New Issue Brief from The Century Foundation Reveals the Extent of U.S. Gender and Racial/Ethnic Inequality and Suggests Remedies

Dec 17, 2008

Authors: admin

Publisher(s): The Century Foundation

New York, December 18 — An examination of the photos and names of those at the top of the political spectrum, from the presidential candidates to the appointees to the top spots in the past few, and next, administration provides a picture of a nation where gender and race/ethnicity do not matter. However, a new report from The Century Foundation shows that despite some progress, America is a nation in which neither minorities nor women have yet achieved anything approaching economic or social equality. 

In The Long Wait for Progress: Women and Economic and Social Equality, Century Foundation Senior Fellow Beverly Goldberg analyzes the substantial gap in wages between men and women, and then measures that gap in the context of women’s educational achievements and the continuing discrimination against women in the workplace, with attention to the impact of the issues of health and child care. This analysis of the complex and interrelated problems facing working women reveals both that women are subject to pay discrimination and that the inequities between white women and women of color are as striking as those between women and men. Some of the major findings in each of the areas explored are: 

The Gender Pay Gap. Overall, in 2007, women working full time earned only 78 percent of what men did. Even in a traditionally female profession, such as nursing, the 9.3 percent of registered nurses who are male earn somewhat over 10 percent more than their female colleagues. Furthermore, a look at the median weekly earnings for all women reveals the serious gap between women by race/ethnicity: white women earn $626 a week, while black women’s median weekly salary is $533; and trailing are Hispanic women who earn the least—$473 a week.

Educational Achievement. Younger women have begun to reach the same levels as men when it comes to completing high school and lag men by only a bit when it comes to graduating from college. Yet, when yearly earnings at different educational levels are compared, the results are far from equal. A man with a high school diploma earns $35,700 a year, while a white woman earns $27,500, an African American woman $24,400, and a Hispanic woman, $23,400.

Employment Discrimination. Some argue that the reason women earn less than men is that they work in professions that are lower-paid. Women do tend to work in professions that pay less, for example, child care, but do those jobs pay less because they are “women’s” jobs? Even if women choose to work in jobs that pay more, such as the trades, those jobs traditionally have been closed to them: only 10 percent of the nation’s 2000 pipefitters are female, and the same disparity occurs in other construction jobs, including carpentry, welding, painting, and wallpaper hanging, all work that women are physically capable of doing.

The Costs and Availability of Health Care. The problems facing women in this area stem from the fact that they do not earn as much as men and therefore have to spend more of their income on their share of premiums in employer-sponsored plans, as well as out-of-pocket expenses. In addition, women, who are less likely to be covered by employer-sponsored plans, pay more for private insurance coverage in most states: for example, in Denver, a forty-year-old woman pays 34 percent more for a policy from Humana than a man does.

The Lack of Child Care. Unlike in much of Europe, there is little in the way of state-supported child care available in the United States: the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities reported that in 2003 funding limitations meant that “only one in every seven children . . . eligible for child care assistance under federal rules actually receive that help. Millions of low-income working families with children that need assistance paying for child care do not get it because of insufficient funding for child care programs.”

Although the first order of business for the incoming administration will be the state of the nation’s economy, there are some remedies for gender and racial inequalities that should be acted upon as soon as possible:

● passing legislation aimed at increasing transparency when it comes to wages, making it harder for companies to practice pay inequities without fear;
● providing funding for lifelong learning, which would provide training opportunities at all stages of life;
● increasing the availability of English language study programs for immigrants;
● developing programs to help women learn about and train for jobs in nontraditional fields;
● reforming access to health care and controlling its costs (this seems to be high on the new administration’s agenda); and
● creating enough government-supported child care centers to address the needs of those in poverty.   

The Long Wait for Progress: Women and Economic and Social Equality is the latest in a series of issue briefs written by Beverly Goldberg addressing the problems of economic inequality. This and other related publications can be downloaded from The Century Foundation Web site at www.tcf.org. For more information, contact Christy Hicks at hicks@tcf.org or (212) 452-7723.