Women in the United States earned only 73 cents for every dollar men were paid in 1999, though the gap narrowed during the 1990s, according to census figures. Women gained roughly 7 cents on the dollar over the 10-year period, the figures released Tuesday said. The figure does not necessarily mean that women are being paid less than men for doing the same job. Instead, the census looked at earnings in 1999 for full-time workers in all industries and found that the national median income for men was $35,922 and $26,292 for women. "I would say we have a long way to go toward closing the gap," said Marianne Hill, an economist for the Mississippi Institutions of Higher Learning. Experts said the main reasons for the wage gap are that women often take time off to have children and lose experience and pay because of it; that women often choose lower-paying professions, such as teaching and social work; and that women are discriminated against when it comes to promotions and raises. "I don't see it becoming equal until women become much more equal in terms of who's taking care of the kids at home and who's doing house work," Hill said. Karen Nussbaum, assistant to the president of AFL-CIO in Washington, said a recent study by her group attributed about half of the wage gap to discrimination. One of the biggest reasons for the narrowing of the gap was that many high-paying manufacturing jobs held by men were lost as the industry declined in recent years, she said. Colin Bennett, a labor economist for the Employment Policy Foundation, agreed that women face discrimination but said the gap is more complicated than bias. "A lot of demographic factors are involved," he said. The disparity ranged from women earning 63 cents on the dollar in Wyoming, where the traditionally male mining and oil industries dominate, to 90 cents on the dollar in Washington, D.C., where women are more likely than men to hold high-paying government jobs. Bennett projected that the wage gap could close within 30 years as women continue entering high-paying jobs and child care becomes more evenly split between parents. Nussbaum disagreed, pointing to a recent congressional study that said women professionals and managers had lost ground in the past five years. "This is not steady progress in one direction," she said.