Women and wages
Bill Bonner's reflections in Monday's DR on women in the workforce struck a chord with me…at least the notion that large numbers of women entering a profession might have a tendency to drive down wages in that profession. In my own field of broadcast news, the ratio of newly-minted graduates has been 2-to-1 women for at least the last ten years. (Some of the reasons are discussed in this Washington Post article.) And it's not just reporters; the overwhelming majority of young producers are also women, although in management the numbers are still more balanced.
A few weeks ago, I thought back to one of my first jobs. I was hired in 1988 to produce the weekend news in a mid-sized Midwestern city for $20,000. In today's dollars that's about $35,000. I can say with near-certainty that's not what the position would pay now. I reckoned that was because of the proliferation of cable channels and the Internet eroding TV news audiences over the years, but perhaps that's not the whole story.
Comments: