Why Women Still Earn Less

Why Women Still Earn Less

The gap is narrowing, but men still make considerably more money

Penny by penny – a dime in the past decades – women's full-time wages have been approaching men's, but the gap amounts to more than 40 percent of the workforce and earned an average of 80 cents to each dollar earned by men, up from 67 cents in 1999 based on weekly wages.

The historic gap between women's and men's incomes has started to diminish, notes the U.S. Government's Population Reference Bureau. But many women do not share in these improvements.

Indeed, the wage gap between men and women exists for low-paid and high-paid jobs. Female dispatchers for rental cars, buses, security services, aircraft, etc., make up half of those in the job category but earn only 80 percent of what men do who perform the same jobs. Almost a third of all lawyers now are women. But they earn, on average, just under 85 percent of male lawyers' wages. When we talk of comparing women's earnings with men's earnings, we find that no matter how we measure them women's earnings are below those received by men, says the Department of Labor's Women's Bureau.

Education and work experience may explain some of the gap. Although the number of women attending law school has shot up dramatically in the past decades, only after they've been practicing law for a while will the salary gap start to narrow further. Another statistic may be more revealing. Despite the increasing numbers of working women, men stay in the labor force for an average of 40 years, while women average 30 years. That, too, is changing. Women are taking less time out when having children. In 2015, 52 percent of women were working by the time their children were a year old, while only 17 percent were between 1961 and 1965.

A beauty. Illustration by Elena.

Women are still virtually shut out of some sectors of the business world. According to Catalyst, a non-profit research and advisory group dealing with women in business and professions, only 6.2 percent of board seats on the Fortune 500 and service 500 companies were held by women in 2000. In addition, according to a 2000 survey, women make up less than 5 percent of senior managers (vice presidents and those higher up) at those companies. Asked why, chief executives most frequently cited management's aversion to “taking risks” and a “lack of careful career planning and planned job assignments for women.”

Paradoxically, the wage gap is narrowest in the few fields where a large percentage of the workers are women as well as in the occupations that have attracted few women workers. Female secretaries, stenographers, typists earn 97 percent of the weekly wages of their male counterparts, who make up only 2 percent of that work force. Only 4 percent of mechanics and mechanical repairers are women. But they earn more than their male counterparts!