Week 11 — Reading the 83%: What a Pay Ratio Shows and What It Cannot — Traditional alternative (no AI)

Instructors: publish this instead of the adaptive version if you prefer, and unpublish or delete the adaptive one.

Assignment 10 of the term — read the Bureau of Labor Statistics' 2024 women's-to-men's earnings ratio, work out what it says, and explain to someone outside sociology what a national pay figure can and cannot tell one worker.

This week you learned to tell sex from gender, to see gender as socially constructed, to watch it being taught and done, to name patriarchy and the gender order, and to read gender inequality through three perspectives. In Week 2 you learned to read any statistic four ways and to keep percentage points separate from percent, in Week 7 you met the median, and in Week 8 you learned to name the level of an explanation; this week you use those habits on the real 2024 earnings ratio. In this assignment you work four short problems, interpret each one, and explain a finding to someone who has never studied sociology. This week's lecture tutorial, quiz, discussion, and Sociology in Action Workshop practice the same ideas from other angles.

The task

You will use these figures, all from this week's chapter or invented for this assignment:

• Highlights of Women's Earnings in 2024 (Bureau of Labor Statistics): women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings that were 83% of men's in 2024. In 1979, the first year with comparable data, the ratio was 62%. The figure is a raw ratio of medians across all full-time jobs, not a comparison of the same job.
• An illustrative firm (from this week's chapter, invented for teaching): Job X pays 700 dollars a week and Job Y pays 1,000 dollars a week, and each job pays women and men the same. Four of the five women work in Job X and four of the five men work in Job Y.
• An illustrative county (invented for this assignment): among full-time workers, women's median usual weekly earnings are 1,050 dollars and men's are 1,250 dollars.

Work these four problems, showing your arithmetic:

1. Women who were full-time wage and salary workers had median usual weekly earnings that were 83% of men's in 2024. Taking men's median as 100, how many points below men's median was women's median?
2. The women's-to-men's earnings ratio for full-time wage and salary workers was 62% in 1979 and 83% in 2024. By how many percentage points did the ratio rise?
3. In an illustrative firm, women's median weekly pay is 700 dollars and men's median weekly pay is 1,000 dollars, while each of the firm's two jobs pays women and men the same. What is the firm's raw earnings ratio, in percent?
4. In an illustrative county, women's median usual weekly earnings among full-time workers are 1,050 dollars and men's are 1,250 dollars. What is the county's earnings ratio, in percent?

Beside each answer, add one brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it. For problem 1, say what the 83% compares and over whom, and explain why it is not a same-job comparison. For problem 2, explain why the change is written in percentage points rather than as a percent, and say whether the figures show a correlation, a cause, or neither. For problem 3, compare the raw ratio with the same-job ratio in each job, and say what a controlled comparison removes and what it cannot tell you. For problem 4, name two of the week's five explanations of the gender pay gap (occupational segregation, differences in hours, the motherhood penalty, the devaluation of women's work, and discrimination), state each at full strength with its level (individual or structural), and say what further evidence would help you weigh them, without declaring a winner.

Explain it to a non-expert

Your friend has never studied sociology and sees a post that says, "Women earn 83 cents for every dollar a man earns for doing the same job." Your friend works full time and asks whether that means her own employer is paying her 17 percent less than the men beside her. Write a 3–5 sentence message to your friend that explains in everyday words what the 83% compares, says why it is not a same-job comparison, explains why a national figure cannot tell her what her own employer does, and names one thing she could check instead. Explain any technical term in everyday words. More than one accurate message can be defensible.

For a different, ungraded example, imagine a roommate who reads that "people who finish a coding bootcamp earn more than people who don't" and asks whether signing up will raise his pay. Model answer: "That line compares two groups of people, not what would happen to you. The people who finish a bootcamp may differ in other ways, like the jobs they already had or the time they could spend studying, so the program may not be what made the difference. A group pattern also cannot promise anything about one person. Before you sign up, ask what happened to people in your own field who finished it."

Use that pattern for your message to your friend, with your own explanation and evidence.

Show your arithmetic. A reader should be able to reproduce every number you report from the values above without guessing which values or steps you used.

Deliverables

Submit a single data-reading report containing:

• the four answers, each with the arithmetic shown and a brief interpretation of what that value shows and one limit of it;
• your message to your friend, explaining what the 83% compares, why it is not a same-job comparison, why a national figure cannot describe one employer, and one thing to check instead; and
• a one-line restatement of the values you used, so your results are reproducible.

Keep it to roughly one page. Clear and correct beats long.

Choose how you show it. Present your report as written text, or as a recorded audio or video explanation of about three minutes with a transcript, or as a labelled diagram of the ratios with a short note. Every form is graded by the same scoring criteria. Submit in any accessible file type or as a link; a recorded response may be submitted as audio or video with a transcript, or as text.

How you'll be graded

The full analytic rubric is attached to this assignment in Canvas.

Academic integrity and AI use

This version is designed to be completed without AI: do the computations, the interpretations, and the writing yourself, without any AI tool. You may use a calculator or a spreadsheet for the arithmetic. Submitting AI-generated work as your own, or copying another student's numbers, is an integrity violation under the course policy.

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