A recent Huffington Post article would have you believe the answer is both.
The article, titled “Men Educated At Ivy League Schools Vastly Outearn Female Classmates”, posits that sexism plays a large role in the gender gap of the alumni of top universities. According to the Department of Education chart below, MIT and Stanford had the largest pay gaps, while Cornell clocked in at 18th on the list of 33 universities–only Brown was a more equitable Ivy.
The apparent wage gap is largely explained by choice of major, and perhaps more directly, choice of occupation. Even the author of the article, Emily Peck, admits this, writing “Much of the gender wage gap can be traced back to men and women’s choice of college major, experts told The Huffington Post.”
However, right after this in the same paragraph she pivots to writing, “years of subtle biases […] often steer young girls into the social sciences and humanities.”
So, forced to admit that it really is not workplace sexism that causes the wage gap but rather the aggregate impact of different life decisions made by men and women, we see that sexism is still the cause because, according to Peck, it causes women to self-select into traditionally less lucrative fields of study.
She quotes Lisa Babcock, a professor of economics at Carnegie Mellon University, who states that women “overwhelmingly” choose humanities and social science majors, but “not necessarily because of inherent interest in the topics.”
Her reason why women don’t choose to study STEM topics at similar rates as men? “[P]eers might discourage girls from the ‘boy subjects,’ and there are few role models in the media for females.”
The first point is, today in 2015, really a nonissue. Everywhere we look, we see massive encouragement of female participation in STEM fields, from elementary school through higher education. Ever here at Cornell we have an upcoming Cornell Coding Boot Camp focused specifically on female enrollment.
The second point is the baffling one because it is like a Catch-22: “We have too few female STEM role models, which deters women from choosing STEM careers, so we need more women choosing STEM majors, but they have too few female STEM role models….”
I wonder what Carly Fiorina would have to say about that.
Another criticism of this study relates to the “10 years after enrollment” time frame. Perhaps some women, age 27-29, may voluntarily reduce their employment to part-time, to facilitate child raising while continuing their career. It’s just my speculation, but that may tend to skew the women’s income data points towards the left.
A more valid study might look at earnings five years after college enrollment, and twenty years after college enrollment. Perhaps these data were collected but suppressed for obvious reasons.
Yet another more valid study would investigate gender pay differential, if any, for undertaking the same position, or by college major of study.
To all those who play the GenderPayGap card, let’s see these other graphics please. If the data are already out there, then simply show us.