Over the last several months, we have heard many things about how President Barack Obama selected Pittsburgh for the G-20 summit because the transformation of the region from a steel economy to a diversified service and high-tech economy is a model for the world. Many things are cited as having made important contributions to our community's renaissance over the past 25 years. One major factor, however, is overlooked in nearly every account: It was the working women of Pittsburgh who made the transformation possible.

Many of you likely wonder how that is possible. You live here, and what you are more likely to hear about working women in Pittsburgh is all bad: the significant gender wage gap, the lack of women in senior management positions or elected office, how few women manage their own companies or sit on corporate boards.

While those things are certainly true (and it is past time to do something about them), focusing only on these disparities belittles the amazing contributions the women of Pittsburgh have made over the years.

Consider this: In 2004, for the first time, women and men made up an equal percentage of the total Pittsburgh workforce. Since then, the percentage of women in the workforce has exceeded the percentage of men.

This reverses a gender gap that has seems to have always existed in Pittsburgh. As early as 1920, the gap in Pittsburgh for women working in industry was significantly bigger than in other heavily industrialized cities such as Detroit, Buffalo and Cleveland. In 1980, the gap for married women in Pittsburgh was at an all-time high as the steel industry began its sharp decline here. As recently as 1999, the male-female gap in Pittsburgh remained larger than the national average.

One result of the dominance of the steel industry in Pittsburgh was a marked, intentional exclusion of women from the work force. This gender exclusion was not as pronounced in the auto industry in Detroit or in other industries. But now, Pittsburgh women participate in the labor force to a greater degree than women in many similar cities.

How did this remarkable turn-around happen? And what makes Pittsburgh different from comparable cities?

Three things: education, spunk and need.

Because young women were locked out of the primary industrial economy for so long, their middle-class fathers, concerned for their long-term welfare, sent them to school while their brothers headed for jobs in the mills -- jobs that would largely vanish in the coming years. Even before 1928, many more girls in Pittsburgh completed high school than boys.

Young men earned better wages by skipping formal education and heading straight for the mills; for young women, education was considered essential to upward mobility. This pattern continued over time and, as a result, according to the Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly, women in the Pittsburgh area have had higher average levels of education than both men locally and women nationally.

This education typically resulted in jobs in teaching, nursing or clerical/financial services. While these were the few options open to women at the time, professions in these service industries now fall under what we consider three of the primary sectors responsible for our economic revitalization: education, health care and finance.

Also, despite their historic marginalization in labor and industry, the women of Pittsburgh have fiercely protected the livelihoods and economic security of their families. And they repeatedly have defied social convention to do so.

According to noted local historians Maurine Weiner Greenwald and Paul Kraus, there are great stories in the New York newspapers from the 1840s and 1850s describing the Pittsburgh women who participated in local labor disputes. Despite the fact that most could not work in the mills, were paid one half of men's wages when they did and were excluded from joining unions, these women came out with babies on one hip and shotguns on the other to actively take part in labor protests. Described by the newspapers as "boldly aggressive," shouting the "vilest profanity" and jostling Pinkerton Guards with umbrellas, brooms and blackjacks, these courageous women -- who usually spent their days cooking, cleaning and caring for children -- vigorously defended their families' economic rights. A number of these women remained active in the labor movement through the 1930s and beyond, even when doing so required significant personal sacrifice.

Then came the 1980s.

Not since the 1930s had Pittsburghers -- men and women alike -- felt their livelihoods and ways of life in such peril. As the steel mills shuttered, one after another, with no "economic stimulus plan" in place and financial need growing every day, the women of Pittsburgh responded. This time it was not with violence or rhetoric, but in a manner equally as revolutionary at that time. Married and unmarried, working class and middle class, black and white -- the women of Pittsburgh went to work.

A 2003 article in the Pittsburgh Economic Quarterly reported that, according to 2000 Census data, Pittsburgh women were closing the labor force gap. For the first time in history, the labor force participation rate among working-age women in Pittsburgh (25 to 64 years old) was identical to the national rate (69 percent). This figure has been tracked since 1960, when it was just 30.8 percent -- nearly 10 percentage points below the national average of 40.2 percent. This 10-point differential remained stubbornly in place until well after 1980.

Then, in December 2007, researchers at the University of Pittsburgh's Center for Social and Urban Research published their highly regarded and comprehensive report, "Gender Wage Disparity In the Pittsburgh Region: Analyzing Causes and Differences In the Gender Wage Gap." It included this statement:

"Women are singularly responsible for the region regaining its employment and labor-force levels above their peaks prior to the massive job losses of the 1980s ... in fact, total employment and total labor force would reach their all-time peaks in the Pittsburgh region in the late 1990s. This expansion in the local labor force, despite the large structural job loss of the 1980s, was only possible because of the dramatic increase in female labor force participation."

So the next time someone from outside the area compliments you about how far Pittsburgh has come, take a moment and thank your wife, or your mother or your sister -- or the thousands of other women who sacrificed to make it happen. They may not have been presidents or VPs or CEOs, and they probably were paid less than they should have been, but they used their education and did what was necessary to pay the mortgage, put food on the table and get their kids through school. Along the way, they re-created Pittsburgh.

And, if you're one of those spunky Pittsburgh women, the next time you find yourself with some of your sisterhood who are (legitimately) complaining about how far we have to go, stop for a moment and appreciate how far we have come. Having done what we did in the past 25 years, just imagine what we can do in the next 25.