> Well, I was browsing _The Mismeasure of Woman_ the other day at the
> bookstore and the author claimed that the closing of the wage gap was due
> not to women's rising salaries, but men's FALLING salaries (due to
> downsizing, etc.). Perhaps now that the economy is recovering, men are
> making back what they lost and the disparity is growing again.
That's an interesting thought. I hadn't considered it, certainly.
Anyway, this is all getting a bit away from F&SF literature, and I
certainly hope that equal pay for equal work is not a fantasy...
I will, however, give you this URL that a friend of mine dug up:
http://www.dol.gov/dol/wb/public/programs/1w&occ.htm
Going on this, it looks like a lot of the disparity is the type of job.
I.e., more women are in jobs with traditionally lower income. The stats
in the above page include some information about part-time vs. full-time
(women seem to have the edge in part-time work, but not as much as
the men have in full-time), white vs. black vs. hispanic, young vs. old,
etc. There's also some break-down by occupational sector. The data
looks to be from 1995.
That's obviously not all of it. Another friend related a story that a
new manager came in and found a disparity between the salaries of men
and women in his group, so he immediately brought the women up to parity.
This was in the computer software industry in California.
Perhaps oddly (perhaps not), female enrollment in Computer Science at
the local university has been dropping for several years. I don't have
the figures, though.
As distressing as all of this is, perhaps we should try to get back
toward F&SF... (I'll do my part by shutting up now... :-)
Pax,
-allen
--
Allen Briggs - end killing - briggs@macbsd.com
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Thu May 25 2000 - 19:06:44 PDT