The Wrong Route to Equality – Men’s Declining Wages

The median is the point where half the values are higher, half are lower.

http://www.epi.org/publication/wrong-route-equality-mens-declining-wages/

The improvement in women’s wages relative to men’s is in part due to men’s declining wages

By Heidi Shierholz | June 12, 2013

In the late 1970s, after a long period of holding fairly steady, the gap in wages between men and women began improving. In 1979, the median hourly wage for women was 62.7 percent of the median hourly wage for men; by 2012, it was 82.8 percent. However, a big chunk of that improvement – more than a quarter of it — happened because of men’s wage losses, rather than women’s wage gains.

With the exception of the period of labor market strength in the late 1990s, the median male wage, after adjusting for inflation, has decreased over essentially the entire period since the late 1970s. Between 1979 and 1996, it dropped 11.5 percent, from $19.53 per hour to $17.27 per hour. With the strong labor market of the late 1990s, the median male wage partially rebounded to $18.93 by 2002. It then began declining again; at $18.03 per hour in 2012, the real wage of the median male was 4.7 percent below where it had been a decade earlier.

This cannot be blamed on economic stagnation.

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Furthermore, looking at the median wage understates the losses many men have experienced since the 1970s. For men with a high school degree, real wages have fallen by more than 14 percent. It is not the case, however, that men’s wages have fared poorly since the 1970s because men do not have the right education or skills. In the last 10 years, even workers with a college degree have failed to see any real wage growth.

Nor are men’s losses are due to women’s gains. The forces that were holding back male wage growth were also acting on women’s wages, but the gains made by women over this period in educational attainment, labor force attachment, and occupational upgrading, along with greater legal protections against discriminatory pay, initially compensated for adverse forces. In the last decade, however, women’s wages have also dropped.

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The decline in unionization alone explains about a third of the rise in male wage inequality (and about a fifth of the increase in female wage inequality) over this period.

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