College may not close women’s pay differential

Women graduating from college will still earn less than the men graduating alongside them with the same degrees, a new study suggests.

The study, “Graduating to a Pay Gap,” came out Friday and found that even when men and women attend similar universities and graduate with the same major, women on average earn 82 percent less than men who accept the same type of job.

“What we wanted to do with this study is look behind the pay gap, what’s driving these differences,” said Catherine Hill, one of the authors of the study from the American Association of University Women. “It’s really a great opportunity to look at how educational choices end up affecting earnings.”

The study suggested that the majors women choose, what type of jobs they take and differences in the hours that men and women work account for some of the pay gap. However, the study also showed 6.6 percent of the pay gap is unaccounted for.

Hill said there is not a way to prove why exactly there is still a pay gap.

“We don’t know why these differences exist,” she said. “We look at survey data that is taken by the federal government and it’s not going to be able to tell us how and why.”

The Boston University community said discrimination could be the cause of this unaccounted pay gap.

“If the area is a male-dominated job area or sector, it looked to me [from the study] like that’s where the pay gap was,” said School of Law professor Michael Harper. “[This] suggests that the decision makers are more likely to be men in the male-dominated fields and they are more likely to discriminate against women than are other women.”

Hill said a number of people are not aware of their own stereotypes and biases.

“A lot of people think stereotypes are a thing of the past and women can do whatever we want,” Hill said. “Some of the other research that we’ve done and other people have done suggests that stereotypes still affect us and how we think about ourselves and our choices and they affect how we behave toward others.”

She said men were not the only ones with these stereotypes. Women were often more critical and hard on themselves in potentially male fields.

“They were very quick to say, ‘This isn’t for me, I’m not doing well, I’m not very good at this,’ as opposed to what men would say, ‘I need to work harder, this is really challenging.’ They had more persistence,” Hill said.

BU students said they were not surprised by the outcome of this study, even though they thought a college education would make a difference.

“It doesn’t really surprise me because I’ve heard that statistic before,” said Bethany Moore, a College of Engineering sophomore. “I don’t feel like it affects me. When I graduate, I don’t think I’ll be paid less than a guy of my equivalent.”

Pantelis Gkaliamoutsas, an ENG sophomore, said the government should be able to step in to balance male and female salaries.

“It’s something that has been going on for awhile, and it’s something that has to be fixed, because of course, it’s an unfair advantage,” he said.

Veronica Faller, an ENG senior, said she would ask about pay differences between genders before accepting a job.

“And, if I’m actually in the position to say I’m not going to work here because that isn’t fair, then I’d do that,” she said.

As a woman, Megan Smith, a College of Communication freshman, said the study was especially disappointing.

“It does surprise me a little bit because you’d think that by now women and men would have more equal pay, especially since we fought so long for equality,” she said.

Ashwini Kerkar, a Sargent College of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences senior, said making more people aware of the situation would help decrease the pay gap.

Harper said the pay inequity could be hard and advised students to be tough.

“If they get married to a man, find a man that’s willing to share financial responsibilities,” he said. “Be tough. You can never have equality at the workplace unless you have equality in your family. We’ve come a long way, maybe, but we haven’t come all the way.”