(Blog) For Younger Women, a Smaller Wage Gap

The gender wage gap is much narrower for younger workers, according to a new Labor Department report on women in the work force. Women under 35 who work full time earn around 90 percent of what their male counterparts earn. But women over age 35 earn only about 75 percent as much as their respective male counterparts.  There are many potential explanations for the fact that the gap generally widens with age.  For example, older women may have entered the work force at a time when inequity in pay between the genders was more acceptable. Thus, even though more protections may exist today against outright pay discrimination, older women may have started from a lower salary base and, despite raises, will never catch up.

The different mix of jobs that women versus men go into — which helps explain a large part of the wage gap across the board — may also have changed in recent decades. Unlike in the past, women today claim the majority of college diplomas awarded; perhaps that means that women today are going into higher-skilled (and higher-paying) jobs.

Additionally, women workers at most levels of educational attainmentearn more than their equally educated peers from a generation ago. If you look at the wage gap by age over the last 30 years, however, you will see that older women have almost always had a bigger gap in pay, compared to men their age, than younger women have."