefully consider the economic con