Wednesday, Apr. 30, 2008

Biggest obstacle for S.C. women also plagues men

I’M A statistics agnostic. When people use numbers to make their case, my first question is about where the numbers came from. I want to examine them so I can figure out whether they have any meaning. Often they don’t — or at least they don’t have the meaning being suggested.

I don’t consider statistics the third, and worst, form of lies, but I do believe they’re often misunderstood and misused. Usually, this reflects our blind spots: We see a number that confirms our preconceived notions, and we don’t ask the same questions we would ask if it didn’t support what we believed to be true.

Take the report, issued last month by the Alliance for Women and the S.C. Commission on Women, on the economic status of women in our state. The headlines proclaimed that one in seven S.C. women live in poverty.

True enough.

But dig your way to the back of the report, and you’ll find that one in seven men in South Carolina also live in poverty.

In fact, you could take just about any group in South Carolina — black men, white women, doctors, burger-flippers, vegans, Republican business owners — and find lower incomes than among corresponding groups in other states. You’d also find lower education levels for pretty much any group you compared to a similar group elsewhere. There’s no coincidence there.

That’s not to say there’s nothing to worry about when it comes to the economic status of women in South Carolina. The wage gap between men and women is real, and despite progress, it’s still wider here than in the rest of the nation: S.C. women earn 74 percent of what men do, compared with 77 percent nationally. The report does note that two-thirds of the gap can be explained by differences in experience, education, occupation and other gender-neutral characteristics, but that still leaves S.C. women making 9 percent less than men ($3,300 a year) simply because they’re women. And that’s troubling, not just for women.

Columbia College President Caroline Whitson says the wage-gap numbers paint a picture of women as “a huge, underdeveloped economic resource in our state.” She points to a 2004 study that found reducing the income gap by just 10 percentage points (assuming it’s done by raising women’s pay, not by lowering men’s) would generate an additinonal $150 million in state taxes.

Dr. Whitson is spearheading three initiatives to try to help women do better economically: a micro-enterprise system that provides small loans and support systems for people who want to start small businesses, a leadership training program for professional women whose employers hope to move them up in their organizations, and leadership camps for middle school girls, to increase their expectations and their ability to meet them.

Giving young girls focus and self-confidence is particularly important because their absence leads to risky behavior that is even more dangerous for girls than boys: When boys and girls have sex, it’s the girls who get pregnant. It’s the girls who skip college, often even drop out of high school. It’s the girls who find themselves forced into dead-end jobs they can never escape because they have a child to feed.

But as Dr. Whitson acknowledges, giving girls and women the confidence and skills they need to stay in school and avoid risky behavior and get out of abusive relationships and succeed in their careers is just one of many approaches we need to take to combat poverty and raise the overall quality of life in our state. That’s because, as the fuller look at the income numbers shows, even if we could snap our fingers and bring women’s incomes up to men’s tomorrow, we’d still be one of the poorest states in the nation.

Our biggest problem in South Carolina isn’t that women don’t get enough encouragement and a good-enough education or that blacks don’t get the encouragement and education they need or introverts or jocks don’t get the encouragement and education they need. It’s that South Carolinians don’t get the encouragement and education they need.

More than in most states, children here are born into poverty, and that’s where they stay. They grow up in families with no hope, in communities with no hope. Their parents had bad experiences in school and ended up in minimum-wage jobs with no hope for themselves and no hope for their children. The children go to school expecting to have bad experiences themselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Our political leadership clearly doesn’t have much hope for them, either. Oh, it’s their dumb luck that their parents aren’t encouraging them, we say. Oh, it’s a waste of money to find a way to get better teachers in those schools, we say. Oh, there’s nothing we can do about school boards that are more interested in giving the only decent jobs in the county to their cousins and cronies than in demanding excellence, we say.

Oh, what happens to those poor kids doesn’t affect my life, and my kids, we mean.

But of course it does. It determines whether companies will locate in our state to provide decent jobs to our kids, or whether our kids will move away, and take the grandkids with them. It determines whether we’ll have safe neighborhoods to live in, or be overrun by all those drop-outs who figure their best hope is breaking into nice homes or joining gangs and engaging in shoot-outs in the streets.

The choice is ours. We can give hope to the girls — and boys — who are hopeless. Or not.

Ms. Scoppe can be reached cscoppe@thestate.com or at (803) 771-8571.