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WE RETIRED AND MOVED to Spain in 2018. We were excited and eager to explore our new home and a new culture. We traveled a lot, mostly in Spain, but also the rest of Europe and Asia. But since the pandemic started, our travel has been limited.
Indeed, COVID-19 sped our return to Dallas. I’m happy that we’re now closer to our sons, and can see family and friends in person. But having lived in Dallas for 28 years, I already know the city well. Still, I plan to keep exploring—but this year I’ve resolved to take my retirement journey in two different directions.
First, during the ultra-strict Spanish lockdown in early 2020, I discovered my love of drawing and painting, and even set up online art shops. Creating art has helped me deal with the stress of the pandemic and of my mother’s situation. It has become my way of turning off the outside noise. This year, I’ve resolved to continue to draw and paint in my sketchbook every day. Whether that will translate into making more money isn’t important to me, though I’ll admit that I get excited and enjoy the extra validation that comes with selling a piece of art.
My second journey for 2022 is returning to graduate school. Like my husband Jim, I was recently admitted to the Master of Arts in Interdisciplinary Studies program at the University of Texas at Dallas. My focus will be gender studies and economics.
Why? I spent my career in the male-dominated world of finance and banking, and I’ve written about my experiences and the challenges women face. I’ve also been interviewed about the gender pay gap. It’s an issue I’m passionate about and want to explore in depth. Classes are set to start in late January. I hope that, by drawing on multiple academic disciplines, I’ll have the opportunity to turn my personal experience and interest into a more complete understanding of the issue—and then I want to work to broaden opportunities for women who are still in the game.
This is anecdotal and not data, but my own experience as a woman in academia for over 30 years has been interesting with regard to pay. I got my first professor job at age 30, and as to pay, I started low and stayed low. I’m not sure if that was because of gender or because I was too young and stupid to know how to negotiate, but I do know that men hired around the same time as me got tenured and promoted more quickly and easily than I did, even though I was a better teacher, publishing regularly, and even chairing committees and directing programs. On the other hand, the job was relatively less stressful in that it focused more heavily on teaching than on publishing, and it worked well for me at the time I had young children, even if the financial rewards were somewhat limited.
Fast forward and my kids are grown and I’m now at a different university. I’m in a humanities division in a STEM university, and the majority of more advanced professors are still men. As a result, there have been several “equity adjustments” based on an algorithm which determined that as a woman in a non-STEM field, I was under-compensated, so I got extra equity raises. Because of this and my own success at the merit increase process, my salary has more than doubled in 13 years from where it was after 18 years at the previous place. At the moment, I’m the highest paid member of my department, a fact that has made a couple of much younger men complain bitterly (salaries at state universities in my state are publicly searchable). So I guess—and again this is anecdotal—I’ve seen some progress over my working life?
[The other thing is the extra labor women take on in the workplace, usually uncompensated or under-compensated. That’s a whole other thing, and I’ve definitely experienced that. I still do to this day.]
DrLefty,
Thanks for sharing your experience. Even though you said your experience is anecdotal, it happens to many women all over the world and the aggregated data has supported your and my experiences that most women are underpaid. With the requirement for salary transparency, I hope things will get better for women.
Good point about extra unpaid labor, I see it in my friend now who is working in IT and does the extra labor she takes on unpaid. I try to counsel her to stop or let someone (preferably other men in the team) else share the load.
For many reasons, even beyond gender discrimination, historically there has been a gender pay gap. However, do you feel that a woman entering the workforce today or even within the last several years is paid less than a man all factors being equal?