Posted on 04/23/2007 6:58:28 AM PDT by presidio9
A dramatic pay gap emerges between women and men in America the year after they graduate from college and widens over the ensuing decade, according to research released on Monday.
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One year out of college, women working full time earn 80 percent of what men earn, according to the study by the American Association of University Women Educational Foundation, based in Washington D.C.
Ten years later, women earn 69 percent as much as men earn, it said.
Even as the study accounted for such factors as the number of hours worked, occupations or parenthood, the gap persisted, researchers said.
"If a woman and a man make the same choices, will they receive the same pay?" the study asked. "The answer is no.
"These unexplained gaps are evidence of discrimination, which remains a serious problem for women in the work force," it said.
Specifically, about one-quarter of the pay gap is attributable to gender -- 5 percent one year after graduation and 12 percent 10 years after graduation, it said.
One year out of college, men and women should arguably be the least likely to show a gender pay gap, the study said, since neither tend to be parents yet and they enter the work force without significant experience.
"It surprised me that it was already apparent one year out of college, and that it widens over the first 10 years," Catherine Hill, AAUW director of research, told Reuters.
Among factors found to make a difference in pay, the choice of fields of concentration in college were significant, the study found. Female students tended to study areas with lower pay, such as education, health and psychology, while male students dominated higher-paying fields such as engineering, mathematics and physical sciences, it said.
Even so, one year after graduation, a pay gap turned up between women and men who studied the same fields.
In education, women earn 95 percent as much as their male colleagues earn, while in math, women earn 76 percent as much as men earn, the study showed.
While in college, the study showed, women outperformed men academically, and their grade point averages were higher in every college major.
Parenthood affected men and women in vividly different ways. The study showed mothers more likely than fathers, or other women, to work part time or take leaves.
Among women who graduated from college in 1992-93, more than one-fifth of mothers were out of the work force a decade later, and another 17 percent were working part time, it said.
In the same class, less than 2 percent of fathers were out of the work force in 2003, and less than 2 percent were working part time, it said.
The study, entitled "Behind the Pay Gap," used data from the U.S. Department of Education. It analyzed some 9,000 college graduates from 1992-93 and more than 10,000 from 1999-2000.
Parenthood affected men and women in vividly different ways.
Procreation and childbirth do as well. It’s almost as if the sexes were designed for different purposes.
You know, maybe women are just different from men in their goals and ambitions. Why do we have to assume it is some kind of discrimination?
This seems unlikely to me. In every major, women have higher grades than men? Engineering? Mathematics? This would refute any number of studies that show, in general, better performance of men in math and fields with heavy dependance on spatial relationships.
Hmmmm, I wonder if a study conducted by the Cato Institute, or the Heritage Foundation, using the same exact data would have reached the same conclusions. It seemed to me as I read the article that even though the study found significant other factors that contributed to the "gap" it discounted those factors and concluded that the data gives conclusive proof of discrimination.
I’m an employer. Multiple companies in multiple states nationwide.
I’ve never once even considered a lower pay scale for women, and most of the staff in the companies are in fact female, as I sit and think about this.
I’ve never seen a situation where a woman isn’t paid the same money for the same job as a male, I only read about it in articles like this.
Which causes me to wonder if its real, or just PC coming out.
So the professional whiners can get on TV and to keep the grant money flowing.
ping
This is the second story I’ve seen on this in several days.
It’s the beginning of the new push to ratify the ERA.
Early this year, Hillary ran this cause up the flag poll as a potential major campaign topic, and even liberal women had a hard time getting excited about it, because it’s simply no longer an issue. It would have been as if Obama ran as an abolitionist candidate.
I'm not going to say because I havent seen it. But this group is hard to beat for biased, agenda-driven work. Check out this critique of their famed fantasy, How Schools Shortchange Girls.
http://www.uaf.edu/northern/schools/myth.html
Y..A...W...N
Same tired old arguments. This can’t be true, otherwise there would be no men in the workplace. My old company managers would sell their own children to shave 1/10th of a percent off the bottom line....imagine what they’d do to save 10-30%!
Given that fact, the law of supply-and-demand explains the income gap between male and female college graduates; the scarcer resource commands a higher price.
If you do the comparison within a given field and adjust for experience missed due to child-rearing, I would guess the disparity disappears.
What they're saying is that women who do easy office work should be paid as much as union construction workers or engineers.
Please cue the Internationale.
This is the second story I’ve seen on this in several days.
It’s the beginning of the new push to ratify the ERA.
Hmmm. Gotta admit, I didn’t even consider that aspect, thanks for pointing it out.
It makes sense.
“Early this year, Hillary ran this cause up the flag poll as a potential major campaign topic, and even liberal women had a hard time getting excited about it, because it’s simply no longer an issue”
Good point.
Bingo.
Your real-life experience is precisely the truth. I have NEVER seen even one example of gender-based wage differences. I have worked in computers for over 30 years, and the pay scales are identical, as adjusted for individual experience. Not only that, every government installation must as a matter of law and policy have identical scales. This whole thing sounds like feminist propaganda. If some women prefer to go into fields other than those that have identical pay for productivity, that is no concern of mine.
John Stossell (I think) wrote about this not long ago. You're right, it becomes statistically insignificant...
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