The Rocket Girls and the Wage Gap

It’s a lovely photograph. Twenty seven women in two rows, lined up outdoors at Caltech in 1953. Young and old, saucy and stern, black and white, a wonderful panorama of mid-twentieth century American womanhood. Recently memorialized by Nathalia Holt in her book, “Rise of the Rocket Girls,” these women are called out as true heroes.

They were computers, at a time that when that was still most generally a human profession, not a machine. They were an island of women in a sea of male engineers and researchers and administrators.

And in their computational labors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, eventually to become a unit of NASA, they helped shepherd us into the space age. Calculating trajectories and orbits and escape velocities and safe reentry vectors, they were the unheralded heroes who made Explorer, Voyager, the Apollo moon landings, and the Viking Mars expedition resounding successes.

And they were most certainly paid less than their male colleagues.

Which is inequitable, unfair, and just plain not right, penalizing both the women and their families and society in general.

In 1960, the average compensation for women was 60% of that of men. That stark difference has slowly been equalized but seems to have stalled just shy of 80% since 2001. While outright discrimination and exploitation play a part, there may be something more to it.

As long ago as 2012, the New York Times cited studies identifying a significant wage penalty in developed world economies for working mothers. Terming it the “Mommy Penalty,” the Times cautioned us that the true impact could be even worse:

“And remember, those wage gaps are for full-time workers only. The gap widens if you compare all working mothers, since women are much more likely than men to work part time.”

The Times reporting, as well as other studies, suggest that women earn less than men because they tend to be the ones who bear children, and that might impact the time and/or energy invested in work outside the home.

In our current political climate, with our obsessive drive for equality of outcomes, let’s consider some prescriptive policy relief. To assure equality of results, let’s impose some legislative conditions on men.

Let’s start with the amount of time expended in employment. To create a level playing field, it must be equalized. So when a woman bears a child and begins to dial back her time commitment to work, her male partner should be required to do likewise. The man must take off the same time for doctor appointments, the delivery, the recovery, early child rearing. And as the child grows and the woman leaves early to take the child to athletic events or to attend a school play, her mate must do the same. When the wife declines a business trip due to family obligations, so, too, must her husband.

If the woman declines a promotion because she wants to maintain her family work/life balance, so must the guy she married.

As you might sense, if this were the case, that stubborn wage gap might finally again begin to dwindle.

But this is only the beginning. Since we are in a regulatory mood, let’s not waste the moment.

Imagine the relative number of female vs. male workers in various professions. Roofers, sheetrock hangers, firefighters, police, lumberjacks. Let us legislate that the ratio must be 50/50 men and women, even if that requires firing some men to reach that ratio. Now compare the wage gap again.

But we aren’t done yet. How many manicurists do we have in town vs. bank officers, and how many are men and how many women? We may need to fire some male bank officers and make them into manicurists in order to reach our equality goal. This is command economy intervention at such a height that only a true socialist could comprehend and appreciate.

But the wage gap, stubborn as it is, would finally be beaten into submission. Only at the cost of our overall economy, and the financial health of our families, but darn it, equality would be worth it.

All this a bit tongue in cheek but based on economic reality. A more productive set of policies might be to provide increased funding for women's education and skills development, expand subsidized public daycare and pre-school, and encourage aggressive EEOC actions to root out bias. But even this will not eliminate the gap.

Perhaps one day technology will rescue us, where fetuses are gestated in artificial wombs and infants cared for by robotic nannies. But, unfortunately, until that day, some degree of wage inequality may persist.

The Rocket Girls, with their impeccable logic and mad mathematical skills, would understand this well.

You didn't build that

In a recent NPR broadcast on the wonders of the human brain, we learned how researchers have been able to identify particular regions used for specific tasks and emotions. Such as the finding that people who are happy tend to have a larger precuneus, a structure also thought responsible for consciousness.

These are indeed miraculous times, that we can inspect our own brain and determine what makes us self-aware, what makes us feel happy, which regions might cause insomnia, and how we learn language. One scholar exclaimed of the mystery and power of a brain that is able to unlock its own secrets and understand itself.

After all, our brain is but a computer, composed of about 86 billion neurons. The African elephant has three times as many, but we rarely see scholarly articles published by elephants.

The secret, of course, is that we have evolved the ability to communicate, to both exchange and record complex thoughts. And that over time we have developed tools and technologies allowing us to delve into our physical world, to manipulate and understand its workings, including that of our own brain.

When a single researcher is bent on the task of fathoming the human brain, it is not only her brain focused on the task. She is benefiting from billions of fellow human brains that have, over many years, built a corpus of thought and research and tools and recorded knowledge. This is our unique human power.

Robinson Crusoe, stranded alone on his desert island, would have little chance of understanding the operation of his own brain.

In any human endeavor, it is the multiplication effect that makes our race so successful. Libraries full of research, universities training new generations, clever tools and machines and sensors probing our world, computers and networks facilitating communication, we amplify the power of our own measly 86 billion neurons.

In spite of the critical importance of this social infrastructure, individual brilliance is still crucial, cultivated, and revered. Albert Einstein, whose theory of ripples in the fabric of space-time was recently validated, stood on the shoulders of Copernicus and Planck and Maxwell. It’s as if this fabric of human knowledge and abilities forms a trampoline on which a brilliant, young, aspiring thinker might ascend to a new insight, a breakthrough, a flash of genius.

In this we observe the interaction and mutual interdependence of society and the individual.

“You didn’t build that” is a meme that has pervaded our recent politics. It is meant to diminish the significance, and hence the deserved remuneration, of individual contribution. Liberals use it as a justification for increasing the tax on success. Conservatives interpret it as an attack on the value of entrepreneurs and the free market.

In truth, both have a point. Tom Brady would not be fabulously wealthy without the social infrastructure that offers him a field of play. But we (at least those who are fans) would be the poorer for not seeing his brilliance on the field. Tom Brady is wealthy because we value the entertainment he provides.

Examples abound. Steve Jobs (rest his soul), was enormously wealthy but brought us our ubiquitous, dearly loved iPhones. Larry Page and Sergey Brin, each multi-billionaires, founded Google, an indispensable tool to billions of people every day. Mark Zuckerberg, another multi-billionaire, brought us the spectacle of silly cat videos and embarrassing spring break photos on our Facebook feeds. None of these folks “built that.” But “that” wouldn’t have been built, in this way, at this time, without them.

More quotidian examples surround us. For government employee, teacher, police, and fireman pension funds, those are invested in corporate America. The success of those companies, and the CEOs who lead them, is paramount to your retirement. Yet somehow it is fashionable to decry and punish that success.

Just as in science, society has evolved a commercial infrastructure upon which our entrepreneurs and business leaders create and implement their individual visions. It is true that trucking companies couldn’t be successful without public roads. But without trucking companies, the value of public roads would be diminished. And it’s also true that we must all contribute to the public fisc.

But we must never demean nor punish individual achievement, whether an Einstein, Zuckerberg, or Brady. Individuals need society, and the inverse is blindingly obvious. The trampoline is useless without the jumper.