NEW YORK — Women who want to earn more on Wall Street than their male colleagues have one reliable option. They can set up a shoe-shine stand in Lower Manhattan.
NEW YORK — Women who want to earn more on Wall Street than their male colleagues have one reliable option. They can set up a shoe-shine stand in Lower Manhattan.
Female personal care and service workers, which include butlers, valets, house sitters and shoe shiners, earned $1.02 for every $1 their male counterparts made in 2010, according to census data compiled by Bloomberg. That job category, which covers 38,210 full-time workers, was the only one of 265 major occupations where the median female salary exceeded the amount paid to men.
The six jobs with the largest gender gap in pay and at least 10,000 men and 10,000 women were in the Wall Street-heavy financial sector: insurance agents, managers, clerks, securities sales agents, personal advisers and other specialists. Advanced- degree professions proved no better predictors of equality. Female doctors made 63 cents for every $1 earned by male physicians and surgeons, the data show. Female chief executives earned 74 cents for every $1 made by male counterparts.
The Census Bureau figures underscore the lack of financial progress made in the generation since women began leaving the home and moving into the workforce in large numbers. While the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression initially hit women less severely, their median earnings still trailed men in 505 of 525 occupations tracked by the federal government.
“We don’t see the pay gap closing,” Ilene Lang, president and chief executive officer of Catalyst, a New York- based nonprofit advocacy group, said in a telephone interview. “It’s persistent.”
That isn’t to say the gap hasn’t narrowed as full-time female employees are now better educated, less likely to be married and more likely to delay childbirth. All those developments have helped shrink the median-pay disparity for all occupations to 77 cents for every $1 earned by men from 61 cents during the last 50 years, census figures show.
Women made up 57.6 percent of the labor force in the U.S. finance and insurance industries, according to an analysis published this month by Catalyst. Yet females constituted 3.7 percent of Fortune 500 chief executives and 18.3 percent of corporate-board directors, the study showed.
The financial sector pays women in the six major jobs with the biggest salary gap from 55 to 62 cents for every $1 made by men, according to the census. Female bank tellers, with a median salary of $23,695, came closest to narrowing the gap in the industry, pulling down 96 cents for every $1 earned.
One reason female professionals make less money in the financial sector is that they tend to wind up in lower-paying positions such as in public finance rather than on trading desks, said Louise Marie Roth, a University of Arizona sociologist and author of “Selling Women Short: Gender and Money on Wall Street.”
Women often simply don’t know how much they’re being underpaid because a large percentage of Wall Street salaries are based on bonuses that are kept secret, she said.
“A lot of people talk about Wall Street being a meritocracy,” Roth said. “But it’s not always true.”
Among occupations requiring advanced degrees, female lawyers, who reported annual median earnings of $97,964, made 78 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. Female university professors, with a median salary of $55,292, earned 80 cents for every dollar. They suffer professionally when they take time off to provide care for children, aging parents or both, said John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors.
The percentage of full-time female university professors has grown to 28 percent from 10 percent in 1981, according to an April study by Curtis. Women made up 57 percent of undergraduate students and 59 percent of graduate students in 2009, the association reported.
The organization has tracked pay disparity for three decades now. “The gap really hasn’t budged,” Curtis said.
Many women are happy to trade travel-heavy, intense jobs at major law offices for those that offer a higher quality of life, said Mary Cranston, a retired senior partner and former chairman at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman in San Francisco. High- end law firms offering large salaries are still predominantly male.
“That’s changing gradually, but it’s a long, slow road,” Cranston said. “I don’t know when pay equality will happen.”