The economic position of women

by Academy of Political Science in the City of New York

If the principle of the same salary schedules for men and for women were mandatory, either the women’s salaries might be raised or the men’s salaries reduced. Either process would have palpable consequences, economic and pedagogic. Consider the results of each method separately.

1. To equalize the salaries of all women who were teaching in the same grades as men, with those of the men employed in such grades, in May 1909, would have entailed a cost that year of $7,837,662. But since that date men who were teaching in grades below the sixth have been transferred, so that today, it is estimated, the cost would be below seven million dollars per annum. A large part of that increase would be of the nature of a “bonus” to the women, a bonus, say some legislators, no more justifiable than would be an extra price paid for goods by city officers to women because they were charming.

If the board of education, when appointing new teachers, would save no money by appointing women in preference to men, it is certain that the proportion of men appointed, supposing the rates of pay were high enough to attract men at all, would be much increased. Men would drive out women just as women when they were cheaper have driven out men. Most authorities would agree that such a result would be beneficial to the schools, which sadly need more men; and some approve the dogma of “equal pay” because they desire such a result. The same result could be won at much less cost if the board of education determined to ignore the savings to be made by appointing women and, for the sake of keeping the virile elements in the school, should appoint under its own schedules the dearer men.

2. If the salaries of men were reduced so as to conform to the salaries of women the effects would be considerable.

The cost for teachers would decrease by an amount which nobody has cared to waste labor in estimating, because nobody imagines that either the authorities or the men teachers would permit that experiment and the women teachers would be no more content than anybody else to see it tried. Naturally they do not wish the “equal pay” principle to be applied in a way to put no more money into their pockets. Primarily and properly they seek higher salaries; they would burn no incense to a dogma which promised them no increase.

The pedagogical results of lowering the schedules for men would be disastrous, for, unless the standard of quality in candidates were shamefully lowered, new men would not enter the system and the little band of 2,099 men teachers who now add the male influence to the female influence of their 14,974 women colleagues would fast diminish and soon approach extinction. Then the schools would be entirely feminized, an outcome so bad that even enthusiasts for economy hardly dare openly advocate reducing the men’s pay.

Is the agitation of the women teachers, then, altogether unjustifiable and doomed to be fruitless? Not at all. Already it has had two good effects.

1. It has called public attention to what Governor Hughes styled “glaring inequalities” in the salary schedules. Since the schedules embody the judgment of their builders on a variety of elements, some of them, such as “personality”, quite impalpable, none of them measurable with instruments of precision, the schedules can never satisfy every critic. Always the critic’s judgment of the relative values of academic scholarship, experience, technical skill and so on, may differ from the judgment of the authorities. However, the women teachers have convinced the board of education that the existing differentials between men and women are generally too heavy. For example, of the teachers in elementary schools women start at $600 a year and by yearly increments of $40 go up to $1,240 and men start at $900 a year and by yearly increments of $105 go up to $2,150. That difference is not demanded by the circumstances.

But the differences between salaries of teachers of different ages, which are conspicuous in the schedules framed by the Interborough Association, are equally flagrant and open to attack. In fact any schedules which assume that teachers of different ages who are doing analogous work should receive pay for their years as well as for their effort are vulnerable to a logician’s spear.

One teacher of two years’ experience may possibly do better than another twelve years her senior. The younger may have the divine gift of teaching which comes only by nature; the older be a mere drudge, a hewer of wood and a drawer of water. Yet the older, under the schedules of the Interborough Association, would continue to receive a much higher salary than the younger. That may be proper, and is certainly unavoidable, but it mocks at logic and at “equal pay for equal work.”