Wage gap figures question??

Jim Westrich westrich at miser.umass.edu
Thu Apr 22 07:19:17 PDT 1999


At 05:00 PM 4/21/99 , you wrote:
>Marta Russell wrote:
>
>>Looking over the CPS census data I found that women ($24,973) are paid
>>less than men ($33,674).

The median woman in the labor force earns around $19,000. The median man earns around $30,000 (exact numbers available on request). Medians below means are indicative of inequality and the fact that for women the median is substantially lower than the mean indicates there is greater inequality among women in labor market.


>Doug Henwood wrote:
>
>The per capita figures include kids; the numbers for men and women are for
>those 15 and over, and only include those with income >0. If I'm
>remembering right, back in the old days, only about half of women had
>income >0; now it's about 90% or so.

A look at people in the labor force reveals there is a lot of income inequality. A fact that surprised me while running my own numbers on the CPS 1998 is that 23.7% of women in the labor force earn less than $10,000 (both low pay and part time status factor in here), while for men it was 12.8%. 58.7% of women earn under $23,000 while only 36.3% for men. 9.9% of men earn over $75,000 while 2.6% for women.

Peace,

Jim

"With a song in my heart I took all the blows."

--Jackie Leven, "Ballad of a Simple Heart"



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