The change started gradually. After all, the last decade has been all about prosperity-related excess. The remaining dreariness of the recession-tinged early 90s was drowned out by the sparkly pop saturated landscape where the women were doing it for themselves. At first, women were still adjusting to our increased financial power. We had little money, but it was still easier if we had someone else footing the bill - or at least paying back what they owed.

Then came the early 00s, with women expecting to be high earners. "The Opt-Out Revolution" was published in 2003, chronicling the lives of women who had so much money, they had started to turn away from the workforce. While most of us weren't in that position, times were still good enough to start declaring financial independence from that guy (or special lady, for the lezebels in the house) we asked to pay the bills in the first place.

Then came Recession 2.0, launching an all out assault on our jobs and lines of credit. Unemployment began to hit record highs, with many states hovering close to the 10% unemployment mark. In the midst of this chaos, some interesting statistics began to emerge, around wages and compensation:

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the wages of the median woman — at the statistical middle — rose 3.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, while the wages of the median man rose only 2 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The Journal noted that the typical full-time female worker earned $657 a week in the third quarter, while the typical man earned $812 a week. However, men are still more likely to be unemployed — the BLS data showed that male jobless rate is 11 percent while for women it was 8.4 percent.

"This is a situation where everyone's losing but men are losing more, and that's not really a victory for women," Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute told the newspaper.

However, the "everyone's losing" idea is a bit misleading. One, since women's salaries are historically lower than men's salaries, our small net gains aren't much to celebrate. Two, income disparities follow both racial and gender lines, and having those breakdowns paint a more dramatic picture of what is being lost and gained:

Asian men fared worse than other men, but the median weekly wage for Asian men and women was $877 in the third quarter — higher than any other ethnic group. Whites were next at $753, then blacks at $607 and Hispanics at $527. The median pay of Asian men declined 4.1% between the third quarter of 2007, just before the recession began, and the third quarter of 2009. The typical black man saw his wages fall 2.8%.

The recession began in December 2007 and most economists believe it ended this past summer. Women's wages have long lagged behind men's, but minority women did much better than their male counterparts during the recession.

Over the past two years, the wages of the typical black male full-time worker fell, but wages rose 7.3% for black women. Among Hispanics, the median male wage rose 0.4% over the past two years, but the median female wage rose 5.5%.

Wages of white and Asian women didn't rise as much as those of other women; the median increased 2.4% and 1.8%, respectively, over the past two years. White males were slightly better off: Their wages rose 2.8%. It was the only ethnic group in which men's wages rose more during the recession than women's; white women's wages rose 2.4%.

And, once again, an increase is beneficial, but starts to feel futile when one looks at the starting points.

Still, the revelation that many women have assumed the role of breadwinner, or are out-earning their male counterparts, has resulted in a lot of speculation about the impacts of economic realities on gender roles. Much of the focus has resulted in looking at how women and men are coping to major lifestyle changes:

Beth Klingensmith, who lives in Colorado Springs, Colo., said it was hard enough to have to alter their financial plans after her husband lost her job. Now she worries about losing her own job because of the nation's economic woes. Already, she's been asked to take some furlough days as the state copes with budget constraints.

"We're doing OK, but there's absolutely no safety net,'" she said. "If something happens to my job, I cannot imagine."

Her husband, Jim, 49, is hopeful that his custom-made golf club business will take off soon, allowing him to contribute more toward the couple's bills. He said that in many ways he likes his new career more than the physically taxing work of running a printing press, but he admits he's struggled somewhat with the changed circumstances.

"We're Christians, so for me to not be the breadwinner … it's not the easiest thing," he said.

With all the upheaval with the recession and with housing, is it any wonder that people are spending their days applying for jobs, managing budgets, and nursing wounded egos?

The Opt-Out Revolution [NY Times]
State Unemployment Keeps Rising; Three Hit Record Highs [CNBC]
Women's wages rising faster than men's [UPI]
Women's Wages Outpaced Men's During Recession [WSJ]
The Wage Gap, by Gender and Race [Infoplease]
Rising number of women earn more than mates [MSNBC]

Belkin begins by pointing out an uncomfortable truth:

[I]t is also unsettling to face the fact that so much of the history of women in the workplace (both their leaps forward and their slips back) is a reaction to what was happening to men.

That was the case in the 1930s, when working women were dismissed so that they didn't take jobs from able-bodied males with families to support. During the 1940s women were invited back in, a replacement work force when the men went to war. By the 1950s and into the '60s women lost their higher-paying blue-collar jobs and took lower-paying ones in the expanding retail and service sectors or returned home; in the 1970s the most ambitious among them rebelled - a period when women truly commandeered the train and drove it forward, often sacrificing dreams of children to get ahead. By the 1980s mothers worked because of the growing feeling that households needed two incomes, and the realization dawned that the workplace was designed to fit the life of a man with a wife at home rather than a woman juggling work and family.

As times have progressed, women have made modest gains in the workplace, but true equality still eludes us. Issues like equal pay, adequate child care, and the penalty for opting out of the workforce to raise a family still plague workers, but have also acted as a somewhat unwelcome benefit:

Primarily, women are still cheaper. They earn 77 cents to every dollar earned by a man, and in a flailing economy employers see that as an attractive quality. Women who are returning to the work force after several years at home raising children are particularly cheap. Sylvia Ann Hewlett, an economist and the founder of the Center for Work-Life Policy, has estimated that the penalty is 10 percent of income for every two years out of the job market, a loss that is never recouped. From the hiring side of the table, that may be a good bargain.

In addition, women are concentrated in lower-paying industries, like health care and education, where there have been fewer layoffs, rather than in higher-paying realms, like finance, construction and manufacturing, which have contracted. Why this is true has long been an economic chicken-and-egg question - are these professions less lucrative and prestigious because they are predominantly held by women, or are they predominantly held by women because men are less likely to take them given their lower pay and status? But whatever the cause, the end result is that the "female" professions have not suffered as much this past year.

In addition to the fact that women workers are seen as cheaper, we're also apparently big on commitment:

When choosing among overqualified applicants for a position, employers often seem more comfortable hiring a woman for a step-down job. Ellen Galinsky, president and co-founder of the Families and Work Institute, says women might be seen as less resentful about taking a job with less money and authority, and they might also be less likely to bolt if something better comes along. Especially "if a woman is coming back to work and has had difficulty finding a job, the assumption is she is going to be more grateful than the man," she says.

But David Zinzecko's concept of the he-cession is still a ways off the mark - according to studies, successful, high earning women are being laid off at the same rates as men.

As Belkin concludes:

It is not good news when women surpass men because women are worth less. Perversely, real progress might come when we reach the place where a financial wallop means women lose as much ground as men.

The New Gender Gap [New York Times]

Earlier:
"Breadwinner Wives" Are Still Losing

The new Forbes list is actually called "World's Most Powerful Women," but it puts the cards on the table in the first two paragraphs:

Forbes' Power Women list isn't about celebrity or popularity; it's about influence. Queen Rania of Jordan (No. 75), for instance, is perhaps the most listened-to woman in the Middle East; her Twitter feed has 600,000 followers.

In assembling the list, Forbes looked for women who run countries, big companies or influential nonprofits. Their rankings are a combination of two scores: visibility—by press mentions—and the size of the organization or country these women lead.

Interesting. In almost every other list, power is measured in dollars and cents. Yet, when it comes to women, the financial component is glossed over entirely.

The women selected are certainly interesting - Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, heads the list for the fourth consecutive year, and Queen Raina of Jordan (above) was given special acknowledgment for her social media savvy. Other high profile women like Sonia Sotomayor and Michelle Obama are also given nods on the list. And certainly, there are things in this world more important than someone's financial status. But Forbes exists to disclose numbers, so the omission nagged at me the entire article.

Joan Smith, writing for the Guardian's Comment is Free, argues that the list still places money as the top indicator of success:

Indeed, what's striking about the Forbes top ten is its reverence for money. Ten women holding the title of prime minister, chancellor or president make it into the top 100, but Merkel is the sole politician in the top ten. The list has been published only for the last six years, so it's impossible to know what it would have looked like 25 years ago, but it's hard to imagine Margaret Thatcher and Indira Gandhi being overlooked in favour of Irene Rosenfeld, chief executive of Kraft Foods. I'm sure Rosenfeld is a big player in the business world, but is she really the sixth most powerful woman in the world? More influential, better-known and more of a role model than J K Rowling? [...]

At first sight, the Forbes list looks like bad news for women who aspire to other forms of power: cultural, social and political. But what it really tells us isn't about powerful women but how power itself is perceived in a country where commerce trumps everything else. Despite the recession, and whether you're male or female, the US remains a country where money talks louder than anything else.

But I disagree. What is striking to me about the list is how the amount of wealth or assets controlled was not counted with the women on the list - and that reveals more about the wage and wealth gaps between men and women than Forbes may care to admit.

What would it look like if the headlines about the Forbes list blared something like "World's Wealthiest Women is Six Billion Dollars Short of Last Ranked Wealthiest Man?" instead of focusing on who was ranked?

And I don't think my theory is too far off. Take another feature on the Forbes site, "The Top Earning Jobs for Women." I started browsing the slide show, and noticed and interesting little statistic bundled in with the standard job facts: percentage of men's earnings.

As explained in the article:

An unlikely No. 1 emerged. Much to our surprise, pharmacy topped the list, where women pharmacists earn a median wage of $1,647 per week or about $86,000 a year. Women currently account for slightly less than half of all pharmacists in the U.S. and earn about 85% as much as their male colleagues. It's a much smaller pay gap than that of medical doctors, however, where women make 59% as much as men. And pharmacy requires less education.

Ouch.

And female executives illustrate the classic percentage of the wage gap:

The only job where women were compensated on par with men is Speech-language Pathologists.

So it should come as no surprise that the wage gap costs women anywhere from $700,000 to $2 million over the course of their working life.

So how do we start fighting the wage gap? Perhaps we can begin by asking Forbes and other publications marketing sections aimed at women in the workplace to write articles about this issue, and to stop filling their sections with ladymag knockoff articles like these:

Lists [Forbes]
The World's Billionaires [Forbes]
Top Earning CEO's [Forbes]
Top-Earning Dead Celebrities [Forbes]
World's Most Powerful Women [Forbes]
What Forbes reveals about women and power [Guardian]
Top-Paying Jobs For Women [Forbes]
Fighting the Wage Gap [Women Work]

Ex (let's call him Marc) had a conversation with another lifeguard, Ally. Now, he and Ally had started at the same time, with the same rate of pay - a flat $7.00 per hour. Over the years, they had consistently taken the same exams and the same accreditation, both ultimately obtaining their pool operator's license. One day, Ally complained to Marc about her low rate of pay. After being with the same company for close to five years, she was still making only nine dollars an hour.

Marc was dumbfounded. He was making $13.00 an hour. He ended up coaching Ally on how to forcefully ask for a pay raise (flash credentials, threaten to leave, cite a competing companies offer) and she renegotiated up to $11.00 an hour. He concluded that women just weren't forceful enough when asking for money.

"You all are too nice," he groused, "you need to learn to ask for what you want."

But are all asks considered equal?

Over at Broadsheet, Tracy Clark-Flory spells out the tricky road women walk when negotiating for pay.

The same explanation for the gender pay gap has been put on exhibit, again and again: Women aren't as aggressive as men are about asking for raises. But, according to a new study, the reason may not be so much that women don't know how to haggle as it is that they perceive consequences to being seen as the not-so-nice girl.[...]

Oh, and there are consequences.

[I]n a related study, the researchers asked 285 volunteers to evaluate videos of job applicants either asking for higher pay or agreeing to the offered salary. "Men tended to rule against women who negotiated but were less likely to penalize men; women tended to penalize both men and women who negotiated, and preferred applicants who did not ask for more," reports the Washington Post.

While much is often made of how women never ask for more money (which also stems from societal conditioning), less is made of the social penalties facing a woman who has decided to step outside of what is acceptable and have the nerve to request the amount that she is worth. I can remember my first few encounters with negotiations, and how differently the process went with bosses who were invested in my development as a person as well as an employee and how it went with bosses who were ultimately more concerned with their bottom line.

By the time I got my first salaried job, I thought I was pretty skilled in negotiation. I routinely made counter-offers to my job offers and generally received a pay upgrade. I was realistic in evaluating my strengths and what I could bring to an employer. And I was good at surveying and understanding the market I work in (after all, one of my former gigs was in market research).

However, what I was not prepared for was irrationality from employers. How you could do everything "right" - have a solid work history, be a team player, work up to a performance review, prepare a lot of documents on your own behalf, make an offer that is in keeping with your production and market value - and still receive push back about a promotion or a raise.

So, I learned a couple things about negotiating at work.

The first one, I notice, is in a lot of the career advice for men, but not in the career advice for women guides.* It's the simplest thing in the world - be prepared to walk. Sometimes we aren't in the position to walk. And I understand that. But sometimes, it's the only way to signal to an employer that you are serious. At my first salary position, there came a point in time when I was managing $1.7 million dollars worth of business partnerships. My employer paid me less than 30K. So, I buckled down, redoubled my efforts, made sure my partner recommendations were glowing, made sure that I upped my productivity time, and came into the performance review prepared.

Still nothing. The company had the money to pay me, and chose not to, saying that they could only give me an extra $500 bonus. The worst thing about it? I had only asked for an additional $3,000 a year. I started looking for a new gig, quit the job, got a new one paying me an additional $4,000 and through that job, landed the next gig that both doubled my salary and thrust me into the world of self-employment.

So, in sum, if there is any way possible you can leave once your company indicates they are unwilling to negotiate, do so.

The second one is to try to have as much negotiation leverage as you can when making this decision. Ally walked in with the knowledge of Marc's salary and was able to negotiate a much higher raise than the initial fifty cents an hour offered to her. And I made the decision to quit the job I did armed with information about what other departments in my organization were paying their employees. It quickly became clear that our department was eating the salary increases for all the other departments - the next lowest paid employee was another 10K ahead of me, the highest paid person in my department. And the best way to gain information isn't using websites like Salary.com (though they can be helpful if you are trying to switch industries) but actually talking to people, and earning enough trust where they are willing to have the ever awkward "what I make" conversation with you.

However, these two tips are not fool-proof. As comfortable as a I am with negotiating, there are still many times when I crash and burn or have to walk to make a point about what I am worth. But in order to have intelligent conversations about women in business and the wage gap, I think we need to have a more honest conversation about what we are up against.

*I'll take a deeper look at those later this week.

The Costs of Asking for a Higher Salary [Broadsheet]
Salary, Gender, and the Cost of Haggling [Washington Post]

This isn't the first time some bullshit right-winger pulled this Communist theory out of their ass. So, a few thoughts.

• Tucker Carlson and all the rest of these assholes are avowed free-marketeers and capitalists. Many of them have opposed health care reform for more than a decade, in part because they don't want to see doctors be able to successfully monetize their educations. That is, of course, unless those doctors are performing abortions, in which case they should be poor.
• Most people who've studied economics understand the theory of supply and demand: when supply goes down and demand remains the same, prices go up. Anti-abortion activists have spent more than 35 years trying to drive abortion practices out of business through extra-legal harassment, intimidation, murder, assault, over-regulation (again, exposing the limits of their love of a free market) and attempted bans on abortion providers and abortion clinics. If abortion providers are getting rich off of their practices — and they've got no evidence other than Tiller's profits, which he had to plow back into providing security for himself, his employees and his patients — they've got no one to blame but themselves.
• The whole stupid concept rests on the idea that since Carlson and his ilk think abortion is immoral, the people who think they're providing a legitimate, necessary and legal medical service for women have no right to make money. I don't think Tucker Carlson would like to be on the receiving end of a national debate over how much money he should be compensated for spewing conservative bullshit and amoral hot air from his piehole.

Now, mind you, Tucker Carlson's compensation for being a conservative talking head isn't a matter of public record, but let's guess he easily makes over $150,000 a year (and likely much, much more) for his work. Technically speaking, then, Tucker Carlson, while appearing on Fox News yesterday as a compensated contributor, just made money off of abortion. And he's not the only one.

While Operation Rescue's non-profit status was revoked by the IRS in 2006 for illegal political activities, it meant that its donors couldn't legally take a tax deduction for their donations — though its website helpfully promises confidential "advice" about nonetheless making suchdonations. What this means is that, unlike much of its competition, it don't have to disclose how much money they pay their directors or staff. But if it's anything like its competition on the right, it's pretty substantial.

Take Focus on the Family, headquartered in Colorado Springs (median household income: $51,227). its employees do pretty well for themselves — hell, you might say that they're "enriching" themselves by advocating abortion. For instance, the organization's president, James Daly, is paid $240,000 per year by its political action arm (which allows it to lobby). Its CFO, Wade Crow, makes $136,000 and Senior Vice President Thomas Minnery makes $150,000. From the strict non-profit side, Senior VP Bufford Tackett pulls in $180,000 every year; COO Glenn Williams $172,000, and 10 other senior VPs make between $120,000 and $147,000. Its 5 highest paid employees that aren't considered officers make between $116,000 and $137,000. That means Focus on the Family has at least 20 employees who make more than $100,000 every year.

Over at the Family Research Council in DC, its President, Anthony Perkins, makes more than $200,000 each year, while its Executive Vice President Chuck Donovan makes $175,000 and its VP of Administration, Paul Tripodi, makes $125,000. Its top 5 employees who aren't officers pull down between $117,000 and $138,000, given them at least 8 employees that make more than double the median household income in the United States today — and that's not including the former board member their political arm continues to shell out more than $100,000 a year to.

In a shining example of the wage gap, the American Life League only pays its President, Judith Brown, $127,000 each year. Her husband, like Todd Palin, is the uncompensated EVP, and no other director makes over $100,000 — but 3 of its top 5 employees do. David O'Steen, Executive Direction of the National Right to Life Committee, and his second-in-command Darla St. Martin both make over $100,000, though they don't pay O'Steen's mother, who serves on the Board.

More amusing is the compensation structure over at the Concerned Women of America, where Board Chairwoman Barbara LeHaye's son, Lee, serves as CFO and makes $115,000, and President Wendy Wright makes $121,000. Barbara LeHaye is the only compensated Board member, pulling in $26,000 herself. But the male Executive Director George Tryfiates, makes $129,000 and the male Director of Development pulls in a cool $135,000 each year ( i.e., more than the female President). In fact, of the top 5 employees outside of the directors, only one is a woman — and she makes under $100,000. No wonder the wage gap isn't on its agenda.

This, by the way, is just a sampling of the people (and the ways) that anti-abortion advocates enrich themselves while serving God's supposed will. Conversely, the mean annual wage for all obstetricians and gynecologists is about $200,000 — and most of those people don't have to hire armed body guards and buy bulletproof vests and armor their cars to go to work. So, maybe people like Tucker Carlson ought to stop getting paid for flapping their lips about how doctors have the audacity, in a capitalist society, to make money for providing a legal and demanded medical service, or stop bitching about how other people make their money doing things they disagrees with.

Tucker Carlson Decries Doctors Who "Get Rich Performing Abortions" [Huffington Post]
Focus on the Family 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Focus on the Family Action 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Family Research Council 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Family Research Council Action 990 2008 [GuideStar]
American Life League 990 2008 [GuideStar]
National Right to Life Committee 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Concerned Women for America 990 2008 [GuideStar]
Occupational Employment and Wages, May 2008: 29-1064 Obstetricians and Gynecologists [Bureau of Labor Statistics]

Related: Video of Jon Stewart's Epic Takedown of Crossfire [About.com]
Operation Rescue [RH Reality Check]
Donate [Operation Rescue]
Colorado Springs, Colorado [US Census]
Undermining Women's Choices [Concerned Women For America]

Earlier: How The Anti-Abortion Movement Demonized George Tiller

But, first to the naysayers, courtesy of the Associated Press:

At Bench Warmers Bar and Grill in the southeast Kansas farming town of Chanute, owner Cathy Matney has decided to let some of her dishwashers go rather than pay all 22 of her employees more.

"It's bad timing," said Matney, whose waitresses and cooks will have to pitch in with scrubbing pots and pans. "With the economy like this, there's a lot of people who are out of work and this is only going to add to it."

What the AP fails to fact-check here is that Matney's waitstaff likely only makes the federal minimum $2.13 cents an hour for tip-driven jobs, a rate which is actually not going up. So Matney can tell her staff (and the word) that it's the government's fault, but the fact of the matter is that she's not going to be paying "all" her employees more and won't be required to. Whoops.

The AP's next example isn't exactly any better.

Ryan Arfmann, who owns a Jamba Juice shop in Idaho Falls, Idaho, will be cutting hours to his staff, which is made up largely of college students, high schoolers and homemakers who want to make a few bucks.

"Am I going to fire anybody, no," Arfmann said. "But kids understand there's going to be hours cut."

Arfmann said he wishes the increase was spread out over a few more years, to make it easier for him to absorb the costs.

So, basically, Arfmann's employees — many of whom aren't solely reliant on the income, might lose a few hours here and there, but no one's getting fired? Well, that's a good reason to delay a wage increase for the Americans who are dependent on the income. And what does the AP forget to fact check here? It turns out that, in fact, the minimum wage increase was spread out over the course of the last 2 years.

The other examples aren't any better: they quote two people who worry that they might get fired, what with all the right-wing propaganda out there that they will be fired. It isn't until the end that the piece bothers to mention that if people have more money to spend because their wages go up, they'll be able to buy things they can't yet, and even that assertion is met with skepticism by the right-leaning economics approvingly cited in the article.

Tsedeye Gebreselassie and Paul Sonn, writing for The American Prospect, pick up that argument where the AP leaves off.

Minimum-wage increases go directly to those workers who will spend it immediately on basic necessities like food, gas, rent, and clothing. Economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago have shown that minimum-wage increases boost consumer spending substantially more than tax cuts do, and the Economic Policy Institute estimates that the July minimum-wage increase will generate $5.5 billion in spending over the next year. A strong minimum wage is therefore key to boosting consumer demand and shifting our economy back to one that is built on good jobs rather than on consumer debt.

You know, it's kind of the trickle-up theory: if you give consumers money to spend, they tend to spend it, leading to more demand for goods and services, allowing businesses to hire more people, which gives those people money to spend, increasing demands for goods and services. It's just instead of giving it to the rich through tax cuts (or the banks through bail-out money, since we all know how well that's gone) and hoping it trickles down, you make sure it's given to the people you want to have it in the first place.

Gebreselassie and Sonn also note the positive effects that the minimum wage increase will have on female workers, who make up a significant component of those earning minimum wage (and, since they comprise less of the recessionary layoffs, a less significant component of those who will be affected by stimulus spending).

But while unemployment is lower for women, so are their wages. That's why this month's boost in the federal minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour couldn't come at a better time, especially because the overwhelming majority of minimum-wage earners are adult women, many of whom support children.

The minimum wage effectively sets pay scales for jobs like home health aides, child-care workers, waitresses, retail clerks, and janitors — in which millions of women today spend their career. The decline in the real value of the minimum wage over the past 40 years has dragged down pay in these sectors, which are some of the fastest-growing sources of jobs in the 21st-century economy. The upcoming increase, while modest, will help slow falling living standards for this deserving work force.

In other words, it's a more positive way to further narrow the ongoing gender gap in wages than simply seeing men driven out of work by the economy in disproportionate numbers.

The authors also note, unlike the AP, that the absence of an increase in the tipped-earner minimum will disproportionately affect women, too:

For tipped workers like waitresses and nail salon workers — a group that is overwhelmingly female — the situation is even worse. For them, the federal minimum wage is a shockingly low $2.13 an hour. And under another outdated exemption, workers in the fast-growing home-health-care industry, in which millions of women tend to the most vulnerable in our society — seniors, persons with disabilities, and the ill — are not guaranteed any minimum wage at all.

Recession or not, for some women, wage reforms still have a way to go.

Minimum Wage Hike Raises Recession Fears [Associated Press]
Women And The Minimum Wage [The American Prospect]

Related: Federal Minimum Wage Will Increase To $7.25 On July 24 [US Department of Labor]

(By the way, women have to work further into the year to make up the wage gap than they do to pay their taxes.)

The federal government reports that it is doing a decent job eliminating the gender gap within government — although, despite all the bureaucracy and job descriptions and computerized hiring processes, there is still an 11 percent difference between men's and women's salaries there. That gap isn't only attributable to it being an average, either.

All but 7 cents of the gap can be accounted for by differences in measurable factors, such as differences in education levels and the type of jobs men and women had, the report said. The gap narrowed the more men and women shared characteristics, including the jobs held, levels of experience and education.

The GAO said factors such as work experience outside government and discrimination may account for some or all of the remaining gap.

Another way to say that would be that one-third of the gap is attributable to reasonable differences between men and women (which is what conservatives mean when they say the wage gap is due to "choices") and two-thirds of it is attributable to unreasonable factors, like discrimination.

That is actually not unlike the situation in the rest of society - conservative caterwauling about women's choices aside. According to a new study by the American Association of University Women, the pay gap exists even when all other factors are equal.

When U.S. women's annual incomes were averaged, it came out to $34,400 compared with $44,300 for men. Over four decades that average $9,900 gap can mean anywhere between $500,000 and $1 million in lost income for an individual woman.

Women in some highly paid professions—such as law—stand to lose $2 million or more in full-time careers.

Unsurprisingly, women of color are affected the worst.

The study also took a look at demographics, finding that women earn 78 cents for every dollar earned by a white male worker, the highest-paid group in the work force.

The income disparity widens for minority women, with African American women earning 67 cents on the white male dollar and Hispanic women getting only 58 cents.

So, yeah, "celebrate" is probably the wrong word. "Acknowledge" — and "work to improve" — might be better.

Equal Pay Day [National Committee on Pay Equity]
Government's Gender Pay Gap Shrinking [CBS News]
Wage Gap Study Arrives in Time for Equal Pay Day [Women's eNews]

Related: America Celebrates Tax Freedom Day [Tax Foundation]

It's not that education is a bad place to start — studies all show that the average college-educated person of whatever race and gender makes more than the high-school graduate of the same race and gender. No one is suggesting otherwise. But the case can and should be made — National Black MBA Association meetings aside — that trying to fix the problems that are causing the wage gap can't stop there. Studies show that lip service and diversity-recruitment initiatives aside, race and racial stereotypes still feed into hiring decisions — to the detriment of women of color and to, frankly, companies themselves, many of which could probably use fewer yes-men and more people with a diversity of thought and experience from whom to draw ideas.

Women of color, naturally, face a more than a double whammy as studies show that they don't do as well as either white women or men of color in getting jobs or getting equal pay. This comes even as 44 percent of black households have a woman and the main breadwinner. Black women's median pay only increased by 22 percent between 1975 and 2000, while white women saw an increase of 32 percent. Race and gender seemingly play off each other to a point where women of color aren't merely as disadvantaged as women or as men of color, they're more disadvantaged than either grouping regardless of education achievement, which is a hard pill to swallow in a country that promises equality of opportunity.

So, what to do? Few of the authors of these pieces offer any concrete answers given that the reasons the wage gap persists are so varied. But maybe, as Bill Clinton said on The View this morning, the first step really is to acknowledge not how far we've come but how far we have left to go. As these studies indicate, that's quite a way.

Women of Color [The American Prospect]
Understanding the Black-White Earnings Gap [The American Prospect]
Black Women: The Unfinished Agenda [The American Prospect]
McCain Dismisses Equal Pay Legislation, Says Women Need More 'Training And Education.' [Think Progress]
Less Notorious BIG, More PhDs [The Guardian]

The study, published in the Journal of Applied Psychology, found that men who said they believe in more traditional gender roles earned $11,930 more per year than men with more modern views. Women who held more traditional views made an average of $1,500 less than women with more equal views. Researchers came to this conclusion after analyzing data collected by a Labor Department survey that has tracked the changing attitudes of 12,000 people since 1979. Participants were polled four times from their late teens on and asked questions such as whether they believe a woman' place is in the home, or whether the employment of women is likely to lead to higher rates of juvenile delinquency.

Critics of the gender-gap theory usually say that the difference between what men and women earn is due to men choosing higher paying professions in law or business while more women go into education or social work...or men working longer hours. But researchers say their conclusions in this study were based on men and women with similar jobs, education, and hours per week.

Though the study was designed to prove a link between gender attitudes and pay, not to explain why or how those attitudes come about, researchers have suggested two possible explanations: Men with traditional beliefs may negotiate harder for pay raises, and/or employers may discriminate against employees who see gender roles more equally. The good news is that if this study is correct that the wage gap is partly a result of attitudes about gender roles, as more Americans adopt more progressive attitudes about women in the workplace, the differences in income may disappear.

Study: Traditional Men Earn the Most [MSNBC]
Men With Sexist Views Earn More [BBC]

• NYU has received a $490k grant from the National Science Foundation to promote women and minorities in the sciences. • The Iranian government is looking to decrease elective Cesareans (which make up 40% of births) by educating women and doctors about the benefits and risks of natural births. • In 2005, nearly 4,000 women were treated in a NYC emergency room for injuries inflicted by their partners. • Diet tricks: eat food naked, take pictures of what you're eating, brush your teeth when you are hungry, or wear tight clothes! Basically, try everything but eating healthier, whole foods. • As more women join the field of urology, the culture of the medical field is undergoing a gender makeover that is friendlier and more welcoming to women. • Female condom-makers in India aim market their condoms to female sex-workers through NGOs at a lower cost. • A study in South Africa reveals that over 1 in 4 South African men who have been married or have lived with their partner reported using violence against their current or former female partner. • Cosmopolitan is teaming up with YouTube for StarLaunch, a contest encouraging YouTube female singers to post videos of themselves and win a chance to share the stage with Solange Knowles. Squee! • A luxury boutique hotel in Singapore has set aside a whole floor (5 suites) that are strictly for women only, giving female travelers not traveling with men feel "a sense of peace." • An Australian woman has set up a website to track down a man who viciously beat her outside of a casino. • A new test for a protein called P16INK4A is more effective at catching pre-cancerous cells in women who might have cervical cancer than a normal pap smear. • Women earn roughly two-thirds of the average male income in Brazil in 2006 while blacks earn about half of what whites make.

• A study of the gynecological screening tests for cervical cancer in Sweden has found that immigrants from Norway, Denmark, and Central America are more likely to develop cervical cancer than Swedish nationals. • Germany has the largest wage gap between men and women in Western Europe, which is due in part to maternity leave and shortened hours for working moms and outright gender discrimination.• In related news: New laws in England that would extend maternity leave benefits to a full year and allow parents to demand flexible working hours have some "employment lawyers" worrying that employers will stop hiring women altogether. • Louise Glueck, former U.S. poet laureate, has been awarded the Wallace Stevens Award for "outstanding and proven mastery of the art of poetry." • Women's activists in Iran enjoyed a victory on Monday when Iran's parliament decided to shelve a proposed law that would allow husbands to take multiple wives without permission from their first spouse. • The victory was brief, however, as four Iranian women's activists were imprisoned on Tuesday for contributing to banned women's websites. • Darlene Harris, a police officer in Atlanta, tells the story of how she discovered at the age of 35 that she is an "intersexed" person, or someone whose internal or external sexual anatomy don't fit the typical definitions of female or male. •

Motherhood is part of the reason there's a pay gap, of course. TUC General Secretary Brendan Barber says women are "paying an unacceptable penalty simply for having children." And guess what? It's hard to have a kid without the involvement of a man at some point. Men want women who make less, then the women suffer financially when they become mothers.

In a recent issue of Star, the celeb tabloid put together a list of couples where the breadwinning lady is the one bringing in more dough: Gwen and Gavin, Katherine Heigl and Josh Kelly, Drew Barrymore and Justin Long, Julia Roberts and Danny Moder, Courteney Cox and David Arquette, Madonna and Guy Ritchie, Halle Berry and Gabriel Aubrey, Christina Aguilera and Jordan Bratman. But when we posted a story called "Dudes Don't Mind If A Lady Brings Home The Bacon," one commenter wrote, "Am I the ONLY one who would feel weird earning more than my boyfriend?" Around here? In an informal poll of the ladies working for this site? Yes.

In this day and age, what sense does it make? What about your worth? Let's say you make less than your man and then you get promoted. Would you turn down the cash to keep things less "weird"? Does having a larger salary make a man "manlier"? What if he lost his job? Or suddenly had a medical issue insurance wouldn't cover? What if he dies and the will is contested and you're left raising his kid(s)? Isn't modern marriage a partnership, where each party does the best he or she can? And if that means the woman brings in more money, shouldn't that be fucking awesome?

Blue Eyes And Low Salary Make Perfect Woman [Telegraph]
Motherhood 'Affects Women's Pay' [BBC News]
TUC Attacks Motherhood Penalty In The Workplace, Women Get Paid 16% Less Than Men On Avg — Report [Guardian]

Earlier: Dudes Don't Mind If A Lady Brings Home The Bacon