Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, American women of all economic levels — 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 $1 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 university or college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male graduates in the United States has actually widened slightly since the mid-’90s.
For women without higher education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span.
These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements — the first woman to serve as an American secretary of state, as the lead anchor of a nightly newscast, as president of Princeton and, next month, the first to be speaker of the House of Representatives — 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 one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision.
“Nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late ’70s,” said Francine Blau, an economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay. “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, university-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned 74.7 cents in hourly pay for every $1 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.
Via IHT
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