Reported by Jailain Hollon
Women in the workplace don’t have a way of knowing if they are being paid equally for the same job as their male counterparts. However, a quick look at postgraduate employment outcomes can reveal the prevalent issue of the gender pay gap.
Compared to the national gender pay gap of $10,762, the female student body of Baruch College are slightly above the curve with a gender pay gap of $5,802. However, the gender pay gap being reported out of Baruch College’s STARR Career Development Center doesn’t put the pay gap for female students from Baruch into context.
At the end of this month the STARR Career Development Center—Baruch’s service program that help’s students find jobs and internships—will close its survey period for a new undergraduate employment outcome report to be released in February of 2016. In last year’s survey it was reported that women who graduated from Baruch College made approximately $5,802 dollars less than male graduates.
According to the 2013-2014 SCDC’s report on undergraduate employment outcomes, of the 3007 students that graduated from Baruch College last year, only 1994 or 66 percent of students reported to the SCDC about their employment plans. Of those 1994 students that graduated, 50.5 percent were women, and of those only 68 percent of them reported that they were employed compared to the 72 percent of male students. Furthermore, the report by the SCDC revealed that women graduating from Baruch make an average of $43,068 annually compared to the $48,870 of their male counterparts. It is important to note that only the 66 percent of Baruch graduates’ annual salaries are reflected in the report.
The reason behind these disparities in salary among male and female students that graduated from Baruch College depends on a variety of different variables according to the SCDC’s director, Dr. Patricia Imbimbo. In an interview with Dr. Imbimbo she explains that figure in the SCDC report, she says, “It has to do with the types of majors that students are in. So if you look at accounting majors, men and women are making the same thing, and as far as I can tell in finance that’s the same thing.” Furthermore, Dr. Imbimbo explains that female graduates tend to earn their degrees in majors with lower salary occupations and that is a reason why the figure in the report shows Baruch’s female students earning $5,802 less than the male students.
The SCDC report also provided support to Dr. Imbimbo’s explanation about some college majors earning more money than others, and how this factors into the gender pay gap. For example, the report reveals that Baruch College graduates who majored in Accounting earned $46,603 annually compared to the $38,750 annual salary for those who majored in Psychology. Dr. Imbimbo places an emphasis on how we should look at the determining factors in the gender pay gap between male and female students.
“There’s great variety in what different majors make,” Dr. Imbimbo says, “the biggest numbers, the ones that I think that are closest to what really is happening are going to be things like accounting.” She further reiterates the importance of examining the problem by analyzing how salaries differ between male and female students when they have the same college major, and the same respective jobs.
Dr. Imbimbo explains some of the causes for the gap between Baruch’s male and female student’s salaries in the SCDC’s undergraduate employment outcome report. But she doesn’t think that the women who graduate from Baruch will make less than their male counterparts.
“In terms of the students coming out of Baruch, I don’t think women are making less than men,” Dr. Imbimbo says. “What happens as they move along is another story.”
A study by the Pew Research Center supports some of Dr. Imbimbo’s theory. In 2014, the U.S. gender wage gap was smaller among younger workers, and for every dollar a man earned women from ages 16 to 24 earned 93 cents. The graph further reveals that women from ages 25 to 34 earned 91 cents for every dollar a man made, and women between the ages 35 to 44 earned 84 cents on the dollar. The study reveals that older groups of women are more applicable to larger pay gaps.
Dr. Imbimbo also cites that the lack of access to promotions, and older women reducing their workload to take care of their children is a reason for this widening pay gap. Furthermore, although the director of Baruch’s SCDC doesn’t think the gender pay gap will affect Baruch’s graduating students, some of the college’s graduating women have differing opinions.
Casey Mollon, a senior at Baruch College, believes that because childrearing causes women to take off from work it allows men to work their way up when they do not have children to take care of. “I think that women, when they start out, make less money than men when they start out,” Mollon says. “And I also feel like because of the child rearing argument that it’s used as an excuse for the difference in salary among men and women.”
Women of color who go to Baruch also experience the gender pay gap from a different perspective when race and income intersect.
“As a woman of color I do feel vulnerable. I think we’re paid even lower than other women in the workforce,” says Nadine Roman, an African American Senior graduating from Baruch this spring. “These salary disparities usually have a trickle down effect that hurt those in a minority group more than the majority. So while white women may not get as much as the white man they still usually get paid more than a woman of color.”
In a report on aauw.org—an advocacy organization for women—the pay gap is in fact worse for women of color. According to their Fall 2015 report for economic justice, aauw.org took a closer look into the racial aspect of the gender pay gap. The report found that while black women earn 90 percent of what black men earn, compared to the salary of white men, black women only earned 63 percent. This gap is 15 percent larger than the pay gap for white women who earn 78 percent of what white men earn.
Baruch’s SCDC’s report on undergraduate employment outcomes does not explain any racial disparities for women of color, or the pay gaps between the college’s well established racial diverse student body. However, the pay gap between genders and racial ethnicities are only some of the problems concerning Baruch’s graduating seniors.
Henna Choudhary, another graduating senior majoring in journalism at Baruch College did not find the college’s SCDC helpful for her or her college major. “I used to utilize STARR but to no avail so I started using other websites such as Looksharp, InternMatch, and Glassdoor when I searched for jobs and internships,” she says. “In my opinion, STARR caters primarily to Baruch’s business students majoring in advertising, marketing, and finance.”
Even on the job some of Baruch’s female student body fell that they are treated differently from their male counterparts.
“I feel like I constantly have something to prove just to prove that I deserve to be there as much as any other man,” says Mollon who is also a waitress working part time in New York City. “Women are watched and scrutinized to ensure we are doing our jobs whereas men are not questioned.”
The issue of the gender pay gap and economic inequality goes beyond Baruch College’s STARR Career Development Center’s undergraduate employment outcomes report. It is a political issue for presidential campaigns and for presidential candidates as we enter the 2016 primary elections and the presidential election. Furthermore, Democratic candidates such as Hillary Clinton, former Secretary of State, and Vermont Senator Bernie Sanders have been the most outspoken in their campaigns on the issues of the gender pay gap and income inequality. Rallying younger voters for support by using their issues as a platform has been a goal for presidential candidates trying to become elected as president of the United States.
On December 31, the SCDC will finish collecting data for their annual undergraduate employment outcomes report, and in the month of February of 2016 a new report for Baruch students will be released. Dr. Imbimbo is optimistic about the job market numbers for all students graduating from Baruch. “I do think that the job market is better now, I do think that there are more jobs available and that if I were going to guess I would say that more students are going to get jobs,” says Dr. Imbimbo.
However, with candidates Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders having specific platform issues for the gender wage gap, politics have become prevalent for voting age students, especially voting aged women, at Baruch College. And as long as the gender pay gap is still on pace to close by 2058—according to iwpr.org—this issue will remain an important issue on the ballot for the up coming elections in November of 2016.
“I think politics plays a big role because at both the state and national level these people are the ones that push for the wages and job opportunities,” Roman explains. “I think it’s very important if you want to see change or any kind of positive outlook going into our future as far as not just for us, but for future generations.”