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Few exceptions to wage disparity between the sexes

By The Associated Press

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But not much else.

The Census Bureau compiled statistics on hundreds of job categories from its 2000 headcount and found only five where women typically earn at least as much as men.

Among workers who remove hazardous material, women earn $1.09 for every dollar earned by men. It's slightly more than $1 for telecommunications-line installer and repairers, and it was exactly dollar-for-dollar in three categories: meeting and convention planners; dining-room or cafeteria workers; and construction-trade helpers.

Each of these fields employs predominantly men, except for meeting planning.

Myra Strober, a Stanford University economics professor, said the report and other studies show, "If you are a young woman and want to go into an occupation to earn more money, you'll want to do that in an occupation dominated by men."

The report was based on 2000 census results that tracked 1999 income data for 505 job categories. However, the rankings of median earnings for women and men were based on a subset of about 400 fields that employed at least 10,000 full-time, year-round workers, including at least 1,000 men and 1,000 women.

Nationally, the median income for a woman working full time, year-round was about $28,000, compared with $38,000 for a man. That means a woman earned less than 74 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

That's an improvement from the early 1960s, when women earned about 59 cents for every dollar men earned. Data from a separate census survey that didn't look at detailed occupations showed women earning 77 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2002.

Copyright © 2004 The Seattle Times Company

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