Women have made tremendous gains in education, employment and
earnings in the past 50 years, but there is still a persistent gender
pay gap. Even young working women continue to lag behind men.
Among
recent college graduates, full-time working women on average earn 82%
of what their male peers earn, according to a study released todayby the AAUW (American Association of University Women). The report is based on 2009 U.S. Department of Education statistics.
The
result is similar to a broader study by the Institute for Women's
Policy Research, which said that in 2011, the gender wage gap for
working women of all ages was 82.2%. It found that women earned less in
every occupation except bookkeeping, accounting and auditing clerks.
Women
earn less for a several reasons, experts say, including their college
majors, occupation and the number of hours they work. Today, women
still tend to enter lower-paid fields such as education and social
sciences, while men typically major in engineering and computer science.
AAUW
took a closer look at the difference between men and women who enter
the same occupation. The apples-to-apples comparison found that women
still earned about 7% less than their male counterparts. Give their
similarities, this pay gap is unexplained, and gender discrimination is
one potential factor, the study says.
"A lot of people think that
stereotypes are a thing of the past," says Catherine Hill, director of
research at AAUW. "But we see that these things are continuing and
real."
If a young man and woman fresh out of college with the same
degree walk into a large firm, typically, the man can get placed in
higher-wage jobs than the woman, says Heidi Hartmann, president of the
Institute for Women's Policy Research.
Unfortunately,
private-sector workers are discouraged from or even penalized for
sharing information about their salaries with co-workers. "Many times,
younger women are shocked to learn that they are not on equal footing
with men," says Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and
employment at the National Women's Law Center.
Negotiating a
salary can make a difference in earnings. But some research has found
that women are less likely to negotiate for higher salaries, and other
studies have shown that women who do negotiate are perceived differently
than men and may be penalized, Graves says.
Because of the pay
gap, young women workers deplete more of their earnings to pay for their
costly student loan debt. "What we find is that women who are paying
for college loans after graduation are paying a bigger chunk of their
smaller paychecks," Hill says. "They have less money to live on just
one year after graduation."
More than half of full-time working
women graduates, 53%, were paying a greater percentage of their earnings
toward student loan debt than a typical worker could reasonably afford
to pay, the AAUW study found. That's compared with 39% of men.
What can be done about the pay gap? "Women could pick higher-paying
majors, such as nursing, computer science, math, science and
engineering" Hartmann says. "The employer has the responsibility to
ensure that they do not treat men and women differently.
"And the
government also has responsibility. We have equal-pay laws that have
been on the books for a very long time, but we still have unequal pay,
which suggests a need for stronger enforcement or new legislation."
USA Today