Women closing the job, wage divide

The recession that began in 2007 accelerated changes that had already begun to reshape the landscape of labor in subtle ways that help women in their quest for earnings equality, while making it tougher for men to remain the family's primary bread winners.

"This has been a male recession more than a female recession," said Wesleyan University economist Joyce Jacobsen.

While the overall U.S. unemployment rate is 9.8 percent, 10 percent of men are jobless, compared with 8.4 of women, reflecting the fact that this recession hit guy-fields like construction and manufacturing harder than gal-industries such as health care and education.

Buttressing this short-term disparity are longer-term trends that favor the purse over the wallet - more women than men are earning the college degrees that should lead to even better-paying jobs in the future. At California State University East Bay, for instance, female graduates now outnumber men 58 to 42 percent.

"This is no country for young men," said Timothy Smeeding, a public policy professor at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who is among a growing legion of social scientists who fret about the fate of working men.

Are women poised to surpass men economically? Feminist economists, who understand the complexities of the situation, are not making predictions.

"We have this little roadblock for women," said Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women's Policy Studies: "We haven't figured out how to get men pregnant."

Her quip highlights the biological edge that favors men in the workplace: Many women take time off work to raise children while men continue to accumulate pay and promotions.

Better-paid fields

Occupational segregation also helps men out-earn women: Men predominate in better-paid fields, such as finance for college grads or construction for blue-collar youth; educated women tend toward less remunerative social services while those with high school skills go into fields like retail.

These two factors - breaks to raise children and occupational segregation - help explain why the median hourly wage for working women nationwide was 81.1 percent of the comparable wage for men in 2009, according to Alissa Anderson of the California Budget Project.