Women Better Educated than Men, Still Paid Less

by James Parks, Jul 13, 2008

Union teachers, who are mostly women, earn between 59 percent and 130 percent more than their nonunion counterparts.

Last month, a group of women delivered 9,000 résumés to John McCain’s office on Capitol Hill to remind the senator from Arizona that women are well-trained, highly educated and qualified and should be paid the same as men for doing the same work.

McCain and those who oppose equal pay for working women claim women just need more training to get a better job.

Not so, according to recent data compiled by the AFL-CIO Department for Professional Employees (DPE). The DPE finds that even though women workers clearly are better educated than men, they receive less pay in nearly every profession than their male counterparts. The best way to get better pay, the fact sheet shows, is to join a union, something McCain—who opposes the Employee Free Choice Act—wants to make harder. 

The DPE fact sheet, “Salaried and Professional Women: Relevant Statistics,” notes that women have been earning more bachelor’s degrees than men since 1982 and more master’s degrees since 1981. This year, women are projected to earn 52 percent of all first professional degrees and almost 49 percent of all doctorates. Taken together, women will earn 59 percent of all postsecondary degrees in 2008.

But those advanced degrees don’t translate into better pay. In 2005, full-time women workers who graduated high school earned 34 percent less than men with similar degrees. Women with bachelor’s degrees earned 31 percent less. Those with a master’s degree were paid 32 percent less and those with doctorates received about 30 percent less. Click here to read the entire fact sheet.

Overall, women were paid only 77 cents for every dollar a man was paid in 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. Economist Evelyn Murphy, president and founder of The WAGE Project, estimates the wage gap costs the average full-time U.S. woman worker between $700,000 and $2 million over the course of her work life.

These figures are even worse for women of color. African American women earn only 72 cents and Latinas 60 cents for every dollar that men earn. Asian American and Pacific Islander American women earn less, too. The wage gap also is more pronounced for older women: In 2007, women older than 25 earned 78 percent of what men in the same age group earned, while women aged 16–24 earned 92 percent as much as their male peers.

DPE President Paul Almeida says even though women are increasingly responsible for the well-being of their families, “wage disparity remains a serious and pervasive problem.”  

Women still earn less than men in professional and all other occupational categories. The numbers in this fact sheet demonstrate the power of unions not only to raise wages, but also to combat racism and sexism. Union membership narrows the income gap that disadvantages women and people of color. 

The more than 12,000 women who took the recent Ask a Working Woman survey online, sponsored by Working America and the AFL-CIO, say the top item that would improve their lives is a 10 percent raise. Nearly half say they know or believe that men are being paid more than women.

Equal pay is a problem in every occupational category, even in occupations where women considerably outnumber men, the DPE study shows. Last year, for example: 

• Female elementary and middle school teachers earned nearly10 percent less than similarly employed men, despite comprising 82 percent of the field.
• Female registered nurses earned more than 10 percent less than their male colleagues, although 90 percent of nurses are women.
• Female physicians and surgeons earned a whopping 41 percent less than their male counterparts.
• Female college and university teachers earned more than 25 percent less than those who were male.
• Female lawyers earned 23 percent less than male lawyers.

The fact sheet clearly shows that joining a union has great financial value for women, especially in lower-paid jobs. In 2007, union preschool and kindergarten teachers earned a whopping 130.5 percent more than their nonunion counterparts, while for elementary and middle school teachers, the union wage advantage was 59.4 percent. Union social workers and counselors earned 39.5 and 42.2 percent more, respectively. For registered nurses, the difference was 15.6 percent.

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