Invisible Women: when in doubt, blame the women

The financial return to getting a degree – how much more a graduate earns compared to an otherwise similar non-graduate – varies enormously across subjects. Previous IFS research estimates that studying economics at university boosts women’s pay by 75% by age 30; this is more than ten times the return to studying creative arts (7.2%). However, women make up nearly two-thirds of creative arts graduates but less than a third of economics graduates.

In general, women are overrepresented in degree subjects with low financial returns (Figure 2). There are some exceptions – for example, medicine and law both have average or slightly above average shares of female students and very high returns.

Law firms also had some of the highest gender pay gaps. Women were paid 47.4 per cent less than men per hour on average at Slaughter and May, worsening from 45 per cent in 2018 and 43 per cent in 2019. At Allen & Overy, the gap was 46.4 per cent, from 39 per cent in 2018 and 44 per cent in 2019. Other law firms such as Clifford Chance and Hogan Lovells had pay gaps in the low 40s, while Linklaters and Norton Rose were close to 40 per cent.

Female law graduates, for instance, can expect to earn 28% less than men at the start of their careers. They earn just over £20,000 on average – nearly £8,000 less than their male counterparts. This was despite that fact that more women than men applied to study law at university, out of those surveyed.

The same gap was found right across higher education subjects. Women who read medicine earned 9% less than men. And, out of those who studied physical sciences, women’s wages were £3,626 lower. In education, there was a 4.3% gender pay gap: women’s average wages were £21,679 compared with £22,661 for men.

Some call women’s segregation into low-paid work a choice. But it’s a funny kind of choice when there is no realistic option other than the children not being cared for and the housework not getting done. In any case, fifty years’ worth of US census data has proven that when women join an industry in high numbers, that industry attracts lower pay and loses ‘prestige’, suggesting that low-paid work chooses women rather than the other way around. 

Hertha Ayrton, born Phoebe Sarah Marks, was a distinguished British[…] scientist, who, in 1902, was the first woman to be proposed for the fellowship of the Royal Society. Hertha’s candidature was refused on the grounds of her ineligibility for the fellowship. As a married woman she had no legal existence in British law.

However, in 1906 she was awarded the Hughes Medal of the Royal Society for her work on electric arcs and ripple marks in sand and water, the first woman to receive it for work exclusively her own.

At the turn of the twentieth century, award-winning British engineer, physicist and inventor Hertha Ayrton remarked that while errors overall are ‘notoriously hard to kill […] an error that ascribes to a man what was actually the work of a woman has more lives than a cat’. She was right. Textbooks still routinely name Thomas Hunt Morgan as the person who discovered that sex was determined by chromosomes rather than environment, despite the fact that it was Nettie Stevens’ experiments on mealworms that established this – and despite the existence of correspondence between them where Morgan writes to ask Stevens for details of her experiment. Cecilia Payne-Gaposchkin’s discovery that the sun is predominantly composed of hydrogen is often credited to her male supervisor. Perhaps the most famous example of this kind of injustice is Rosalind Franklin, whose work (she had concluded via her X-ray experiments and unit cell measurements that DNA consisted of two chains and a phosphate backbone) led James Watson and Francis Crick (now Nobel Prize-winning household names) to ‘discover’ DNA. 

The only options were heavy, ill-fitting “unisex” (translation: men’s) boots, with zilch personality.

Men and women have different immune systems and different hormones, which can play a role in how chemicals are absorbed. Women tend to be smaller than men and have thinner skin, both of which can lower the level of toxins they can be safely exposed to. This lower tolerance threshold is compounded by women’s higher percentage of body fat, in which some chemicals can accumulate. 

The result is that levels of radiation that are safe for Reference Man turn out to be anything but for women. Ditto for a whole range of commonly used chemicals. And yet the male-default one-level-to-rule-them-all approach persists. This is made worse by the way chemicals are tested. To start with, chemicals are still usually tested in isolation, and on the basis of a single exposure. But this is not how women tend to encounter them, either at home (in cleaning products and cosmetics), or in the workplace.

In nail salons, where the workforce is almost exclusively female (and often migrant), workers will be exposed on a daily basis to a huge range of chemicals that are ‘routinely found in the polishes, removers, gels, shellacs, disinfectants and adhesives that are staples of their work’. Many of these chemicals have been linked to cancer, miscarriages and lung diseases. Some may alter the body’s normal hormonal functions. After a shift of paid work many of these women will then go home and begin a second unpaid shift, where they will be exposed to different chemicals that are ubiquitous in common cleaning products. The effects of these chemicals mixing together are largely unknown, although research does indicate that exposure to a mixture of chemicals can be much more toxic than exposure to chemicals on an individual basis.

Most of the research on chemicals has focused on their absorption through the skin. Leaving aside the problem that absorption through thicker male skin may not be the same as for women, skin is by no means the only way women working in nail salons will be absorbing these chemicals. Many of them are extremely volatile, which means that they evaporate into the air at room temperature and can be inhaled – along with the considerable amounts of dust produced when acrylic nails are filed. The research on how this may impact on workers is virtually non-existent. (IW, pp. 116-7)

In the US, there are no federal laws that require companies to list ingredients in their cleaning products (in the US women do 70% of household cleaning and make up 89% of home and hotel cleaners – most of whom are ethnic minorities), and a recent report found that even supposedly ‘green’ cleaning products contain EDCs. When Always menstrual pads were tested in 2014 they were found to include ‘a number of chemicals – including styrene, chloroform and acetone – that have been identified as either carcinogens or reproductive and developmental toxins.’ (IW, p.119)

Ever tried to lift a pram up onto a train, and wondered why you’re not entitled to use the ramps? Ever been asked to fold a pram/buggy and pop it up in the overhead storage racks (you know, using all that height and upper body strength you’ve got while the words ‘Reference Man’ whistle through your ears)? Ever wondered where you’re expected to put your baby while executing said manoeuvre? Ever had to breast/bottle-feed a child or change a nappy, or spend the entire journey sat on the floor of the vestibule area because there is no allocated space to put your fellow tiny passenger and their wheeled chariot?