The Gender Pay Gap by Industry
By CATHERINE RAMPELLFrom the Bureau of Labor Statistics comes a cool chart on the gender pay gap for full-time jobs, sorted by industry:
Over all, women who worked full-time in wage and salary jobs had median weekly earnings of $657 in 2009. That’s 80 percent of what their male counterparts earned. But as you can see from the chart above, there’s a lot of variation depending on the industry.
Each dot in the chart represents an industry, and the dot size represents how many people that industry employs. If a dot is farther to the right, it means that there is greater pay parity between the sexes. The construction sector, for example, has relatively little difference in the typical pay received by men and women: Women earn 92.2 cents on the dollar of what men earn.
Additionally, a dot that is further up on the graph means that the typical job in that industry pays more money. Mining, quarrying and oil/gas extraction is far up on the chart, for example, indicating that the women who work in this sector are paid relatively well (median weekly earnings of $873).
Remember, though, that these figures are grouped by industry and not by occupation. Some of the gap within any given industry could be explained by the different types of jobs that men and women may go into, either by choice or opportunity (e.g., if they’re secretaries versus managers).
For more on this subject, there is a map of the gender wage gap by state; a look at how wage gap breaks down depending on how many hours an employee works, since part-time female workers actually earn more than their male counterparts; and a chart showing that the gender wage gap is smaller for younger workers.
Comments