US: Gender Pay Gap still stuck

[Omaha Steve]

http://www.world-psi.org/TemplateEn.cfm?Section=Inter_Americas1&CONTENTID=16890&TEMPLATE=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm

US: Gender Pay Gap still stuck

Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, women of all economic levels in the United States poor, middle class and rich were steadily gaining 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 just 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 the pay 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 only slightly over the same span. A decade ago it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today that is far harder to envisage. In 2005, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old for example, earned 74.7 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group according to Labour Department data analysed 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 both discrimination and women’s own choices.

The number of women staying home with young children has risen recently, according to the Labour 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 burden 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.


FULL story at link.

[smtpgirl]

1. I can vouch for that

So why is it when I have experience and knowledge in the IT field, but I can't bust $75K??????????????

A college graduate, I might add, with an MCSE cert too

I want to get in the network security field, where here in the Washington, DC area, this commands a $150K salary???????

[Warpy]

2. A penny drop is NOT stagnation, it's a loss

that undoubtedly reflects the non enforcement of EEOC laws by an insanely pro corporate administration.

We're LOSING GROUND, not staying in place.

[Manifestor_of_Light]

3. And then there are those of us who are permanently unemployed

Because we're overqualified, both male and female, and therefore too expensive.

I'm female and I'm sorry I went for that doctorate that supposedly "couldn't be offshored"!!!

Hell, the bachelor's never got me a job either. Only the vocational school degree got me a job and I burned out on that by age 36 approximately.