The Cost of Being a Girl: Working Teens and the Origins of the Gender Wage Gap

by Yasemin Besen-Cassino

The gender wage gap is one of the most persistent problems of labor markets and women’s lives. 

Most approaches to explaining the gap focus on adult employment despite the fact that many Americans begin working well before their education is completed. In her critical and compelling new book, The Cost of Being a Girl, Yasemin Besen-Cassino examines the origins of the gender wage gap by looking at the teenage labor force, where comparisons between boys and girls ought to show no difference, but do.

Besen-Cassino’s findings are disturbing. Because of discrimination in the market, most teenage girls who start part-time work as babysitters and in other freelance jobs fail to make the same wages as teenage boys who move into employee-type jobs. The “cost” of being a girl is also psychological; when teenage girls work retail jobs in the apparel industry, they have lower wages and body image issues in the long run.

Through in-depth interviews and surveys with workers and employees, The Cost of Being a Girl puts this alarming social problem—which extends to race and class inequality—in to bold relief. Besen-Cassino emphasizes that early inequalities in the workplace ultimately translate into greater inequalities in the overall labor force.

Genres: Nonfiction, Feminism, Economics, Gender

238 pages, Paperback

Published December 18, 2017

Reviews

[Samuel Edme]

In The Cost of Being Girl, writer Yasemin Besen-Cassino explore the ongoing debate of gender wage gap in the U.S., which was and still is attributed to by many scholarly researchers to things such as maternity leave and more women working part-time rather than full in order to take care of their children. However, Yasemin eruditely points out the errors in these studies, that being they all focus on adults and not the tween/teen cohort where employment begins (namely at 12 years of age). To verify her point, Yasemin gathers the meager studies conducted on that age demographic along with her own interviews with and surveys on female young adults (since she could not do so with minors), much of whom started out their first careers as babysitters dissuaded from asking for a higher salary out of fear of being perceived as 'greedy' or 'insincere' about their jobs, a problem the opposite sex doesn't face nearly as often. As a result, this stigmatic fear continues throughout adulthood. Furthermore, the author shows the socioeconomic and ethnic nuances in the unequal treatment of females which prove again, while we have come a long way from the past decades, we still have a muddy path to clean before we overcome our intrinsic sexism and prejudiced notions in what should be a more Progressive America.

Overall, this book is an insightful eye-opener on an issue many of us are misled to believe is nearly eradicated. I highly suggest it to any person who wants a deeper understanding of the complexities of the gender gap.

[Nancy Ross]

Read this for the Columbia course I'm auditing, Sociology of Work and Gender. Very interesting study of how the first jobs teenagers take (babysitting, lawn work, etc) can set them up for years of inequitable pay and other issues. Aside from having a lot of academic jargon (heteroskasticity etc) this was readable and alarming.

[Natalia Galvis Arias]

Este texto aborda las disparidades de ingreso entre hombres y mujeres en el mercado laboral, un tema bastante estudiado. Sin embargo, trae algo nuevo a esta discusión: los análisis de los primeros empleos en la adolescencia, cuando no hay capital humano acumulado, ni experiencia, ni red. Esto es interesante porque ayuda a controvertir las tesis hegemónicas sobre las disparidades y demuestra sus fragilidades para explicar las brechas de ingreso