Women out earn men

Oct. 31, 2007

Young women in several big cities are now earning more money than men in the same age group. It’s a surprising turnabout that has analysts scratching their heads, according to a recent New York Times article.
A recent study showed that no matter what their educational background, women aged 21 to 30 were earning higher median salaries than men in New York City, Dallas, Chicago, Boston, Minneapolis and a few other big cities, the article reported.
The biggest difference was in Dallas, where women earn 120% of what men do with a median wage of $25,467, according to the analysis of 2005 census data prepared by Andrew A. Beveridge, a demographer at Queens College.
What’s going on?
No one knows for sure, but it may all come down to kids and marriage.
“Citified college-women are more likely to be nonmarried and childless, compared with their suburban sisters, so they can and do devote themselves to their careers,”
said Queens sociologist Andrew Hacker in the New York Times article.
That said, it will be interesting to see what happens as time goes on. Typically, the older women get, the further they fall behind in earnings.
In any case, the days of women being considered a minority are gone, said Traverse City businesswoman Jennifer Borkovich (profiled in the accompanying article).But those days weren’t that long ago. Borkovich remembers being chosen for a highly sought-after internship at 3-M Corporation, and naturally thought she had opened the door herself with a 4.0 grade point average in chemistry at Kansas State University. She was shocked to find out she was a “minority” hire.
“I don’t believe that my gender should be more important than my qualifications,” she said.
Although women still do hit a glass ceiling in the Fortune 500 companies, there are so many women succeeding in the business world that gender issues have faded away, she said.
“In my case, women ten years older than me really had to fight for equality, and women 10 years younger than me have sometimes taken that for granted and don’t give it another thought. I think I’m right on the cusp of the two generations,” said Borkovich.