Female MBA to Journo: Stop the Pity Party over Pay Gaps

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In the best-selling book the authors discuss the pay discrepancy between male and female MBAs, noting their surprise that so many women with the advanced degree choose to opt out of the workforce when they have kids.

“Many of the best and brightest women in the US get an MBA so they can earn high wages, but they end up marrying the best and brightest men, who also earn high wages — which affords these women the luxury of not having to work so much,” they write.

The verb “end up” suggests that women get their MBAs planning to work steadily and then change course later when their similarly credentialed husbands grow rich enough. The outcome, they write, is a “strange twist,” indicating it isn’t the rational use of their education expected by the authors.

On the NY Times Freakonomics blog this week, co-author Stephen Dubner, published a response from reader Lisa, who took objection and contacted the author, explaining “I��m writing to disabuse you of your surprise about women.” Her question: why see women as passive and planning challenged? She says,

Would you cut us some slack? I think we are smarter than you give us credit for!…. Many of us — here��s the surprise — got our MBAs precisely because we wanted to have children work, and we knew we wouldn��t be able to recover from the economic hit nearly as well unless we had an MBA to accelerate us back up the speed ramp when we re-entered the workforce post-child-raising! In fact, one could argue that having an MBA helps on the pregnancy end too, with presumably higher skills and therefore occasionally higher leverage to negotiate a better childcare leave than we might have otherwise.

“I think you will agree that Lisa makes excellent points,” concludes a magnanimous Dubner, and I agree. It’s rare to read an analysis of women’s career and reproductive choices that assumes they make active plans from the start rather than being blown here and there by the headwinds of the workplace and biology. Do you agree?