Gender pay gap no longer narrowing

The Columbus Dispatch

Throughout the 1980s and early 90s, women of all economic levels steadily gained ground on their male counterparts in the work force.

By the mid-90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents 15 years earlier.

Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and that of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-'90s.

For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed slightly over the same span.

These trends suggest that recent high-profile achievements, the first female Secretary of State, lead anchor of a nightly newscast, president of Princeton, and, next month, speaker of the House, do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say.

A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.

An economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay said nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late '70s. She said then the '80s stood out as a period of sharp increases in women's pay. And it's much less impressive after that.

Last year, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned 74.7 cents for every dollar that men in the same group did, according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. A decade earlier, the women earned 75.7 cents.

The reasons for the stagnation are complicated and appear to include discrimination and women's choices. The number of women staying home with young children has risen recently, according to the Labor Department; the increase has been sharpest among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high salaries. The pace at which women are flowing into highly paid fields also appears to have slowed.

Like so much about gender and the workplace, there are at least two ways to view these trends. One is that women, faced with most of the responsibility for taking care of families, are forced to choose jobs that pay less or, in the case of stay-at-home mothers, nothing at all.

If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view.

The other view is that fewer women than consider money a top priority. Many relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that allow them to influence other people's lives.

An economist at Harvard who has written about the revolution in women's work over the last generation asked is equality of income what we really want? Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours (a week) in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don't expect them to take that chance equally often, she said.

Whatever role their preferences play in the pay gap, many women say they continue to battle subtle forms of lingering prejudice.

In fact, the pay gap between men and women who have similar qualifications and work in the same occupation has barely budged since 1990. Today, the discrimination often comes from bosses who think they treat everyone equally, women say, but it can still create a glass ceiling that keeps them from reaching the best jobs.

A 42-year-old bakery manager at a Sam's Club in northern California who will make $63,000 this year, including overtime said she doesn't think anyone would ever say she couldn't do the job as well as a man. Still, she said she was paid significantly less than men in similar jobs.