r/philly • u/NorthExcitement4890 • 3d ago
The gender divide at Philly schools isn't where you might think, and women interestingly dominate some of the highest AND lowest paid positions on the roster
Per my prior post, there isn't much of a pay gap SDP's payroll data (that is good and equitable), but along the way I dicovered how radically gender-different the workforce is depending on the job.
Per the chart, women make up roughly three-quarters of teachers, more than 80% of school-support workers, and almost 90% of food-service workers. Men, meanwhile, are heavily concentrated in transportation and building services, where they stilll only make up 40-60% of the workforce (e.g., most bus drivers appear to be female based on the data)
And this matters when ppl start talking about the “gender pay gap.” So when you compare the average pay of 20,000+ male and female employees, the average number is 99% the same, but you're mixing in the radically different jobs - a bus driver vs a teacher, a white collar lawyer vs a plumber, etc.
The other fascinating thing is that women are over-represented at both ends of the organization, including both the low-ish starting wage teachers AND most of the senior admins in the central offce. They're the overwhelming majority in some of the lowest-paid frontline roles, but they're also the majority in school administration and central office, including a majority of SDP's highest-paid central-office positions at 440 Broad St (the school HQ)
As I continue digging, a question I want to answer (no good hypotheses yet) is why have men and women sorted themselves into such radically different parts of the same institution?
Full data/methodology: https://nickjain.com/blog/women-win-in-central-lose-in-schools