NEW YORK – Although women have made significant gains in education and income during the last three decades, the pay gap between college-educated men and women continues to widen in the years following graduation, experts say.
A new report is being released today by the American Association of University Women.
The gender gap will remain until more women pursue careers in science and engineering, women become tougher negotiators, and employers do more to accommodate the needs of mothers with young children, said Catherine Hill, research director for the association.
“We also need to take a hard look at sex-discrimination in the workplace, which is affecting young women just as it affected their mothers and grandmothers,” she said.
Previous studies have found that more women than men are earning college degrees and that the salaries of college-educated women have risen faster than those of male graduates.
Still, like other researchers, Hill and her colleagues found that an income gap persists.
Analyzing U.S. Department of Education data on 19,000 men and women, Hill’s team found that one year out of college, women in 1994 earned 80 percent of what their male counterparts made. By 2003, a decade after graduation, they had fallen further behind, to 69 percent of men’s incomes.
Adjusting for the number of hours worked, parenthood and other factors, college-educated women still earned 12 percent less than their male peers, according to the report, suggesting that “the effects of gender discrimination are cumulative.”
Students’ individual choices explain part of the gap, Hill said. Engineering and computer-science majors typically command higher salaries than those with education or English degrees. Those technical fields draw fewer women than men nationwide – 18 percent of undergraduate engineering majors and 39 percent of mathematics majors were women in 2000, according to the Department of Education.
Even among those with the same technical degree, such as mathematics, women graduates often become teachers, earning less than men who move into industry, Hill said.
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