The Equal Pay Act Turns 50 – Food for Thought

The New York Times ran a great piece by Stephanie Coontz, co-chairwoman of the Council on Contemporary Families, on the occasion of the 50^th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act where the author succinctly summarizes some of the gains towards equality since 1963 but also takes a close look at where we are today.

The findings are interesting in themselves, so here is a brief overview:

• In 1963 women earned 60% of what men earn.  Today they earn around 80%.
• Education now outweighs gender as in indicator of wage rates.
• More than a quarter of the gain in wage equity comes from loss in men’s wages.
• Motherhood is a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender.

This in and of itself gives a lot of food for thought.  But what really stunned me was the riddle that leads the piece.  Bear with me if you know it already:

A boy and his father are in a car crash and the father is killed instantly. The boy is airlifted to the best hospital in the region and prepped for emergency surgery by one of the top surgeons in the country. The surgeon rushes in, sees the boy, and says “I can’t operate on this patient. He’s my son.” Who is the surgeon?

Boston University researchers Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle asked this same question in a study and found that 86% of the subjects did not know that the surgeon was the boy’s mother.  That is a startlingly high percentage and paints a poignant picture of how far we still have to go in recognizing women as equal forces in the professional world.