I'm so excited to fill out my brackets for this year's March Madness NCAA basketball tournament. My competitive spirit comes out when I compete against my friends to see whose teams will come out on top. But I'm not just factoring in team records, star players, or knowledgeable coaching. Nor am I relying on my well known Big 10 bias. I know which schools I'm betting on--the ones with the smallest gender pay gaps. But as I made my choices, there were some interesting surprises.
For the last two years, AAUW encouraged fans to make their bracket selections based on the pay gaps between the coaches of women's and men's teams. As a result, AAUW predicted the University of Dayton's Cinderella run a few years ago. This year, however, AAUW's tournament brackets predict the victors of the women's and men's NCAA championships based on the earnings of the schools' graduates, not their coaches. How? By computing the gender pay gap between the mean earnings of female and male graduates 10 years after entry to college (based on U.S. Department of Education data). After doing the calculations, the school whose graduates have the smaller gender pay gap or higher earnings ratio advance to the next round.
If my AAUW brackets play out, the Men's Final Four would be comprised of Hampton, Florida Gulf Coast University, Temple, and Virginia Commonwealth. The ultimate winner would be Hampton. It'll be an uphill battle for the Hampton Pirates, however, since a 16-seed has never before beaten a number one seed. But miracles do happen in the NCAA tournament - that's why they call it March Madness!
But as AAUW analyzed the data, we came across something notable: Hampton, an historically Black institution (HBCU), was the only school in the Final Four and in the entire tournament (men's and women's) with an earnings ratio in which female grads earn more on average than men--109 cents for every dollar a male graduate earns. What's up with that? Turns out, a lot; and this circumstance provides an excellent opportunity to show how the pay gap has gender and racial components.
It's no secret that the pay gap is worse for women of color. But African-American men also face a racial pay gap when compared with the earnings of white men, which is one reason pay gaps between men and women of color are generally narrower. This analysis is further explained in AAUW's research report, The Simple Truth about the Gender Pay Gap.
The Final Four in the women's bracket is made up of two more HBCUs -- Alabama State and North Carolina A&T - as well as Albany and St. John's, with the lowest earnings ratio of the four schools at 85 percent (Albany). Alabama State takes home the trophy with a 99 percent women's earnings ratio compared to male graduates. The victory by the Lady Hornets reinforces AAUW's findings of smaller pay gaps between women and men of color, since both race and gender clearly factor into the size of the pay gap.
The national pay gap stands at 21 percent, with women working full time typically paid just 79 percent of what men are paid. But we know the gender pay gap doesn't affect all women equally. Most women of color face a much wider pay gap. African American women make only 63 cents to a white man's dollar, while Latinas make just 54 cents.
Looking at our Men's Final Four, the lowest earnings ratio out of these four teams belongs to Temple at 87 percent -- not bad at eight percentage points better than the national gender pay gap. However, there's definitely a jeer within the cheer in this year's AAUW March Madness brackets: while we can cheer the HBCU teams that have a narrower gender pay gap and thus win our brackets, we need to remember that the overall earnings for both men and women at HBCUs are lower than the national average for all college graduates. That, my friends, is most definitely a jeer -- and a good reminder for all of us that because the pay gap goes far beyond gender, so must our solutions.