Women in Washington State continue to earn dramatically less than men, a new report from the Economic Opportunity Institute finds—and the gap is only growing, as private-sector fields dominated by men rebound while the public sector, whose jobs are mostly held by women, continues to shrink. (This has been true, by the way, since early this year, when the so-called “mancession” gave way to the “hecovery,” with men taking 95 percent of all new jobs across the country).
Last year, women—who held about 47 percent of all jobs in the state—brought home just 63 percent of men’s monthly earnings—a ratio that’s worse than it was 20 years ago, when women made 65 cents for every dollar earned by a man. That gap held true at every education level, with women who held a graduate degree, for example, earning $27,500 less than men with graduate degrees. The gap gets worse over time, and as annual earnings increase, with three times more men than women making more than $100,000 a year.
“Through 2008 and the first half of 2009, men suffered greater job losses and higher unemployment rates than women, leading
some in the media to label it a ‘mancession.’ But a different story has unfolded since then: women are becoming increasingly vulnerable to economic instability and poverty,” the report concludes. “As men are slowly returning to work, women are continuing to lose jobs; and all the while, ongoing state, federal and local government budget cuts are shredding the social safety net.”
Other findings from the study:
In Washington State, the median hourly wage for women is $5.00 less than men’s hourly wage—a gap $2 larger than the national hourly wage gap.
• Much of the reason for the gap is that women dominate health care and social service sectors—the kind of traditional “caregiver” jobs that pay less, and are more vulnerable to state budget cuts, than industries dominated by men. In the construction industry, for example, men hold 84 percent of jobs. Women’s presence in high-paying male-dominated industries like IT, meanwhile, has actually shrunk—while women held about half of all information technology jobs 20 years ago in Washington, today men hold about two-thirds of all jobs in IT.
• Additionally, most public-sector jobs are held by women. (Seventy-four percent of teachers, for example, are women). As the private sector has rebounded, the public sector has continued to shrink. “Across all sectors, Washington lost 206,000 jobs
between February 2008 and February 2010 – including 62,000 in the predominately male construction industry,” according to the EOI report. “By October, 2011, the private sector had gained back 63,000 jobs, with big gains in the male-dominated sectors
of manufacturing, wholesale trade and software publishing. However, employment in Washington’s state and local government continued to shrink, losing an additional 6,000 jobs in public schools – 74% women – and 6,000 from the state government.”
• Women are more likely to work part-time, in jobs that don’t offer benefits like health care, retirement, and paid sick leave (just 11 percent of part-time jobs, for example, provided any health care benefits), in order to accommodate other family responsibilities like caring for children. Women’s part-time employment rates rose to 37 percent last year, even as men’s continued to drop, ending the year at 23 percent.
• But the gap can’t be explained entirely by the fact that men and women work in different industries and on different schedules, the report concludes. Indeed, women earn less than men for doing the exact same jobs—including in fields, like teaching, where women dominate.
Read the whole report, along with EOI’s recommendations for reforms, here.
