Mind the (Wage) Gap

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You’re listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I’m Sarah Green Carmichael, Executive Editor.

NICOLE TORRES:  I’m Nicole Torres, Associate Editor.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  And I’m Amy Bernstein, Editor of HBR.  As ambitious, hardworking women it’s frustrating, even infuriating, to know that we’ll likely spend at least part of our careers earning less than men doing the same work.

NICOLE TORRES:  A lot of us go into our first jobs naïve to the discrimination we’ll face.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But the gender wage gap is a fact, and not a simple one.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  When we talk about the wage gap, the figure we usually use is 80 cents on the dollar.  That’s the U.S. national average.  But in fact, as you dive into the data what you see is that it’s really a series of different wage gaps.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Today we’re exploring the wage gaps with a couple of experts.

NICOLE TORRES: Amy took a trip into Cambridge to talk to our first expert.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So this is pretty cool.  We’re going to be talking to one of the experts on the gender wage gap, Claudia Goldin.  She’s a Harvard economist and she is with the National Bureau of Economic Research.  Really, no one knows more about this than she does.  Claudia, I’m really happy to be here with you today.  Thanks for taking the time.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  And thank you.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  Let’s start by addressing the commonly held belief that women earn 80% of what men earn.  Is that true?  What are you seeing?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  It is true.  It’s true because we can compute that as a fact from very good data from the current population survey, but it has a definition.  And the definition is that it is the ratio of what the median woman earns who’s working full-time year-round over the same for a male.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So you’re very careful about that definition.  What is it that you’re guarding against?  What is it that people misunderstand?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  So, first of all, the definition comes from the Bureau of Labor Statistics and it’s been used for decades and decades, so we have consistent data going back for a very long time.  It’s a perfectly fine definition, but the issue is that the gender gap is not a single statistic.  So across a person’s lifetime it’s going to change.  There is a dynamic aspect that you’re not capturing when you do it in terms of a median.  Also, in terms of the median you’re missing the fact that men more so than women have a much longer right tail in terms of earnings.  So some of them earn a tremendous amount more and women, some of them also earn a tremendous amount more but disproportionately men do.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  Let’s talk about the course of the careers and how men and women diverge.  What do you see and how is that changing?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  So, what we see in the most recent data is that men and women after they graduate from college or get an MBA or a JD or an MD or whatever, go into the labor market, get jobs.  They earn sort of approximately the same.  Men generally earn somewhat more but not a tremendous amount more.  And then over time we generally measure it for ten to 15 years, ten to 20 years.  Men begin to earn a lot more and the gap widens quite a lot.

BERNSTEIN: So 55% by the time they reach their early 40’s.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN: So for individuals with considerable training, education sort of at the upper end of the distribution in terms of earnings, the work I’ve done on MBAs shows that the gap increases so that after about ten to 15 years women are earning about 60% of what men are earning.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So let’s talk about those MBAs, people in professional services largely, I’m guessing.  What is going on in the course of a woman’s career compared with a man’s career that would cause her to earn so much less?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  So, there are various factors.  We’ve learned a lot from the MBA study, so we know that we can explain almost all of the difference because women shift into jobs that are somewhat lower hours, and saying lower hours does not mean that any of these jobs is under 40 hours a week.  They’re still fairly long hours jobs, but they shift out of positions in investment banking and consulting, which are more grueling, and they shift into positions, I’ll give one, which is HR, which has more reasonable and more predictable hours and fewer demands.  That’s the first thing.  The second factor is that any time off has heavy penalties in certain sectors, in the corporate sector, in finance, in management, in consulting.  It just has fairly high penalties, and so we can see that in the MBA data.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So you talked about switching jobs and that women tend to go for jobs that for various reasons they have to care for their children or family members.  They take jobs that demand less of them, and they take pay cuts.  Is that accurate?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  That is fairly accurate.  Part of it is that they could go, and we see this in the aggregate data, they go into firms that we can see are firms that on average are lower wage.  So within their firms they’re making the same as men are making, but relative to the individuals in all of the firms they’re making less.  So lawyers for example, you might start out at a big law firm in New York and Boston and Chicago that pays a lot and that you work hard to make partner.  In the middle of that you might decide this is too grueling, I think I’d like to work in a smaller law firm.  So you shift it to a small law firm, which we would see as a firm that has on average lower earnings.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So let’s talk about job switching.  You did some work that found that men benefit more from job switching, broadly speaking, than women do.  Tell us what’s going on there.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  Good point, and let me begin and say that we still don’t have all the evidence.  This is why we’re still doing research on this.  But over time women are staying in firms that are as I said the lower wage firms.  They’re moving into the lower wage firms.  Men are moving disproportionately more to the higher wage firms, so we’re somewhat of a split in that.  We also know that within each of these firms women are not climbing the ladder as much as men are.  Now, if we want to scratch beneath that surface we need to get much better data, and this is what we’re doing right now.  We need to get data on couples, and we want to see whether a couple begins their earning approximately the same, they’re both working for approximately the same type of firm in terms of high wage, low wage, and then at some point each one of them might get different offers.  And if they have a family at some point they might decide that they’re going to stay in a place where one of them, generally the man, is making the higher salary, or they’re going to move to the place where generally the man, the husband, is making the higher salary.  So in the first case we would call that a tied stayer.  The woman is sort of stuck in a place and the other one is a tied mover.  She moves to a place that might be less advantageous for her but on average more advantageous for the family.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  I understand it’s usually the woman who’s making the sacrifice.  Are you seeing any evidence that that’s changing?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  We’re certainly seeing evidence that we can see over time that the gender gap is smaller, but for us to have a sense whether one of the causes in terms of the tied stayer, tied mover issues that that is changing, we need better data.  I don’t have the data on that yet.  What we do see, and this is the good news, is that we see that men are wanting more of what women have always wanted, which is to have more predictable hours, more flexible hours, more ability to be with their kids.  We can see from time use studies that men, particularly the most educated men, are spending more time with their children in terms of educating them, taking them to various soccer lessons and ballet lessons and whatever.  So this is an indication that we’re probably moving in the right direction.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So you mentioned flexibility.  Some of your work has found that the flex policies like job sharing, that women take more advantage of than men on the whole, carry a penalty.  Can you tell us about that?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  Yes.  So, flexibility, predictability, these are amenities just like clean air is an amenity, just like having a nice rug or furniture is an amenity, and it’s often costly.  It can be very costly in certain places or it can be less costly in other places.  And a firm that is seeking to fill a job with two part-time people rather than a full-time person could be able to take advantage of it and pay them considerably less than half, so in other words their hourly rate will go down, but as more firms are doing this the rate will go up.  And there are lots of other ways in which we can create or the market can create pay that is more linear with ours rather than being extremely non-linear or extremely convex.  What I mean by that is that the individual who works 40 hours a week on an hourly basis gets a lot less on an hourly basis than the person who works 60 or 80 hours a week.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  I was really intrigued with your finding that in some sectors where client interaction is important, face time, that women tend to pay a wage penalty because they have less flexible schedules.  What are you talking about there?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  So, once again it’s the same point about the amenities.  So if your job requires that you be around most of the time because a client will come in or you have teams of complementary people in your office and you have to be there for all these other people, then it stands to reason that if you’re the person who says no, 11:00 on Friday I have to take my kid to the dentist, or 4:00 on Monday I take my mother to her rheumatologist, you’re going to be the person who isn’t promoted.  You’re going to be the person who isn’t going to get the important clients to take care of because you’re not going to be there.  So the places that put a lot of emphasis on face time that’s meaningful will be the places in which this amenity, flexibility, predictability is going to be the most costly.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  I’m trying to sort of parse that.  Is that when you’re a consultant and you go out for dinner with your client?  You know, you’re sort of cementing the relationship there.  Is that what we’re talking about here?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  Unfortunately, no.  That I can understand.  The cementing part is absolutely, shall we say, concrete.  But what I find, and some of my students have told me, is they’ll say I am working for a big firm in New York, let’s just call that Goldman Sachs, and I come in at 7:00 in the morning.  And I’ll say, why are you there at 7:00 in the morning?  No one’s there.  And the person will say, but someone’s going to come in and then I’ll be there.  And that’s face time.  And if I make friends with this person, maybe this person will train me to be the you name it, trader, broker, you know, investment banker that I want to be.  And I’ll say that doesn’t make any sense because they should have some sort of a routinized training program.  People shouldn’t just be sitting around waiting for you to, you know, to see you.  So I haven’t heard of anything called face time that makes sense.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So let’s talk a little bit about what you’re seeing with older women, women in their 60’s and 70’s.  A greater number of them are working.  Talk about that.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  So, in the past 20 years or so we’ve seen a remarkable increase in the U.S. and now in much of Europe, which is something new, in the labor force participation and the employment of women over the age of 55.  And these increases are not part-time work.  They’re full-time work.  They’re not due to the fact that an individual leaves one job, downscales, downsizes, goes to something else.  This is more continuity, and the increases have been quite large in the U.S.  They’ve sort of tapered off a bit in the last five years, but they’ve been extremely large for women around 62 years old over a 20-year period.  It’s almost a doubling.  It’s extremely large.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  What happens to the wage gap at that age?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  Once again, that’s in the future because in fact we know from some aggregate work that I’ve done, aggregate meaning just repeated cross sections, nothing fancy, that the wage gap that I was talking about before that dynamically opens up in the first two decades of employment, so if you start at 23 that would bring you to about 43, then begins to start closing.  So the same forces that early on widened it, a greater need for one member of the couple, generally the woman, to have more flexible, predictable hours this tied stayer or tied mover issue that I mentioned before, that that becomes less of an issue after 45, 50.  So my guess is that the gender earnings gap for the individuals I was just talking about is lower than it was when they were 35 years old.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  But that outer edge on the right still exists, right?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  The outer edge on the right would still exist, and one might even think that for older men who, you know, CEOs are generally older men, would be relatively large, right?  But it’s a small group relative to this big group.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So I read something you wrote that really kind of made me sit up.  It’s that the gender gap in pay would be considerably reduced if firms did not have an incentive to disproportionally reward individuals who worked long hours and who worked particular hours.  Talk about what you mean there.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  So, this gets back to the issue of flexibility and predictability in hours.  So if we have a set of jobs in which firms believe that it’s extremely important for workers to be around, what we were talking about before.  We have rich clients.  Clients comes in, says where is Ann today?  And you say, well, Ann’s out today, but don’t worry because Joe is really a very good substitute.  And the person says no, no, Ann is my tax accountant, counselor, whatever.  Then in that company, the ability to be around for many hours is worth a tremendous amount.  But if we can find ways to make people better substitutes for each other, and the person comes in and says I want Ann, and someone turns around and says I’m Ann’s double, hi!  It’s like, I’m Alexa.  Then we wouldn’t have this problem.  So to the extent that you can have someone who fills in for you, just one person who fills in for you, then we’ve gotten rid of all of the difficulties.  Then we have to think, how can we get someone to fill in for you?  Well, that person would have to have ways, and we have them, of having a transfer of information with perfect fidelity.  So a very good example is pharmacists.  There was a time when female pharmacists were far lower paid than male pharmacists.  They worked part-time.  The male pharmacist was there most of the time, and people would come in and depend upon the male pharmacist to compound whatever it is they were asking for.  The male pharmacist would be the owner of the business, would be the residual claimant, would be there at 2:00 in the morning if there was a leak in the roof, for example.  And then many things changed in the field of pharmacy.  For one, we got standardized drugs, so I don’t care who counts my pills.  They’re still the same pills, OK?  Number two, we have absolutely perfect fidelity of information.  So I come in there, the pharmacist knows exactly what I’ve been taking, so would know if there is any reason that I should be told something about the drug I’ve just been given.  They don’t have to know me personally anymore.  And the final thing is that corporate ownership changed who is the residual claimant.  So it is not that it’s impossible to create good substitutes for people, and it’s not as if pharmacists are low paid.  They’re very highly paid professionals.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  So, I’m going to shift gears a little bit.  I’m curious about what got you into this field of study.  What drew you to the gender wage gap in the first place?

CLAUDIA GOLDIN:  Gender is a distinction that is timeless, that it doesn’t seem to matter over the centuries how much change there is and how much we have narrowed these gaps between what men do and what women do.  It doesn’t matter how much we have changed social and cultural norms and stigmas, and we have gone a very, very long distance.  We’ve come a long way.  It doesn’t matter.  Every single generation can say in my generation there have been major changes in gender differences, so it means that it doesn’t matter where you are in this long history.  Gender matters a tremendous amount.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Ain’t that the truth.  Well, thank you so much for your time.

CLAUDIA GOLDIN: And thank you.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So that was a really cool conversation with Claudia.  The thing that really interested me I wish we could have explored further was that she’s seen more men looking for the same kind of shift into less grueling schedules, and she said specifically that they want to spend time with their families.  They want to spend time with their kids.  They just need more data to show that.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, one of the things that strikes me about that as particularly hopeful is that often when we talk about the maternal wall that women at work run into, sort of the corollary into the glass ceiling, what Joan Williams calls the maternal wall, is we talk about it as an issue of logistics, of well, someone just has to take care of the kids or do the daycare pickup, and that those logistics are what are holding women back.  But actually there’s a bunch of other research out there too that shows it’s not just about that, it’s that mothers are perceived as less competent in the office and they are penalized more heavily when they don’t exude huge amounts of warmth.  I think if men are starting to also indicate they want to spend more time with their families, maybe that is a stereotype that will start to lose its power.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I hope so.  I mean, the way I think it shows up in really honest conversations is commitment.  She doesn’t have the commitment.  And when guys start saying I need to be at my kid’s softball game, I need to go to the school play, I’m going to need to leave early at 7:30 this evening, you know?  Maybe that’ll shift all of us a little bit.

NICOLE TORRES: I think that shift is encouraging and promising because there’s also this other strand of research that has found that when men do ask for things, or in the past when they have asked for things like more flexibility, don’t they tend to be penalized more than women?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes, yes

NICOLE TORRES: So that has upheld certain stereotypes that have kept men working these crazy long hours but then maybe even allowed women to ask for more flexible schedules.  They’re still penalized, but not as much as men are because there is this expectation that they will take more time off.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: The other thing I find interesting about men asking and speaking up about wanting more time off is that one of my favorite pieces of research that we’ve published was by Erin Reid, who was talking about men who pretend to work 80-hour weeks.  And it’s kind of crazy.  She did this study of a big consulting firm where she found that the women were the ones that were asking for formal accommodations, asking for the flexible schedule policy, and men were just kind of quietly slipping out the door and maybe even saying oh, I’m just headed to a client meeting, when really they were going to go skiing with their son or something.  [LAUGHTER]  Yeah, and the women really paid a price for being honest in those cases.  So if men are being more forthright about their family commitments, then maybe it sort of changes the whole workplace dynamic.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I also wonder how much of it is that women don’t actually need to say everything.  Sometimes you just gotta go, you know?  I’m going to need to leave here at the stroke of 5:00.  No explanation needed.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Right, or just leave.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Just leave.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Exactly.  Don’t tell people, oh, I need to leave at 5:00 today.  Just walk out the door.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, because there’s a huge gap between the part where you’re putting in the hours or not, and that’s just rarely the case that someone isn’t putting in the hours and that you’re getting work done.

NICOLE TORRES: So, I wanted to ask both of you if this is something that either of you thought about as you were entering your careers or at different stages of your careers, because speaking from personal experience, when I graduated college I was not thinking that the gender wage gap would affect me personally, would limit my earnings potential.  And I was reading an old HBR article that did cite a study of U.S. college students in 2006, and most predicted that gender would not affect their promotions or their pay.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Well, I didn’t think about it 50,000 years ago when I entered the workforce.  [LAUGHTER]  The thing that I also struggle with is how do you know that there’s a gap between – I mean, equal pay for equal work is a matter of law, right?  So how do you know that you are a victim of the gap?  That’s something I don’t – do you understand that?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I have thought about this a lot, and I used to kind of obsess over it.  Because you don’t know.  You don’t know.  You walk around, you look at the men in the office, you’re like are you making more than me?  I don’t know.  And it takes this sort of cognitive load.  And the reason I think about this stuff is I have always been interested in gender.  And now that I’m in my mid-30’s I am at the point where all my friends suddenly are feminists too because they’re running into these issues.  But I read The Feminine Mystique when I was 11 years old.  That is the person that I am, for better or worse.  And so I was like the unpopular girl in the high school who was like women!  Feminism!  And so of course I’ve always thought about this stuff.  But then I read this piece that we published that said that actually people who are paid above market, 35% of those people think that they’re paid below market.

NICOLE TORRES: People tend to think they’re underpaid.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: People tend to think they’re underpaid.  So at some point after that piece came out, I did a bit of digging and research on different websites to try to figure out what an editor with my title would make at different publications.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, man.  Don’t trust those things.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: No, but, well —

NICOLE TORRES: that’s helpful to hear though.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: You might take it back, because what I found was that I was relatively well paid.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  Well, it’s not even that.  When I’ve done the same thing at those type in your title thing, you and I both know that the title you have here is not the same as the equivalent job title at an equivalent company.  That’s the thing, that those things are very blunt measures.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: It’s totally true.  At the same time, having done a bit of research on what other firms and talked to people at other firms, I started to feel confident that I was making a fair or better salary, and then I stopped worrying so much about whether there was a gap with my male colleagues.

AMY BERNSTEIN:  Where I really felt it was when I was in my 20’s and I noticed that the cohort of 22-year-olds that entered my workplace together at the very bottom of the totem pole, the guys were moving ahead faster than the women.  And I sort of ascribed it to their brashness and the thing where they didn’t need to be perfect and global experts at whatever it was they were doing before they would put themselves out there.  And I think that that’s maybe one source of the wage gap, just based on my own experience, is unequal access to opportunity.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes, and I think different assumptions about what it takes to get hired and I think different assumptions about how much skill and knowledge you need to do certain jobs.  Promotions are one of the best ways, obviously, that you can earn more money, and one of the big veins of research to come out on men and women in promotions has to do with having a sponsor versus having a mentor.  And the research on this, a lot of which has come out of the firm catalyst, is about how women actually are more likely to be mentored than men.  But a mentor is sort of someone who gives you these feel-good life lessons.  The thing a sponsor can do for you, he or she can get you better assignments.  And there’s another whole strain of research that shows that assignments are really what get people promoted and that women are statistically less likely to get the good juicy meaty assignments, right?

NICOLE TORRES: The highly visible ones.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Exactly.  So that is the thing that a sponsor can do for you, is get you those assignments.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And the other thing about sponsors is that sponsors have to have political juice.  And women haven’t always had enough power to have political juice.  I think it’s one of those distinctions with a very substantial difference, and one worth paying attention to because advice is great and good advice is invaluable, but going to bat for someone, that is where you really get to – and I’ll say this as a senior person – it’s where you really get to effect positive change.

NICOLE TORRES: There was this HBR article we published, Ending the Wage Gap, that looked at female executives and male executives.  It looked at newly hired chief financial officers of U.S. public companies and it found that there was no gender wage gap upon hiring, but after two years women were lagging behind in terms of total compensation than their male counterparts.  The authors had a couple of ideas about why this is, you know, maybe the companies think women forgo higher pay for family-friendly factors like location stability.  And these authors gave four steps that women can take to prevent this from happening.  So they say move or show that you’re willing to move; compete within the firm, so seek opportunities for additional responsibilities; try to get better, more visible assignments.  They say get a contract that calibrates your raises to the increases paid to men of the same rate, and they say do your homework about what people get paid and bring it to HR and your managers.  Both of you are female executives.  Were these steps that you took?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, I totally had them write a contract to calibrate my pay to – no.  [LAUGHTER]

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I love that idea, though.

NICOLE TORRES: I know!

AMY BERNSTEIN: No, I’ve never done any of that.  Have you?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I mean, I’ve done my homework, right?

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, doing your homework, yeah.  Table stakes.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I have not moved, nor have I gotten the sort of contract in writing.  I did once when I started out at HBR actually get – because I asked for a higher starting salary than I was given – and the manager who hired me said, well, after three or six months or something, we can take another look and if your work is really good we can renegotiate.  I was too scared to bring it up, so I just sort of let that go by and didn’t mention it and sort of waited for someone else to mention it, which was obviously a mistake.  And then also earlier in my career here, I had just edited an article on how women don’t ask enough for raises.  And so then when my boss came and said, here is your annual raise, I was like, I‘d like to ask for more.  I was so terrified, I think I sweated through my shirt.  And he was like, um, can I just ask why?  He was really stunned.  And I was like, I thought I should ask.  Women don’t ask.  And he sort of laughed in a friendly way and was like, OK, well, I’ll see what I can do.  And obviously that did not work at all.  So I feel like early on I definitely missed the football a couple times.  Which is normal, but now I don’t know.  I think the thing I have done probably the most is I’ve tried to really put my hand up when I see an opening.  And every time that I have felt like I could take on more or there’s a cool project I want to do, I’m sort of volunteering for that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Do you do it with the idea that this is a visible assignment?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Yes, and I would say I also have tried to avoid assignments that just seem like a sandbag.  Like if there is some thankless assignment that is just going to go nowhere and bring no glory and also seems boring, obviously I try to skitter out of the way of that.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I think that tends to hit women more than men because men say no more than women do.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: But I have tried to be I guess both a show horse and a workhorse, because you can’t just be a workhorse and no one likes you if you’re just a show horse.  So I feel like as women you have to really do both. One of the things that has worried me about the wage gap and the data about it is that really when you start to get to age 37, that’s when you see the wage gap really widening for women.  And I am turning 37 later this year.  And also maybe TMI, but my husband and I have been talking about kids and when you look at the motherhood penalty, then I start to see kind of all sorts of red flags in my future.  I really started thinking about the gender wage gap differently after I saw Margaret Gullette, who is a professor who studies age in wage gaps, give a presentation at Harvard Business School last year, at their gender symposium.

MARGARET GULLETTE: Why do midlife women get bullied in wage negotiations?  Why do employers stop investing in their careers?  The double standard of aging starts long before menopause and goes on long after.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: She talked about how the age gap is really an age wage gender gap.  We called her up and reached her while she was in Nicaragua, so you may hear some birds chirping in the background, and we asked her what happens as women get to that age that I am facing, 37.

MARGARET GULLETTE: Women just flatline.  Sorry to use a metaphor from dying, but your pay basically flatlines.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So that was not good news. I want to know, Nicole, how that sounds to you as someone who has maybe another ten years to go before that point?  I mean, is that terrifying?  What is your reaction to that?

NICOLE TORRES: It’s terrifying.  It’s not something that I thought explicitly about, especially to pin the age 37 onto that is very scary.  I’m still optimistic that us having conversations about this right now will change some of the things that are leading to that flatlining.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Oh, so I’m way more than ten years away on the other side, and this has nothing to do with my experience and the experience of most of my friends, who are women who are my age and have been working most of their lives.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s a relief.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.  I wonder if what we’re hearing here is sort of the tyranny of very large data sets and the gap between those and your own context.  I’m not saying that it definitely won’t happen, no promises, as if I control all that, but not my experience at all.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I think it is true that as you gain skills and knowledge and seniority it becomes harder to replace you, but you can also sometimes be on the losing end of layoffs or the losing end of some kind of management shakeup.  And then what ends up happening is that a lot of older women I think find it harder to get back into the workforce and find it harder to be seen sometimes as valuable.  And Margaret calls this middle ageism.

MARGARET GULLETTE: Middle ageism is harsher on women.  Now, it’s harsher because of a kind of sexist ageism, that is to say women are alleged to get less attractive, to not be sexy anymore.  Women talk about it all the time, but they don’t necessarily make this connection that being considered unattractive or asexual, it’s not good for your career.  Even if you don’t have a career, you’ve having what Americans more and more have.  You’re having a series of jobs, sometimes every other day, sometimes after two months or so, and every time you have to start over again and you start over again in a market that thinks that you are deficient.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.  Here I am, deeply embedded in middle age and I think that when you stop being a dazzling nubile young woman, the world sort of turns away a little bit.  I mean, the good news is that there are more and more women in positions of responsibility who say now this is ridiculous, don’t hold it against her because she has jowls, or yes, that candidate is a perfectly credible candidate but she isn’t as good as this candidate who’s ten years older.  I mean, there’s a moment for stepping up and kind of calling people out on their nonsense.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So it’s interesting to me, because I feel like yes, what she says is real and it is documented and there is also research that shows that there is a kind of sexiness premium that more conventionally attractive people tend to earn more money, taller people earn more money, right?  At the same time where I am now in my late 30’s, I have appreciated becoming less attractive by the standards of society because earlier in my career I felt like my looks were a distraction.  I was a young 20-something blonde woman working with lots of older men, and they were always making comments.  Not sexual comments necessarily, but sort of patronizing comments.  To me it was a relief to start to see some wrinkles and stuff going on because I just felt maybe now I finally will be taken seriously.

AMY BERNSTEIN: You know, I was sort of interested in Claudia Goldin’s finding that more women are working into their 60’s and 70’s.  I was sort of wondering how looks and ageism played into their experience.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: Well, and that reminds me too of this friend of my mom who always has worked as a consultant and who has always deducted her hair dye as a business expense because she feels that if she goes in to negotiate with someone or to do a client-type visit and she has gray hair that they are not going to see her as a valuable, smart employee.  They’re going to see her as an old lady.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah, I totally buy it.  I think Botox is in the same category.

NICOLE TORRES: So, we also asked Margaret what ageism looks like in the workplace and how we can intervene if we witness it.

MARGARET GULLETTE: Well, a lot of it is in code or through jokes, so you have to figure out just the way people figure it out with sexism what you are capable of.  People will have different responses, you know.  One of them is just to say, we’re none of us getting any younger.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL:So is there anything, Amy, that you would say if you sort of sensed it in the air?

AMY BERNSTEIN: I think that people don’t realize it when they’re behaving this way, when they’re acting on these biases.  I do think a lot of times they’re unconscious.  And so what I don’t want to do is put someone on the defensive.  I want that person to hear what I’m saying, and so I’ll ask honestly why this person minus the technical skill that can be acquired over a weekend on course Sarah isn’t perfectly qualified for this job.  And you’re saying that this person isn’t digital, but I think this person has everything going for him or her except for the one thing that’s easiest to acquire.  So I might do that.  In my own case I’ve said, you know, if the road is ending that quickly then I need a different road, so I have no intention of sitting back at this stage and just resting on my laurels, such as they are.  If you believe it’s happening you’d go home and kick yourself if you didn’t say something.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: So, we’ve been talking mostly about ageism at the older end of the spectrum, but there is also sometimes ageism at the younger end where people devalue younger people’s skills and sort of say, like the equivalent would be oh, that person doesn’t have the experience or in that sort of a coded way.  Have you ever seen that happen, or has it happened to you and do you have a comeback?

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah, I’ve been asked how old are you when I show up to a meeting because I look pretty young and –

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: That’s so obnoxious.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah, and that’s inappropriate.  So I just think that it’s important to see ageism when it’s directed at younger people too, because it happens.  But it’s harder to argue and point out that that is ageism and not someone just saying you’re inexperienced.

AMY BERNSTEIN: So, I think in the case, I’m just going to offer some unsolicited advice here, which is sometimes saying I think that’s ageism isn’t going to get you what you want.  Maybe what you want to say to she doesn’t have the experience is how am I going to get the experience?  Give me a chance to gain the experience, I’m a really fast learner.

NICOLE TORRES: Yeah. That’s good advice.

AMY BERNSTEIN: I find that kind of self-fulfilling prophecy infuriating.  I’m wondering, because I’m still struggling to figure out where the sort of broad macroeconomic trends, what they really tell me about my own situation, whether you guys, Sarah and Nicole, have gotten anything out of this conversation, has it clarified anything for you?

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: I think it has opened my eyes to the issues that especially older women tend to face in the workforce.  I was sort of patting myself on the back for getting out of what felt like the kind of can’t be taken seriously early 20’s and was feeling pretty confident about the future but also now have a sort of a sense that all those issues are not resolved, they just become different issues.

AMY BERNSTEIN: Yeah.

NICOLE TORRES: I think it’s opened my eyes too, especially because in the media now we see all these stories about the wage gap and women earn 70, 80 cents on the dollar when compared to men, but a lot of this research that we’ve talked about has shown that it’s not as simple as one statistic and number.  Like there are all these other factors that come into play like profession, like choices, like a culture of overwork and flexible hours.

AMY BERNSTEIN: And I think it also gives you the weapons you need to take into your next conversation with your manager about your own pay, right?  I mean, that’s super useful.

SARAH GREEN CARMICHAEL: And I guess the other thing that has stuck with me, studies like the study about how women don’t ask and women should negotiate more and stuff, that gets a ton of play in the press.  And what sometimes gets less attention is that’s like a sideshow.  After combing through all the research that we combed through for this, I was like, oh, that would make a small statistical difference, but it’s not like the whole wage gap would be solved if women just asked.

AMY BERNSTEIN: It’s rarely just one factor.

NICOLE TORRES: That’s our show.  I’m Nicole Torres.  My cohosts are Amy Bernstein and Sarah Green Carmichael.  Our producer is Amanda Kersey.  Our audio product manager is Adam Buchholz.  Curt Nickisch is our consulting editor, and Maureen Hoch is our supervising editor.  One of our favorite parts of the week now is reading and responding to your emails.  Meryl wrote us about the Make Yourself Heard episode, saying I can’t wait for the next person to interrupt me.  I’m ready.  Another email that stood out to me was from Tiffany.  She wrote, it’s empowering to have tools to use in my day-to-day work and to improve what I can control, but I also hope in the future women don’t have to do as much shapeshifting just to be heard.  Totally.  I hope that’s the future too.  And we’ll keep giving you practical advice and encouraging managers to do a better job of listening.  So please keep writing us.  Our email address is womenatwork@hbr.org.  Talk to you next time.