Recently released data from the U.S. Census found that younger women in the workforce who have recently graduated from college are actually making more money than their male counterparts.
University women’s issues experts argue that although it might seem that strides are being made in the workforce, problems still exist that limit women’s career choices, income levels and opportunities at obtaining a well-paying career in male-dominated fields.
Single women ages 22 to 30 with no children earn 8 percent more than men of the same age group, according to 2008 Census data released in September 2010.
This income rate is due to the increasing number of women who attend college and get high-paying jobs after graduation.
According to the census, between 2006 and 2008, 32.7 percent of women between ages 25 and 34 had a bachelor’s degree or higher.
However, income rates do not remain the same during a woman’s lifetime compared to males, according to a 2007 study by Catherine Hill, Director of Research at the American Association of University Women.
The older a woman gets, the less money she earns compared to men of the same age. Women of all marital statuses who are a year out of college make 80 percent as much as all male colleagues. Ten years after college, women earn 69 percent of what men the same age earn, according to Hill’s study, “Behind the Pay Gap.”
Although the census data found younger women are making more money than men of the same age, women are still struggling to make advances in the workplace, experts said.
Gender equity in the workforce is still a long way from reality, students and organizers from the ASUO Women’s Center said.
Readers need to be critical of these types of surveys, University graduate student Cory Kirshner-Lira said.
“Sexism still pervades in every single institution in society,” Kirshner-Lira said. “This doesn’t remove the suppression of women happening every single day.”
ASUO Women’s Center Director Brandy Ota said that factors like the economic recession influence job equality in the workforce. Teachers have been hit hard by the economic recession. Historically stereotyped jobs and jobs that are considered socially acceptable for each gender are still the jobs modern women most often take, in career fields like health care and education.
“The jobs women are taking are not as valued (as men’s jobs), but just as necessary,” Ota said.
University professor and Director of the Center for the Study of Women in Society, Carol Stabile, said that women are underrepresented in careers in the sciences, even here at the University.
Stabile said engineering and computer sciences have low figures of female employees throughout the nation.
She provided the video game industry as an example of a male-dominated career field, where employees often work “crunch time” and have 80 to 90 hour work-weeks to meet deadline. Female employees who have children might not have access to childcare and feel alienated by these types of male-dominated career fields.
Societal changes need to be made through all career fields, Stabile said.
“The culture of the workplace and the organization of work need to be shifted in order to obtain some kind of equity,” she said.
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