Blog Post

AEIdeas

Every year the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) publicizes its “Equal Pay Day” to bring public attention to what it claims is a 23% gender pay gap driven primarily by discrimination against women in the workplace. “Equal Pay Day” this year falls on April 14, and allegedly represents how far into 2015 the average woman has to continue working to earn the same income that the average man earned last year for doing the exact same job. Inspired by Equal Pay Day, I introduced “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” in 2010 to bring public attention to the huge gender disparity in work-related deaths every year in the United States. “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” tells us how many years and days into the future that women are able to work before they would experience the same number of occupational fatalities that occurred in the previous year for men.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) tracks workplace fatalities and statistics for the most recent year (2013) are available here. Assuming those data will be representative for occupational deaths in 2014 (the gender shares of workplace deaths have been pretty consistent over time at about 93% male and 8% female), they can be used to estimate a new “Equal Occupational Fatality Day.” As in previous years, the chart above shows the significant gender disparity in workplace fatalities in the most recent year: 4,101 men died on the job (93.1% of the total) in 2013 compared to only 302 women (6.9% of the total). The “gender occupational fatality gap” in 2013 was considerable — nearly 14 men died on the job last year for every woman who died while working.

Based on the most recent BLS data, the next “Equal Occupational Fatality Day” will occur about 13 years from now ­­– on July 29, 2027. That date symbolizes how far into the future women will be able to continue working before they experience the same estimated loss of life that men will experience in 2014 from work-related deaths. Because women tend to work in safer occupations than men on average, they have the advantage of being able to work for more than a decade longer than men before they experience the same number of male occupational fatalities in a single year.

Economic theory tells us that the “gender occupational fatality gap” explains part of the “gender pay gap” because a disproportionate number of men work in higher-risk, but higher-paid occupations like coal mining (almost 100 % male), fire fighters (96.5% male), police officers (86.6% male), correctional officers (72.8% male), logging (97.9% male), refuse collectors (95.2%), truck drivers (94.8%), roofers (99.3% male), highway maintenance (98.9%) and construction (97.4% male); BLS data here and see table above of the ten most dangerous occupations in the US, all heavily male-dominated. On the other hand, women far outnumber men in relatively low-risk, more family-friendly occupations, often with lower pay to partially compensate for the safer, more comfortable indoor office environments in occupations like office and administrative support (73.3% female), education, training, and library occupations (73.8% female), and healthcare (74.4% female). The higher concentrations of men in riskier occupations with greater occurrences of workplace injuries and fatalities suggest that more men than women are willing to expose themselves to work-related injury or death in exchange for higher wages. In contrast, women more than men prefer lower risk, family-friendly occupations with greater workplace safety, and are frequently willing to accept lower wages for the reduced probability of work-related injury or death.

Bottom Line: Groups like the NCPE use “Equal Pay Day” to promote a goal of perfect gender pay equity, probably not realizing that they are simultaneously advocating a huge increase in the number of women working in higher-paying, but higher-risk occupations like fire-fighting, roofing, construction, farming, and coal mining. The reality is that a reduction in the gender pay gap would come at a huge cost: several thousand more women will be killed each year working in dangerous occupations.

Here’s a question for the NCPE that I ask every year: Closing the unadjusted “gender pay gap” can only be achieved by closing the “occupational fatality gap.” Would achieving the goal of perfect pay equity really be worth the loss of life for thousands of additional women each year who would die in work-related accidents?