ICS Managing Director radio interview with Dan Rodricks

Midday with Dan Rodricks focused its January 30th show on the gender pay gap, acknowledging the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act as well as President Obama's highlighting of women's pay issues in his inauguration speech. Rodricks invited Linda Barrington, managing director of Cornell's Institute for Compensation Studies, to join the hour-long panel discussion. Barrington's co-panelists on Midday were Phillip Cohen, professor of sociology at the University of Maryland and author of the Family Inequality blog; and Kate C. Farrar director of the American Association of University Women (AAUW) Campus Leadership Programs.

Barrington started off her comments by clarifying how the pay gap is calculated and why people quote such varying estimates for the size of the pay gap between men and women.

Barrington explained that the largest pay gap estimates are for "the raw, unadjusted gap which is just taking how much women make in a year or in a week and dividing it by how much men make. …that's where you get the $0.77 on the dollar, the $.80 on the dollar" for what women earn relative to men. Barrington went on to explain that "after you start slicing up the data …[to] just look at the cohort of women who are college educated… [or acknowledge] that women are still majoring in social sciences and literary majors more than hard science…the gap gets smaller."

Listen to Midday with Dan Rodricks interview

Download PDF of slide deck presenting data and research related to the U.S. gender gap as discussed by Barrington.