By Siobhan McAndrew
Reno Gazette-Journal Assistant Business Editor

Tuesday, 10 a.m.: A conversation in a company office in Washoe County, Nev.

"Who was that woman you were having coffee with this morning?" a fiftysomething professional man asked his fortysomething male colleague.

Pressing on, fiftysomething headed to fortysomething's desk. "She was cute, really pretty. Really pretty."

Apparently oblivious to or unconcerned about the women in his vicinity, fiftysomething continued:

"I am just saying she looked really put together. You don't see many good-looking women when you're sitting around here."

I stopped what I was doing — forgetting for a moment why I had come to this office. The woman in me was offended. The reporter in me asked a silent question:

Can it be true that it is still considered acceptable to openly use the office to banter about the looks of female professionals in the presence of other professionals — "cute" or not?

The woman in question, I later learned, was a top executive at a successful Reno company. I have no idea whether she would have been flattered, offended — or both — had she heard this man's comments.

But it made me angry just the same, because a lot of work world realities for professional women are just plain ugly.

Consider these statistics from the Nevada Women's Agenda, the U.S. Department of Labor, U.S. Census Bureau, the National Council for Research on Women, the National Organization for Women and various surveys, studies and news reports.

Nevada women earn 76 cents for every dollar a man makes. Nationwide, women earn 73 percent of what a man makes.

In Nevada, the average man will make $591 this week. The average woman will earn only $457.

In the United States a man makes an average of $155 more a week than a woman.

Since the Equal Pay Act's Passage in 1963, the pay gap has narrowed by only slightly more than one-third of a penny per year.

With a high school education, women can expect to make $421 per week, and men can expect $595.

Female college graduates average $760 per week, while men with college degrees can expect to make $1,022.

A man with a professional degree will make a median income of $140,117 this year. A woman with a professional degree would have to work more than two years to earn that same amount.

Despite being more than 50 percent of the full-time work force, 54 percent of female workers earn less than $25,000 per year, compared with 36 percent of males.

If women received the same salary for the same jobs as men who were of the same age, had the same education and lived in the same place, women's annual incomes would rise enough to cut the poverty level in half.

Studies have found that 50 to 75 percent of employed women will experience sexual harassment on the job.

Twenty-two of the 78 countries competing at this year's Olympics didn't bring women to compete in the games.

Women only make up 13 percent of the Senate and 14 percent of the House of Representatives. Women make up only 13 percent of the top executives of media, telecom and e-companies.

The average unemployment benefits for women are $194 per week, $47 less than for a man.

In 1968, 15 percent of managers were women. If it takes 15 to 25 years for a manager to become a senior executive, women today should be in at least 15 percent of the top positions.

But women today make up only 3.1 percent of senior executives at Fortune 500 companies. At that rate, it would take 475 years for women to reach equality.

Twenty-five percent of the companies on the Fortune 500 don't have even one female officer.

And only six of the companies on this year's Fortune 500 have women CEOs.

This is not one bit pretty.