Getting Even addresses an ongoing injustice in the workforce—the gender wage gap. Even though women have taken great strides in closing the “merit gap” (by equaling men in education levels, years and depth of job experience, and commitment to work), their wages remain a quarter less than those earned by their male peers.
Evelyn Murphy, the Lieutenant Governor of Massachusetts from 1987 to 1991 and current Executive Vice President of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Massachusetts, writes with co-author E. J. Graff that her concern for the gender wage gap began soon after she earned a doctorate in economics and started working fulltime. She accepted the prevailing explanation in those days that the wage gap was due to a merit gap between men and women; similarly, she believed that the wage gap would shrink as women poured into colleges and universities. Since then, women’s wages have indeed risen, but men’s have risen faster.
As this merit gap has closed, researchers and analysts describe “finer-grained distinctions” that try to explain the wage gap, such as “Women are less skilled at negotiating, women are not strong leaders, women choose family over work”—all of which focus the responsibility on women rather than on business policies and practices.
Murphy and Graff highlight the inherent limitations of demographic data used by economists and researchers. Statistics are collected nationwide by the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, and these data describe employees according to age, race, gender, educational attainment, and job earnings. By relying solely on demographic data, however, social scientists see only one side of the picture and may lose more nuanced information from the contemporary workplace because internal employment data is hard to obtain.
The first six chapters of Getting Even attempt to shed light on what happens behind the closed doors of the workplace. Murphy and Graff discuss recent sex discrimination lawsuits as well as cases in which employers have settled rather than risked going to trial. The second half of the book focuses on “what to do” to ensure that women get paid fairly now and in the future. In the end, Getting Even is a call to action for women to work individually and together to close the wage gap, persuade businesses to change policies and practices, and pay women what they deserve.
Co-author Graff has written the book What Is Marriage For? The Strange Social History of Our Most Intimate Institution. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, and Salon.com, among other publications.