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Sexes’ wage gap narrows

More than 40 years after the Equal Pay Act made it illegal for employers to pay women less simply because of their sex, there’s still no state in the country where a typical woman earns as much as a man.

You’ve heard this statistic before: A woman earns just 77 cents for every man’s dollar in the United States.

But before you let this often-quoted 2005 figure get you down, note that there are career fields and places in the country where women are catching up to and even out-earning male co-workers.

In Arizona, a working woman earned 83.8 percent of a man’s annual salary in 2005, well above the national average, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

Out of the 50 states and Washington, D.C., Arizona’s male-female salary gap was the second smallest. Only the gap in the District of Columbia was smaller.

“The fact that Arizona is up there near 84 percent really is outstanding compared to the nation," said Avis Jones-DeWeever, program director for the institute.

The pay gap might be closing for Arizona’s women, but, as Jones-DeWeever points out, it’s probably not for the reason women want to hear.

Men in the state are earning less than the national average, while Arizona’s women are on par with it.

Opportunity for everyone

“When we look at the wage gap in the past 15 years, it certainly has been narrowing (nationally),” said Avis Jones-DeWeever, program director for the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. “Even though the gap has closed a little bit, it’s closed in almost half of the states because men’s salaries have gone down.” We like rising tides to raise all boats. We want to expand opportunity for everyone.”

The nation’s salary gap narrows by just a fraction of a penny each year. The typical woman earned 77 cents for every man’s dollar in 2005.

That’s up slightly from 76.6 cents in 2002 and 73.7 cents in 2000, according to data culled from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Over time, those pennies add up to a pricey disadvantage for women. The AFL-CIO figures that the average 25-year-old woman will lose roughly $455,000 to unequal pay during her working life.

Trend reversed

D. Mai Ling Ferraro, 34, is a speech-language pathologist who earned her master’s degree and is working toward certification that will put her on par with fully qualified men and women in her field.

They earn an average of $69,631, according to an industry magazine.

Women don’t negotiate their salaries effectively enough, said Ferraro, who earns $49,000 annually as a contract employee with Team Ed and works with elementary school children in the Dysart Unified School District.

Instead, she said, women opt for other perks, including more vacation time or a flexible schedule that allows them take care of their children.

“Men don’t have to worry about those things, so they’re going for the dollar amount," said Ferraro, who has two sons, ages 7 and 10. “Women are doing an excellent job of balancing family and work."

But there are occupations where women can reverse the trend.

Technology is one of the few industries where top female executives’ pay is outpacing men’s.

Female information technology executives, including CEOs, CIOs, vice presidents and directors, earn 1.4 percent more than men in the same positions, according to a 2006 salary survey of 19,000 tech workers by Dice.com, an IT job site.

Sure, there’s still a salary gap among all technology jobs. Women in technology earned an average of 9.7 percent less than men in 2006, Dice.com found, but that’s improved from the 14 percent gap in 2002, when it began surveying IT workers.

“When you think about the types of jobs you have in the technology realm, these are all positions that are very skill-based,” said Scot Melland, president and CEO of Dice Holdings Inc.

“The women that make it to that level in those organizations are probably pretty exceptional performers, and that’s being reflected in their salaries.”

Salary ‘fair’

Debbie Joy, a solution executive for CSC, an IT company based in El Segundo, Calif., works out of her home in Desert Hills in far north Phoenix and is the past president of the Phoenix chapter of Alliance of Technology and Women.

“For most of my career, I’ve always assumed I was making the same as men,” said Joy, 52.

“I think it’s been fair. I really felt like they (men) were not competition.”

Other factors, including who you know and how skilled you are, seem to play a bigger role in the paychecks of IT workers, she said.

There are other industries where women are outearning men.

In his book “Why Men Earn More: The Startling Truth Behind the Pay Gap — and What Women Can Do About It,” San Francisco area writer Warren Farrell identifies 39 jobs where women make at least 5 percent more than men.

Women who are employed as statisticians, automotive technicians and speech-language pathologists all earn 25 to 29 percent more than men in those jobs, Farrell said.

Certain careers might favor women, but paychecks are almost always influenced by how much time employees, male or female, are willing to devote to their jobs, Farrell said.

It’s a contest that men win more often than women because men are often willing to work more hours, while women opt to have a more balanced life, which includes spending time at home with family, he said.

Farrell said men are paid more because they’re more likely than women to show interest in and accept higher-paying jobs that require them to travel overseas, work night shifts or work in hazardous conditions, all of which disrupt family life.

But when marriage and families are taken out of the equation, Farrell said, the salary gap actually favors women.

Women who have never been married and are childless typically earn 17 percent more than male counterparts, he has found. “Never-married women who have never had children make a lot more job decisions that are lot more like the traditional man’s. They’ll go into computer sciences,” Farrell said.

“And conversely the never-married men — their career decisions are more like women. (They’ll go) into arts and social sciences.”

But salary gaps are still a reality for most women.

Need for advanced degree

Debra Davenport, a Phoenix career counselor and owner of Davenport/Folio, said women are not only dealing with a salary gap but some are also paying tens of thousands of dollars for advanced educational degrees to better compete with less-educated men for certain jobs, putting them even further behind.

“What I hear from my clients quite a bit is the women feel they have to get a minimum of a master’s degree,” Davenport said. “They really feel that they have to get that extra education in order to maintain any kind of competitive edge. I think that’s really telling.”

Ferraro, the speech-language pathologist, said, ”To think that you’re educated and experienced as the man next to you and you’re not compensated as much, it’s upsetting.”

With salary information so readily available online, she said women should do their research and negotiate more aggressively for fair pay.

“I think the responsibility is on women now,” she said.