David Cay Johnston

New data on U.S. incomes, poverty, pensions and philanthropy all show a common economic reality — women are still getting shortchanged. Do men care?

Men’s median total income in 2010 was $1.54 for each dollar women received, my analysis of new U.S. Census data shows. The median — half make more, half less — was $32,137 a year for men, $20,831 for women.

Ignoring investment and other income, at the median men were paid $1.29 to the dollar earned by women in 2010. Men made $47,715 a year, women $36,931, a difference of $207 per week.

Among nonprofit executives and managers, men make much more than women in the same occupations.

Women run a majority of organizations with budgets under $1 million, but as budgets grow the ranks of women shrink. At nonprofits with budgets of $50 million or more, only one in six is run by a woman and as a group those women are paid 25 percentage points less than men, according to the 11th annual nonprofit pay study by Guidestar, a project I long ago urged on its founder.

All of which raises a question: Why do men, especially married men, put up with this? Why aren’t men in the vanguard of demanding equal pay for women?

It is unfair to the women they love. Viewed in purely selfish terms, pay discrimination limits a family’s resources.
And what about fringe benefits? Many couples lose the value of a second health or other benefit plan because plans designed in a one-income era are often incompatible with one another.

TWO GENERATIONS
We have been through two generations since women began to break out of the narrow list of white-collar occupations readily open to them — teacher, nurse, librarian, secretary.

Some women now work in better paid blue-collar jobs that long had a 100 percent male quota, including machinist, mechanic and stevedore.

The first women who fought to become cops are now retired, some with granddaughters patrolling the streets. Women captain jetliners, while men serve coffee to passengers. My wife runs a quarter-billion-dollar charitable endowment, the kind of job she was bluntly told three decades ago a woman would never hold.

While the pay gap has narrowed some, the official data still show that whether they are sales clerks or CEOs, servers or surgeons, women overall make less than men doing the same work.

Yet women are still more likely than men to be poor, especially in old age, the new census data show. Among single women, one in nine lives in extreme poverty with income below half of the poverty line.

Before Ms. magazine was a gleam in Gloria Steinem’s eye, men had quite a deal. Married middle-class men often controlled the purse while enjoying the pleasures of a full-time homemaker who might work a few hours here and there for “pin money” they could spend on themselves. Mothers of small children seldom worked full-time.

EXTRA MONEY AT A PRICE
Married couples with children in 2009 worked 492 more hours than in 1979, a 15 percent increase, census data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute shows. The extra money comes at a price: less time for the joys of parenting, coupling and community engagement.

Why have men quietly given up all those perks, and the power that goes along with being sole breadwinner, for three-quarters of an extra paycheck? For fathers, that can mean half an extra paycheck or less once childcare costs are covered.

Since most men’s wages have been flat to falling it takes two incomes to get by. IRS data show that average income in 2009 was back at the 1997 level when inflation was taken into account. In 2010 median household income fell again, new census data show.

The women’s movement encouraged self-reliance — not being dependent on the goodwill and good health of a husband — as well as self-realization. Equal pay for equal work was central.

The price of pay discrimination stalks retirement, too, since less pay means less in old age. Among Baby Boomers, the youngest of whom are now 47, single women have a retirement savings shortfall nearly twice that of single men, the Employee Benefits Research Institute estimated.

Among men age 65 or older, median income in 2009 was $25,409, two-thirds more than the $15,209 median for women, the Congressional Joint Economic Committee reported in April. Retired men averaged nearly twice as much from pensions as women ().

Married men and fathers can help close these economic chasms. Will self-interest motivate us to challenge enduring economic discrimination against our wives and sisters, our mothers and daughters? Or will the gender income and pay gaps still be around two generations from now? (Editing by Howard Goller)

PHOTO: A worker installs parts onto the dashboard for the new Chevrolet Cruze car as it moves along the assembly line at the General Motors Cruze assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio July 22, 2011. REUTERS/Aaron Josefczyk

Anyone who wants to understand the enduring nature of Occupy Wall Street and similar protests across the country need only look at the first official data on 2010 paychecks, which the U.S. government posted on the Internet on Wednesday.

The figures from payroll taxes reported to the Social Security Administration on jobs and pay are, in a word, awful.

These are important and powerful figures. Maybe the reason the government does not announce their release — and so far I am the only journalist who writes about them each year — is the data show how the United States smolders while Washington fiddles.

There were fewer jobs and they paid less last year, except at the very top where, the number of people making more than $1 million increased by 20 percent over 2009.

The median paycheck — half made more, half less — fell again in 2010, down 1.2 percent to $26,364. That works out to $507 a week, the lowest level, after adjusting for inflation, since 1999.

The number of Americans with any work fell again last year, down by more than a half million from 2009 to less than 150.4 million.

More significantly, the number of people with any work has fallen by 5.2 million since 2007, when the worst recession since the Great Depression began, with a massive taxpayer bailout of Wall Street following in late 2008.
This means 3.3 percent of people who had a job in 2007, or one in every 3330, went all of 2010 without earning a dollar. (Update: the original version of this column used the wrong ratio.)

In addition to the 5.2 million people who no longer have any work add roughly 4.5 million people who, due to population growth, would normally join the workforce in three years and you have close to 10 million workers who did not find even an hour of paid work in 2010.

SIX TRILLION DOLLARS
These figures come from the Medicare tax database at the Social Security Administration, which processes every W-2 wage form. All wages, salaries, bonuses, independent contractor net income and other compensation for services subject to the Medicare tax are added up to the penny.

In 2010 total wages and salaries came to $6,009,831,055,912.11.

That’s a bit more than $6 trillion. Adjusted for inflation, that is less than each of the previous four years and almost identical to 2005, when the U.S. population was 4.2 percent smaller.

While median pay — the halfway point on the salary ladder declined, average pay rose because of continuing increases at the top. Average pay was $39,959 last year, up $46 — or less than a buck a week — compared with 2009. Average pay peaked in 2007 at $40,764, which is $15 a week more than average weekly wage income in 2010.

The number of workers making $1 million or more rose to almost 94,000 from 78,000 in 2009. However, that was still below some earlier years, including 2007, when more than 110,000 workers made more than $1 million each.
At the very top, the number of workers making more than $50 million rose in 2010 to 81, up from 72 the year before. But average pay in this group declined $4.5 million to $79.6 million.

What these figures tell us is that there was a reason voters responded in the fall of 2010 to the Republican promise that if given control of Congress they would focus on one thing: jobs.

But while Republicans were swept into the majority in the House of Representatives, that promise has been ignored.
Not only has no jobs bill been enacted since January, but the House will not even bring up for a vote the jobs bill sponsored by President Obama. His bill is far from perfect, but where is the promised Republican legislation to get people back to work?

Instead of jobs, the focus on Capitol Hill is on tax cuts for corporations with untaxed profits held offshore, on continuing the temporary Bush administration tax cuts — especially for those making $1 million or more – and on cutting federal spending, which mean destroying more jobs in the short run.

At the same time, nonfinancial companies are sitting on more than $2 trillion of cash — nearly $7,000 per American — with no place to invest it profitably. This money cannot even be invested to earn the rate of inflation.
All this capital is sitting on the sidelines waiting for profitable opportunities to be invested, which will not and cannot happen until more people have jobs and wages rise, creating increased demand for goods and services.

More of the same approach we have had for most of the last three decades and all of the last ten years is not going to increase demand, create more jobs or enable overall prosperity. In the long run, continuing current policies will make even the richest among us less well off than they would be in a robust economy with government policies that foster job creation and the capital investment that grows from increased demand.

On top of this are the societal problems caused by something the United States has never experienced before, except during the Depression — chronic, long-term unemployment.

Having millions who want work go years without a single day on a payroll is more than just a waste of talent and time. It also can change social attitudes about work and not for the better.

The data show why protests like Occupy Wall Street have so quickly gained momentum around the country, as people who cannot find work try to focus the federal government on creating jobs and dealing with the banking sector that many demonstrators blame for the lack of jobs.

Will official Washington look at the numbers and change course? Or do voters need to change their elected representatives if they want to put America back on a path to widespread prosperity?
(Editing by Kevin Drawbaugh)