"Mass. lags on pay for women in the US; Disparity with men among highest" by Sarah Schweitzer | Globe Staff, December 10, 2012
Despite Massachusetts’ historic leadership on pay equity — in 1945 it became the first state to require equal pay for comparable work — the gap between men’s and women’s salaries here is now among the biggest in the country.
Women earned 77 percent of what men took home in median full-time pay, placing Massachusetts 37th among states and the District of Columbia, according to 2011 US Census Bureau data analyzed by the American Association of University Women.
That puts Massachusetts behind every other New England state, according to the analysis. The disparity exists despite a highly educated female workforce in the Bay State.
“We are a progressive state and we do all these progressive things,” said Ellie Adair, director of the Massachusetts chapter of the National Organization for Women. “But we are still victim to the same social and cultural forces as everyone else in the country.”
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Critics charge that much of the wage gap in Massachusetts and nationally owes largely to women’s choices — to become mothers and to work in less remunerative fields, such as nursing or teaching.
In Massachusetts, more women delay motherhood until later in life, meaning that more women delay time off from the workplace as well as transition into jobs with greater flexibility — factors that can imbalance men and women’s pay.
A greater percentage of Massachusetts women, also, earn bachelor’s and graduate degrees than women nationwide, an accomplishment that leads to higher-paid jobs and which long was assumed to be a step on the ladder to commensurate pay with men.
“There was a belief in the 1980s that if you dressed for success, that would work,” said Victoria Budson, chair of the Massachusetts Commission on the Status of Women “In the 1990s education was supposed to be the great equalizer.”
Evidence now shows that higher levels of education can make the pay gap more extreme....
Specialists also note that at the higher end of the pay scale, wages are rarely hourly or union-negotiated, thus women are less likely to know what male counterparts earn. In turn, they are less likely to know they earn less and less likely to advocate for more pay....
The wage gap has narrowed markedly since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963 making it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who do substantially the same work. That year, women working full time made 59 cents for every dollar paid to men.
But stalled progress in the last decade has prompted renewed legislative pushes....
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Related: Mass. boardrooms opening to women, slowly
Also see: Misogynist Massachusetts
No other way to describe it.
