Let's Talk About Sexism

But in 2010, women are actually doing better than the men, earning comparable or even superior salaries. More women than men are graduating from college, and more of them are obtaining graduate degrees than men. There are probably as many women as men who are becoming physicians now, and they are better at it. I know two personally, though my own general practitioner is a man—can't quite imagine a lady doctor doing the annual physical with all that "turn to the left and cough, then bend over" stuff—but some day soon I may have no choice!

Kristof offers some hope for the future, noting that 62 percent of the kids who score 2,400 on the SAT are male. But before high school, the girls seem to do better on average than the boys. My wife's niece is one of those super achievers—all A's, awards, and advancements, etc. Her little brother will have to live up to the ego Big Sis is developing. As she was rattling off her successes, he at age five commented, "Impressive!" No doubt about it, she's going to beat everybody academically, all the way through graduate school. But in the long run, most the super achievers and geniuses I've known hadn't one ounce of common sense between them.

Adjusting and the Sexes

Prior to the mid-1960s, claim adjusting was primarily a vocation for men with a college degree. The claim managers and supervisors were often attorneys who had gotten their law degrees on the G.I. Bill after WWII and the Korean War, back when a law degree was called a Bachelor of Law, not a Doctor of Jurisprudence, and an undergraduate degree was not always a requirement. Men dominated the field, and were assigned company cars, better benefits, and higher salaries than any of the women who might have wandered into a claim career. But the women were often far better at claim adjusting than many of the men, especially after the insurance industry and the EEOC ruled that adjusting no longer mandated that a college degree was a basic requirement.

I recall one day when the six very talented women in the office, who were called claims representatives rather than adjusters, lined up at the boss' door and, one after the other, marched in to give the Old Man hell for not promoting them to equal status with their often-less-qualified male coworkers. After that little war, the boss high-tailed it out of the office and took out his frustration on a golf ball. By the next week, two of the ladies were promoted to adjuster and assigned a company car. The following week the rest were also promoted. Many went on to be supervisors, managers, and company executives.

This occurred in a Southern state; the situation may have been different in other regions, although when I was assigned to Philadelphia and New Jersey, the office was entirely male. The women were well ahead of the men in many ways—we had a non-discriminating claim association, but the women all belonged to the National Association of Insurance Women (NAIW), and that required them to take and pass Insurance Institute of America courses. The men had no similar organization to encourage education. If we did it, we did it on our own.

Statistically Speaking

It's not easy coming up with data on our adjusting vocation, but some is available if one searches. Sometimes, the search is closer than you think, as Claims Magazine's readers chimed in with their own salary figures and benefits in this issue. We're not the only one doing so, though. The July 2010 issue of Best's Review tells us that the earnings of claim adjusters rose slightly from July 2009, by 1.7% to $910.46 a week, about $47,344 a year. That's the first rise in months. The number of adjusters, however, fell over the same period by 14.5 percent, to 43,500. Best's reports that there are also 125,600 "third party administrators" who earn an average of $763.52 a week, but since many adjusters these days are unaware of the legal difference between an adjuster and a "third party" claim administrator, the true average probably falls somewhere in the middle.

The Insurance Information Institute does not break down insurance jobs by either type or sex, but does note that in 2008 there were 236,900 people working in "other insurance related activities" such as adjusters, TPAs, and ratemaking services. Somewhat better statistics come from Pay Scale, an Internet site, from which one learns that of those listed as claim adjusters or examiners, 54 percent are female and 46 percent male. As of July 15, 2010, almost 70 percent of those in such positions had less than 10 years of experience. Their salary range was $38,474 to $58,050 per year, but it did not break that down by sex.

Another web site, Household Data, had not recorded 2010 data yet, but for 2009 showed that in the insurance adjusting field there were 98,000 men earning $1,128 a week (that's $58,656 a year) and 155,000 women earning $845 a week (or $43,940 annually.) That is about what one might anticipate, as it is more likely that property and catastrophe adjusters are men, while the bulk of the personal lines claim staff may be women. But who knows? Some of the best property adjusters I've known were women.

A man's ego is likely to be bruised if a woman can out-do him, climbing on roofs and entering debris-laden wreckage, but when I was an Army medic I knew a lot of women nurses—all officers who were a much braver than I. They went parachuting out into the night while I just went along for the helicopter rides.

The Battle of the Sexes

Kristof concludes, "The truth is that we men have typically benefited as women have gained greater equality. Those men who have lost their jobs in the recession are now more likely to have a wife who still has a job and can keep up the mortgage payments. And women have been particularly prominent in the social sector, devising new programs for the mostly male ranks of the jobless or homeless."

One reason the Great Depression of 1929 to 1941 was so great and depressing was that the majority of the workforce consisted of men, while the women were needed just to keep up with the unmechanized typical home of the 1930s: washboards and clothes lines, child care, very few electrical appliances, poor refrigeration, which required daily shopping, and shoveling coal into the furnace. When 25 percent of that kind of mostly male workforce gets laid off, there was no falling back on the working wives. A few single ladies might have held their office jobs, but most men who were not farmers worked in factories or laborious blue-collar jobs for companies prone to bankruptcy.

Most middle class families today survive only because both parents work. I see the daily line-up of cars coming to pick up the kids at daycare when I take a walk around my neighborhood. Daycare is a booming business. The recession did hit many, but the losers were those who had no other resources or skills to use as a cushion. Some stupidly let their homes go into foreclosure even if they could have paid the mortgages, because the home's value had dropped. But things that drop get picked up again, and now those who could have paid will have a bad credit rating for a decade or more. Not a wise move.

So whether you are a male or female reading this column, the key to success is both education and experience. Outside claim investigation used to be the standard; now there is less of it. Push, yell, and clamor for the opportunity to gain that outside experience, even if it does mean climbing on a roof or living in an RV after a storm for a few weeks. Other men and women do it, and they do it equally well. This is the 21st century—the battle of the sexes was so 20th century.