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US workforce stats show women not progressing into management posts

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Women have made little progress in terms of getting into management positions in the US, according to a report to be released today by the Government Accountability Office.

As of 2007, the latest year for which comprehensive data on managers was available, women accounted for about 40 percent of managers in the US workforce. In 2000, the figure was 39 percent. Outside of management, women held 49 percent of the jobs in both years.

Across the work force, the gap between what men and women earn has shrunk over the last few decades.

Full-time women workers closed the gap to 80.2 cents for every dollar earned by men in 2009, up from just 62.3 cents in 1979. Much of this persistent wage gap, however, can be explained by what kinds of jobs men and women do.

Across the industries, the gender gap in managers’ pay narrowed slightly over the last decade, even after adjusting for demographic differences.

Female full-time managers earned 81 cents for every dollar earned by male full-time managers in 2007, compared with 79 cents in 2000.

This varied by industry, with the pay gap being the narrowest in public administration, where female managers earned 87 cents for every dollar paid to male managers.

It was widest in construction and in financial services, where women earned 78 percent of what men were paid after adjustments.

Across the work force, the pay gap was also slightly wider for managers who had children.

So this picture is rather different from the one painted by Hanna Rosin in an article for The Atlantic in July in which she argued that as women are now the majority in the US workforce, we could possibly see “the end of men” (see WVoN story).

Given the enduring pay gap and the difficulty that women have in bagging the top jobs, I think we’re still a long way off that scenario.

Read the full report in the New York Times.

You can also read two comments on the report, the first from a blogpost on the website of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, looking at why women who do get into management often avoid marriage and children in order to get there; and the second from a blog post on the website of News on Women, asking where’s the E-quality?

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