Hilary Lips wasn't surprised to learn that government statistics revealed full-time working women last year earned only 80 percent of what their male counterparts made.

As director of the Center for Gender Studies at Radford University in Radford, Va., Ms. Lips said women had gained ground in closing the wage gap as more females enter the work force, but that huge barriers still exist, such as restrictive maternity and family leave policies that hold women back.

"I wouldn't expect the [wage gap] to have moved much," she said. "If a woman wants to have a family she is faced with a very tough set of choices ... and, of course, there are fewer women in the very top positions."

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What women earn

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A report released yesterday from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said the median weekly earnings for women nationwide in 2008 was $638 per week, compared with $798 for men.

In Pennsylvania, women earned a bit more with a median weekly pay of $642, but they still trailed men's wages by 21 percent. Men in the state earned a median weekly pay of $815.

When the government began tracking pay levels for men and women in 1979, women nationwide earned 62 percent of men's wages.

By 2005, women had shrunk the gap to 19 percent with median earnings equal to 81 percent of men's. But since then, the disparity has grown a bit each year with women last year earning only 79.9 percent of men's median pay.

Women in Pennsylvania actually gained ground last year when their pay rose to 78.8 percent of men's, up from 77.4 percent in 2007.

The wage gap was narrowest last year in the District of Columbia, where women earned 92.2 percent of what men did, while the largest gap occurred in Wyoming, where women earned only 67.8 percent of men's wages.

Full-time workers in the report were described as those who work 35 hours a week or more at their principal job.

One of the issues keeping women from reaching men's pay levels is the fact that so many of them work parttime instead of fulltime, said Ms. Lips.

Some of those part-timers may have reduced schedules to better balance family and work, and that contributes to lower pay -- even if those women return to full-time work later, she said.

"Women are still doing most of the child care. Women take themselves out of the work force and don't get that ground back. You can never make up the money you lost or the promotions. When you do go back, there's the complicated problem of a young child or children. Certainly men do more than they used to and contribute, but it falls primarily on women," she said.

Other factors that hurt women's opportunity to earn more, she said, are the predominance of women in clerical jobs and service jobs that historically have paid less and the lack of females in top executive positions that carry hefty salaries.

"When I started studying this issue about 10 years ago, people thought the gap was inevitably closing and we just had to wait. But it really isn't doing that."

Though women's wages continue to trail men's by a significant margin, there could be signs of progress in the Pittsburgh region, said Heather Arnet, executive director of the Women and Girls Foundation, based Downtown.

She cited studies that showed women in and around Pittsburgh five years ago were earning 70 cents for every dollar men earned. So if women statewide last year earned nearly 79 percent of men's wages, "We're starting to see the gap close," she said.

Angela Arrington, director of the women's executive leadership program at Duquesne University, also sees small glimmers of hope based on the response of corporations to her program, which launched in 2007 and provides coaching and mentoring opportunities for women in management positions.

Besides enrolling their female executives in the program, businesses including Westinghouse Electric Co., GlaxoSmithKline, Giant Eagle, EQT, Highmark and the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center allow program participants to use their board rooms for meetings and activities.

"When you look at the 20 percent deficit in earnings, it's still a significant gap compared with the number of women entering the work force," said Ms. Arrington. "But it's slowly, very slowly, narrowing."

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