It's official: Pittsburgh women are smart.

In fact, they may be better educated than most women in America, according to a new University of Pittsburgh study.

As a percent of the female population, age 18-64, Pittsburgh has more women college students than any other city. And it's at the top of the charts, as is Allegheny County, in the percentage of women residents with high school or college degrees.

But there's a downside, too, the Pitt study found: These same well-educated, working-age women are paid lower salaries for part-time work than anywhere else in urban America. They're also near the bottom for full-time pay, and have one of the largest gaps in male-female earnings in the country.

"People assume there's a brain drain here, but that's not the case," said Ralph Bangs, program director at Pitt's University Center for Social and Urban Research and a co-author of the study.

Sixteen percent of Pittsburgh's working-age females are currently enrolled in one of the area's many colleges or universities, making the city first in the nation in that category.

"The conventional wisdom was, because we've been losing both young population and total population over the past few decades, there must have been a decline in the college-educated population, but that hasn't happened," said Bangs, citing Pittsburgh's abundant supply of colleges and universities -- the city is fifth in the nation in that category -- as a reason.

"The surprising news today is we have a large concentration in the number of people with a bachelor's or graduate degree, and it's growing."

Moreover, Bangs said, while the region tends to attract fewer college-educated job seekers than it loses each year, overall, the total number of local graduates who stay more than offsets the loss.

"We actually have an overall brain gain, because we're retaining more than half of the women who graduate from college here," he said. "We're both growing human capital locally, and providing it for the rest of the nation."

Using 2000 census data, Bangs compared women's social and economic status in three categories: the nation's 70 largest cities, 50 largest counties and 50 largest metropolitan statistical areas.

The study found that both Allegheny County and the six-county MSA of Allegheny, Armstrong, Butler, Beaver, Westmoreland and Washington counties ranked first in the percentage of women 25-34 with high school diplomas. The city of Pittsburgh followed closely behind, at third in the nation.

In the percentage of young women 25-34 with college degrees, the city of Pittsburgh ranked 13th, while Allegheny County was close behind in that category, at 15th, and the six-county region was 21st.

Median earnings of part-time women workers in the city, county and region are the lowest among all large urban areas in the United States, but Bangs cautioned against blaming those numbers on Pittsburgh's purported low cost of living.

"The cost of living in the region isn't more than 5 percent below the median of other large urban areas," he said, while women's median earnings for part-time work, for example, are about 20 percent below the median of the 50 largest metro areas.

Full-time women workers in the region also earn less than 70 percent of the annual earnings of full-time male workers, an earnings gap that is the seventh largest among the 50 most populated metro areas.

Educators said they were pleased by the findings, but wary, too.

"If we're No. 1, or close to No. 1, in some of these rankings, then these statistics should directly correlate to earnings and leadership opportunities for women, but they're not," said Barbara Mistick, director of the Girls Math and Science Initiative at Carnegie Mellon University. She noted other Pitt studies that found women with college degrees earning less than men with high school diplomas.

"If women have this great level of completion, why aren't we seeing it in the earnings side? I feel pretty strongly that we're not seeing women in enough leadership positions. If women were doing better and earning more, you wouldn't have a city budget oversight committee that forgot to put women on there. This is good news, but it's not the whole story."

But Laura Armesto, vice president of academic affairs at Chatham College, says the Pitt study's numbers are pointing in the right direction.

"I think we're fortunate to have the brain gain," Armesto said. "This is really a reflection of the fine educational institutions we have, and of our support for women seeking to educate themselves or embark on second careers.

"Closing the wage gap will take a while, but in the meantime, we're talking to women about the importance of leadership and the responsibility they have for bringing other women along," she said.

"But this is all going to take time."