Women’s Pay in State Lags 31% Behind Men’s : Jobs: Disparities in experience, interruptions of careers and discrimination all play a role, analysts say.

California’s working women earn only 69 cents for every dollar their male colleagues bring in, reflecting a chronic disparity that touches virtually every corner of the state’s labor force, from schoolteachers to movie stars.

A Times computer analysis of newly released U.S. Census Bureau figures for 1989 shows that women working full time in the state earned an average of $25,015, compared to $36,248 for men. Women in Los Angeles County were only slightly closer to parity, earning 71 cents for every dollar of full-time pay their male counterparts took in.

Particularly glaring was the pay gap in high-profile professions such as medicine and dentistry, where women were making just over half as much as men. Female dentists statewide averaged 55 cents for every dollar brought in by male colleagues--earning $47,639, contrasted with $86,009 for the men.

Even in female-dominated fields, it was a man’s world when it came to pay. In elementary school teaching, women have outnumbered men for generations. But while the average female grade school teacher earned $29,299 in 1989, the average male teacher took home $35,273.

The state gap is roughly in line with national figures which, calculated on a slightly different basis, show American women earning 70 cents to a man’s dollar.

With women increasingly entering and staying in the work force, most economists believe the pay gap is narrowing. The experts attribute much of the lingering imbalance to the longer experience male workers have had in many high-paying occupations and the greater skills they have acquired over time. Women also are more likely than men to take leaves to raise children and care for relatives, often interrupting their peak earning years.

But most analysts say blatant discrimination by employers and customers--along with subtle societal pressure on women to go into lower-paying jobs--also play major roles in holding down the incomes of women.

With women making up 45% of the state’s work force, the gap is an issue that touches more than 6.7 million full-time and part-time workers. Butchers, bakers, shoe salespeople, actors, financial managers, aerospace engineers, counter clerks and cashiers--all earned more if they were male. Ditto for receptionists, file clerks, telephone operators, cooks, bill collectors, bartenders and crossing guards.

In fact, of 481 occupations, women clearly out-earned men in only four: typists, food preparers, assistants to waiters and repairers of communications and industrial electronic equipment. Women in only one of those categories--equipment repairers--had average earnings of more than $25,000.

In 31 other job categories, women appeared to have the edge, but the number in the sampling was too small for reliable comparison. Only 12 women, for instance, listed themselves as full-time dancers, out-earning the 10 male dancers $18,189 to $14,490.

The inequities were found across the board:

* Female physicians were the top earners among California women, but still averaged only 57% of their male counterparts’ earnings--$62,574 a year compared to $110,224.

* California women, and Los Angeles County women in particular, also were relatively well-paid in the entertainment industry in 1989. But when payday rolled around, they still played second banana to men. Los Angeles County’s female directors and actresses averaged $45,250--61.6% of what men made. “When we cease being sex symbols,” said actress Kitty Swink, “we cease getting work.”

* Property and real estate management--a field equally populated by women and men--was nearly doubly lucrative for the latter group. Salaries for women averaged $26,950, while men earned $51,480.

* Insurance salesmen averaged $56,495 in 1989, compared to the $30,027 earned by insurance saleswomen.

* Male authors also vastly out-earned their female colleagues, $59,537 to $33,899.

* The bottom rungs of the economic ladder favored men as well. Among household domestics--a female-dominated field that includes cooks, baby-sitters, housekeepers, cleaning people and the like--men out-earned women in every category but child care. Even there, the edge held by women was a minuscule $411, about $7.90 a week, and there were too few men in the job for a fully reliable comparison. Men who cleaned houses averaged more than twice the $10,251 that was the average cleaning woman’s yearly salary.

When the part-time work force--which is predominantly female--is taken into account, the disparity is greater still, with California women earning less than 62% of men’s wages. Among Los Angeles County women, the overall figure was 66 cents to a man’s dollar when part-timers were factored in.

For most working women, the gap between men’s and women’s wages came as no surprise. The disparity has been documented for decades.

Less clear, however, is why women’s wages continue to lag behind despite two decades of legal and social pressure by women’s rights advocates.

At one end of the spectrum are economists who contend that most of the pay gap stems from voluntary decisions women have made. These economists argue that women have chosen lower-paying fields with flexible schedules to give themselves more time to care for their families.

Rival economists, however, contend that society has long pushed women into careers that pay modestly. Most say the problem goes beyond sexism to outright discrimination.

“Tenure is part of the story and occupational differences is part of the story, but there continue to be enduring differentials” not explained by either, said James N. Baron, a Stanford sociologist who has studied gender-related pay differences in public- and private-sector jobs in California. He attributes “a substantial part” of the pay gap to discrimination.

Baron said patterns already set in the workplace are so entrenched that “even if we went tomorrow to a society that was gender-blind and race-blind, it would take a tremendous amount of time before the differential worked its way out of the system.”

Women’s rights advocates say such discrimination goes to the heart of American culture and the value society places on women and their work.

“It’s a social phenomenon,” said Tammy Bruce, president of the Los Angeles chapter of the National Organization for Women. “We’re making less money because of a social conscience that says women are worth less, and it’s an attitude that has an effect on every working woman, from waitresses to the (U.S.) secretary of transportation.”

Meanwhile, out in the labor force, working women had observations of their own.

Even though teachers are paid according to strict salary scales that apply to both sexes, “there are differentials that the administration hands out like little cookies, little plums,” noted Helen Bernstein, president of United Teachers-Los Angeles, the union representing faculty in the Los Angeles Unified School District.

“If you are a coach or a department chair or an in-house dean, you can make more money, and administrators and principals, who tend to be males, also tend to give these appointments to male teachers.”

Speaking from her mobile phone on her way to an engagement--in a car full of fellow union officials--Bernstein recalled how, during her first teaching job, she and a group of female instructors confronted a school administrator who had handed out all the differentials to men.

“He sat there and told us that he gave all the extra appointments to men because they had families to support,” she said. “Meanwhile, half the women sitting there were divorced, and were the sole support for their kids.”

Bernstein said that attitude--”that for women, teaching is just your second job until you have children and leave”--continues to depress wages, not only for women but for the profession in general because women so dominate the field.

As she spoke, a male colleague chimed in with his own opinions, especially when she noted that “in Los Angeles, even the male coaches make more money than female coaches do.”

“Well, it’s because of the sports they coach--” he interjected, only to have Bernstein cut him off.

“Oh, there’s a typical male viewpoint,” she snorted. “That’s bull----, and you know it. Coaching is coaching.”

Dr. Ivana Srbinovska, a dentist in private practice, said she earns as much as men of similar experience and specialty. Her income, she said, “is a matter of how aggressive I am in managing my business.”

But large clinics, where many of the jobs are these days, tend to favor men, she said.

Madeleine Stoner, a professor of social work at USC and a specialist on the issue of pay equity, complained of similar male gatekeeping in her field, even though it is numerically dominated by women.

“Even before social work became a profession, men have been the ones who ran the agencies and watched the money, and women were the so-called friendly visitors,” Stoner said. “To this day, this is a female-dominated profession. Yet the men continue to occupy the positions of leadership--and this is one of the more liberal and informed and egalitarian fields.”

While economists of varying political stripes acknowledge that the wage gap between men and women has narrowed over the past decade, they disagree over how substantial the improvements have been and how likely they are to continue. Data buttressing the various arguments is easily skewed, depending on how income is calculated, whether experience is a variable and whether the vast numbers of women working part time are factored in.

The Times’ analysis took full-time workers’ salaries and wages into account, but did not include income from self-employment. Nor did the data take into account earnings lost by women who do the same work as male colleagues but are given lesser titles and consequently lower pay--a form of discrimination many contend is widespread.

The most closely watched national figures are derived from Census statistics including wages, salaries and self-employment income of men and women working full time. Those figures showed for decades that women earned about 60 cents for every dollar that men received. By 1990, the figure for women had risen to just under 70 cents.

James P. Smith, a senior economist with the RAND Corp. think tank in Santa Monica, argues that the gap between men and women with equivalent job experience is far smaller than the Census figures suggest.

The Census comparisons are skewed, he said, by the large number of women in their 50s who earn comparatively low wages because they spent many years out of the labor force and have tended to work in lower-paying fields.

Smith noted that the pay gap between men and women in their 20s and 30s is far narrower and more women have begun to enter high-paying occupations--trends that he regards as important signs of progress. A woman entering the labor market today “is going to have a radically different career than someone who came into the labor market in 1960,” he said.

But other analysts are concerned about roadblocks to continued progress in pay equity. For example, they note the continued segregation of women in low-paying jobs such as child care and office work.

In California, women made up three-quarters of the clerical workers in 1989, but fewer than half of the managers. They held fewer than 3% of the jobs in the skilled construction trades--where male-dominated unions control coveted apprenticeships--but represented more than 94% of the housekeepers and maids.

Even in lucrative professions such as law, economists say, women may be more likely to enter lower-paying specialties and face a tougher time being promoted to partner.

“The gap has clearly declined in wages and salaries,” said Joyce P. Jacobsen, an economist at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tenn., and the author of a forthcoming book on gender economics. “The question is, is it going to continue or not, and how long is it going to take to get it to match dollar for dollar?”

How the Study Was Done

The computer study was conducted by The Times’ director of computer analysis, Richard O’Reilly, based on newly released Census Bureau data for California. Known as the Public Use Microdata Sample, it contains the responses of 1,456,011 people who completed the detailed “long form” of the census questionnaire. That form was mailed to about one in six residences nationwide.

Full-time workers were defined as those who reported working at least 48 weeks in 1989 and typically worked 35 or more hours a week. The overall sampling error for the study is less than 1%.

Uneven Money

Here is the average yearly pay for a few of the nearly 500 occupations listed by the Census Bureau and analyzed by The Times. The figures are for Los Angeles County, and for 1989 earnings.

OCCUPATION WOMEN MEN * Accountants/auditors $29,867 $44,407 * Bus drivers $23,588 $29,750 * Cashiers $15,398 $19,965 * Computer programmers $35,161 $41,151 * Hairdressers/cosmetologists $16,878 $25,923 * Lawyers $61,773 $92,148 * Real estate salespeople $42,605 $60,567 * Registered nurses $38,161 $41,917 * Shoe salespeople $17,009 $20,291 * Textile sewing machine operators $10,993 $11,507 * Waiters $14,902 $15,944

Working for Less

Full-time working women in California earn about 69 cents for every dollar their male counterparts make; in Los Angeles County, the figure is 71 cents.

THE STATE

Full-time Pay* Men: $36,248 Women: $25,015 * When part-time workers are included, women overall receive about 62% of men’s pay. *

Big Pay Gaps

Wide disparities in pay for occupational categories statewide include:

Men Women Athletes $39,942 $19,416 Securities/financial sales $73,403 $38,114 Managers/administrators $60,096 $33,653 Authors $59,537 $33,899 Insurance salespeople $56,495 $30,027

*

Where Women Are the Majority

More than half the state full-time work force--62%--is male, but there are some occupations in which women are the majority. In most of those categories, women still earn less than men.

% of work % of work Job Category Men force Women force Nurses / other health care $42,878 17.9% $35,580 82.1% Teachers / librarians $38,724 45.1% $28,465 54.9% Social workers $30,834 41.5% $26,250 58.5% Health / lab technicians $31,682 30.7% $25,783 69.3% Secretaries / clerical $27,540 28.0% $21,837 72.0% Orderlies / health aides $22,164 19.8% $17,605 80.2% Child care / personal service $22,413 28.3% $17,428 71.7% Domestics $19,015 6.7% $10,287 93.3%

*

LOS ANGELES COUNTY

HIGHEST-PAYING Men / Physicians: $108,730 Women / Lawyers: $61,773 LOWEST-PAYING Men / Busboys: $10,887 Women / Sewing machine operators: $10,993 FULL-TIME PAY** Men: $35,481 Women: $25,234 ** Part-time and part-year workers not counted for comparison.

NOTE: All figures for 1989

Source: Analysis of U.S. Census data by Richard O’Reilly and Maureen Lyons / Los Angeles Times.