Women lead men in part-time pay

By Amy Strahan Butler
Bloomberg News Service

WASHINGTON — Women, long subjected to an earnings gap with men in full-time work, take home bigger paychecks than their male counterparts in part-time jobs, a government study found.

Women who work part time earn a median of $1.15 for every dollar their male counterparts make, a reverse of the 76 cents on the dollar women earn for full-time work compared with men, according to a study of 2000 data by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

The numbers reflect the ranks of women who move from full-time to part-time work in their careers to care for children, taking their professional experience with them into more flexible jobs, analysts said. Men with part-time jobs tend to be students or young adults with less experience and earning power.

"More women are choosing (part-time work) not out of necessity but out of choice," said John Challenger, chief executive of Challenger, Gray & Christmas. "Women coming into those jobs are much higher qualified generally."

A quarter of working women work part time, compared with 10 percent of working men, the study said. And while more than half of male part-time workers are 16 to 24 years old, just a third of female part-time workers are that young, according to the report.

There are 29.8 million part-time workers in the United States, most citing non-economic reasons such as childcare and family obligations for not working full time, the Labor Department said.

"Women are still the primary caregivers in households, and working part time helps them take care of children or elderly parents while maintaining their skills, instead of leaving the work force for an extended period of time," said Denise Venable, a researcher for the Women in the Economy Project.

The median earnings of women overall is 76 cents for every $1 for men in the workforce, according to the Labor Department.

That figure does not take into account educational differences or age; neither does it compare different jobs.

Democrats and labor unions rallied on Capitol Hill yesterday to mark the "Equal Pay Day," the date at which each year women's average wages equal those of men's for the previous year.

"Let's make equal pay an election issue," said Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, D-N.Y. "Let's hold people accountable for the continuing discrimination against women and children."

The 24 percent pay gap for full-time work is misleading because it lumps low-paying female-dominated jobs with high-paying male-dominated fields, according to Venable, who says it's like "comparing apples and oranges."

Women who never married make 91 percent of what's earned by men who never married, according to the Labor Department study.

The few women who work in male-dominated fields tend to earn about the same pay, according to the report. The difference in pay between male and female electrical engineers is 4 percent, while female private security guards make only 1 percent less than males on average, and women in health service occupations make only 2 percent less on average, according to the study.

The pay gap is greatest in sales occupations, where women on average make 40 percent less than men, according to the 2000 data.