Positive Trends Underneath Wider Wage Gap Between Men and Women

A recent dispiriting report on the gender wage gap contains some glimmers of hope.

According to a Census Bureau report, women working full time earned 76.5 cents for every dollar that men did in 2012. That is slightly below 2011’s level of 77 cents, where the ratio has hovered for much of the past decade.

However, a look at slices of the data shows that in the past 20 years, mid-career and older workers have made some progress toward equal pay. Those workers also have the most ground to make up. The wage gap is narrowest for women on the threshold of their careers and widens for older workers.

“Women start out doing well and then don’t climb the ladder as well as men,” said Isabel V. Sawhill, of the Brookings Institution. However, “women have a lot more opportunities now than they did when the older cohort was first entering the labor force.”

In 2012, women 15 to 24 earned 87 cents for every dollar men did, compared with 95 cents in 1993, according to Census. Women ages 25 to 44 earned 80 cents last year, up from 74 cents in 1993. Women ages 45 to 64 earned 73 cents, up from 61 cents in 1993.

Economists cautioned against relying on the numbers for the youngest workers, which don’t reflect individuals still in school and not yet in the work force. The data for individuals ages 15 through 24 also are far more volatile than those for older workers.

The trend is smoother for those age 25 and older, with the most substantial wage gaps narrowing in the past 19 years. The gender pay gap is wider for older workers in part because women tend to take more time off for family reasons than men do, said Francine Blau, an economics professor at Cornell University. But these “career interruptions…have gotten smaller over time and women have become more firmly attached to the labor force,” she said.

The glass ceiling also may be more a factor for older workers than young ones, she said: “There is evidence that suggests that men are more likely to be promoted and move up than women and that would give them higher earnings.”

Getting a handle on the gender wage gap is difficult. The raw numbers encompass all jobs, from artist to surgeon, and don’t tease out potentially significant factors, such as education, occupation and work-schedule flexibility. Harvard professor Claudia Goldin found that white, U.S.-born college graduates aged 25-29 earned about 86 cents for every $1 their male counterparts did in 2012; women in their fifties earned closer to 70 cents.

When one controls for differences and attempts an apples-to-apples comparison, the gender wage gap often narrows, said Natalia Kolesnikova, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Mississippi. The authors of a Labor Department report estimated a wage gap of about 5% in 2007, after controlling for variables such as education and career interruptions.

In a recent interview, Ms. Kolesnikova emphasized that work, and not wages, is the key. “I think making the policy discussion focused on 77 cents to the dollar is misleading,” she said. “It’s not that women are not paid the same for the same job. It’s that they have different jobs” that don’t pay as much. “We need to find a way to make sure girls understand they can be just as good in math and science and go into technological professions, like engineering.”

Ms. Sawhill also cited the importance of encouraging more women into higher-paying occupations. “The big problem is not unequal pay for equal work, the big problem is occupational segregation. … Women in the past have been relegated to relatively poorly paid sectors of the economy and jobs: nurses, teachers, librarians, social workers, secretaries… And men have been engineers.”