The persistent gap between what men and women earn has been narrowing over the years, but the progress women have seen in their paychecks is too small and has come too slowly for Heather Arnet.

		Graphic: Wage gap and education

"We are part of a systematic problem,'' said Arnet, executive director of the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania, a new organization that promotes equal opportunity for women and girls in 11 counties around Pittsburgh.

Although exaggerating somewhat to make her point, Arnet said at the current rate of change, it will take women another five decades to achieve pay parity with men. "It's not at all comforting to think that if we leave well enough alone, I'll make a dollar 50 years from now for every dollar my husband makes," said Arnet, whose husband, David Shumway, is an English professor at Carnegie Mellon University.

Female workers in Pennsylvania last year earned 80 cents for every dollar their male counterparts made, up from 71 cents in 1989 and 61 cents in 1979, according to a new study released yesterday by the Keystone Research Center, a labor-backed Harrisburg-based think tank.

Part of the reason for the gap's narrowing is that the median wage has fallen for men, who in general were hurt more than women by the last recession, which hit manufacturing particularly hard. But women's wages in Pennsylvania also have grown more rapidly than men's over the longer term: the median hourly wage of men in the state fell by nearly 5 percent from 1979 to 2003 as measured in 2003 dollars, while women's wages rose by nearly 25 percent the same period, the Keystone study said. The median hourly wage for men last year was $15.21, vs. $12.16 for women.

The state last year bucked the national trend, which saw the gap between what men and women earn widen a bit after declining for several years, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau. Women last year made about 75 cents for every dollar a man made, down from almost 77 cents in 2002. Twenty years ago, women made nearly 64 cents for every dollar earned by a man.

Data is not as fresh for the Pittsburgh region, but what numbers are available from the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Social and Urban Research paint a bleaker picture than the state and national averages.

Using data from the 2000 census, Pitt found that full-time women workers in the six-county Pittsburgh metropolitan region earned less than 70 percent of the annual earnings of full-time male workers. The 30 percent earnings gap is the seventh-largest among the nation's 50 most populated metropolitan areas, it said.

The same Pitt study found that the median earnings of part-time women workers in the Pittsburgh area are the lowest among all large urban areas in the United States -- about 20 percent below the median of the 50 largest metropolitan areas.

There are many factors that can help explain the differences between what men and women earn, including education, job training and work force experience. Women and men also tend to work in different occupations and industries, and to join unions at different rates, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research.

"A lot of it has to do with the fact that men and women still work in different jobs and the jobs women traditionally work in pay less than the jobs men traditionally work in,'' said Vicky Lovell, who has studied the issue for the institute. "There is still a cultural devaluation of work we think of as being women's work."

Women remain grossly underrepresented in higher paying occupations such as jobs in science, engineering and mathematics, as well as in top business and civic positions -- a fact that bothers Arnet and other activists in women's issues.

Arnet said the release of the Pitt study earlier this year has galvanized women and made them take notice of the region's relatively poor performance in promoting women to positions of influence. "We are all aware of the problem ... from the women you run into on the street with kids waiting for the bus to women at the executive level in corporate Pittsburgh," Arnet said.

David Borrebach, a senior compensation consultant with Mercer Human Resource Consulting, said most large companies in Pittsburgh try to make sure their compensation programs provide equal treatment for people doing similar work -- if only to avoid government sanctions or poor publicity in the media.

"Most organizations, most smart organizations, aren't going to rate men and women differently in the same organization with the same job,'' Borrebach said. "They'll get clobbered with a big stick if they do that."

There has been an explosion of information available on rates of pay for jobs ever since the introduction of the personal computer. Borrebach said companies determine pay rates by using that information, along with job and skill evaluations. They also consider education requirements, responsibilities, production results and working conditions.

He acknowledged that jobs traditionally filled by women, such as pre-school education, are valued less in the marketplace than other occupations generally performed by men. But he said those jobs typically pay poorly no matter who holds them. "This society doesn't value pre-school,'' he said.

Some professional women argue that employers, recognizing a strict reading of the law precludes overtly paying less for equal work, are more sophisticated in their discrimination. Women, for example, may not be given equal access to clients, assignments and mentors as men. That can limit their ability to develop deep business relationships, gain experience in shaping upper management policies and obtaining levels of responsibility that command power, influence and higher salaries.

In addition, women often aren't bold enough when it comes to asking for raises and employers aren't going to pay them more if they don't have to, said human resources consultant Holly Maurer-Klein, whose Pittsburgh company, HMK Associates, works with smaller employers that typically employ less than 100.

Women, she said, are more likely than men to put their salary history on an application form. They don't talk about money as much as men do and often are so grateful for flexible hours or other family-friendly arrangements that they don't want to rock the boat by asking for more compensation.

Maurer-Klein advises women to research the going pay rates for the work that they do and to be more aggressive in negotiations, both at the start of a new job and later if they're not making as much as their peers.

"You just go in and say I'm a valued contributor and would like to be paid more money,'' Maurer-Klein said. "Women need to learn to do that more effectively."