Editor’s note: This commentary is by Rhoni Basden, who is executive director of Vermont Works for Women.
Sweeping the floor will get you $2. Making your bed in the morning, another $1. Feeding the dog comes out to roughly $3. These seem like typical conversations parents may have in regards to allowance. How much do we pay per chore? Should we even pay for chores, or should this just be an expectation? What types of chores should kids be doing? The one question you would never think would come up: Should we pay our daughter less than our son? But a national study conducted in 2018, using a chore tracking app with data from over 10,000 families, found that boys were paid on average double what girls were paid for similar weekly chores. That’s a 51% difference! Now, we want to assume that these differences were probably not within the same household, but we cannot be sure.
Starting at a young age we set the expectation that girls’ work is not as valuable as boys’ work. As girls start to age out of school and into their careers, that pay gap continues. Within one year of graduating college, another recent study found a 7% unexplainable gap between the earnings of men and women. This study controlled for factors such as college major, hours worked, age, occupation, region, economic status, GPA and marital status. Yet, there was still that unexplainable 7% pay gap between men and women, just one year after commencement. The most recent Change The Story Women, Work and Wages in Vermont report cites that 40% of the wage gap is attributed to persistent gender norms and expectations, biases, or overt discrimination. These gender norms and expectations have created a culture where your economic security is pre-determined by your gender.
I recently moved back to Vermont to work with the organization Vermont Works for Women. We help women and girls recognize their potential and explore, pursue, and excel in work that leads to economic independence. Before that, I worked for the national organization Girls Inc. for seven years. In both positions, I’ve had direct interaction with a generation of girls recognizing and living through the negative effects of gender expectations on their future. They take issue with not seeing themselves represented in fields they aspire to, like computer science, cybersecurity, construction, and video game development. They’re outraged to think they might not be paid equally to their male counterparts when they go into the workforce. And they’re not taking no for an answer when anyone tells them they “can’t.” They’re ready for a new reality.
We need to recognize our own and others’ biases to challenge traditional stereotypes and forge a new normal. We need to alter the expectations of what successful leaders look like and how they “should” behave. An engineer can be girly, not necessarily masculine, a CEO can be soft spoken, not always forceful, and manual labor can be done by people who wouldn’t describe themselves as “tough.” Most people are almost entirely unaware that they have subconscious biases, regardless of their gender. From schools to workplaces, environments are predominantly structured to reward male centric behaviors, and these systematic biases punish women more than men. Whether conscious or unconscious, biases are what create that 51% pay gap in allowance for boys and girls.
The most important thing we can do for our next generation of Vermonters and ourselves, is to be mindful that these biases exist and they that do directly impact the economic independence of individuals and groups within our communities, as evidenced by the Change the Story report. It’s time to commit to strategies to shift the patterns in need of changing, right down to that first weekly allowance.
