This is brilliant, Alison - thanks for bringing it to us!
I had the chance to talk about this very topic with a guest speaker in a
colleague's class a couple of years ago - she is MTF, and noted that her pay
in the same job description dropped significantly when she returned to work
as a female (at a new company in the same industry) compared to her previous
salary for the same work as a pre-op male.
AARGH!
Laura
--
Laura Shanner, Ph.D.
Associate Professor - Health Ethics
School of Public Health, University of Alberta
Office/Mail: John Dossetor Health Ethics Centre
5-16 University Terrace, Edmonton AB T6G 2T4 Canada
Ph: 780-492-4892 Fax: 780-492-0673 [log in to unmask]
On 10/8/08 8:24 AM, "Alison Nicole Crane Reiheld" <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Folks:
>
> 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
> [log in to unmask]
> ---------------
>
> 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
> consequences.
>
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