The New York Times, December 31, 2004, Friday

Copyright 2004 The New York Times Company
The New York Times

December 31, 2004 Friday
Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section C; Column 2; Business/Financial Desk; Pg. 1

HEADLINE: Gaining Ground on the Wage Front

BYLINE: By LOUIS UCHITELLE

BODY:
Ever since the 2001 recession sent the economy into a prolonged period of weak hiring, hundreds of thousands of men and women have gone through some variation of Tom and Marie DeSisto's experience.
Concerned that he might be laid off as Verizon cut staff, Mr. DeSisto, 54, accepted an early retirement package, giving up a manager's salary of more than $100,000 a year. Now he earns half that as a high school math teacher in Waltham, Mass., while Mrs. DeSisto, 50, brings home $63,000 as the supervisor of nurses in the same school district.
In contrast to her husband's downsized pay, Mrs. DeSisto's salary has risen 75 percent over the last five years as she moved from a nursing job in Framingham, another Boston suburb, to responsibility as supervisor for a growing staff of school nurses in Waltham.
That pattern of improving employment prospects and rising wages for women -- while many men stood still or got hurt -- has done as much if not more than class-action lawsuits, quotas and equal opportunity laws to narrow the gap between men's and women's pay.
Working women now earn just over 80 percent of what men do, up from 62 percent 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one.
The gains for women have stuck. As the economy improved in the second half of the 1990's, women did not continue to move ahead, but they held their own, chiefly because so many men, like Mr. DeSisto, failed to get back into the work force at the same pay levels as before.
''Everyone's image of how they wanted to close the gender gap was for women to catch up with men in pay, without men going backward,'' said Rebecca M. Blank, dean of the University of Michigan's School of Public Policy. ''Now it is clear that for substantial groups of people in the labor market, that is not how it is closing.''
The dynamics reflect profound shifts in the economy. Men are more vulnerable than women to layoffs, mainly because they predominate in industries that are walloped in downturns, particularly manufacturing. Then, too, the large influx of nonworking women into low-wage jobs in the 1990's, caused in part by the overhaul of welfare, depressed the median wage of women as a whole. That influx has stopped, and the median wage has responded by rising.
College-educated women, having entered the labor force in large numbers for nearly 30 years, are showing up everywhere now, which gives employers the opportunity to fill more executive, administrative and professional jobs with well-trained and hardworking women who are paid well, but often not as well as men in those jobs.
Still, as women take these upper-end jobs in growing numbers, the pay level of women as a whole is pulled up. Observing this phenomenon, Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University, declares that the wage gap is closing mainly because of ''the rising educational attainment of women who work full time.''
That may be an important ingredient, but wage data collected by the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the closing of the gap in pay between men and women accelerated in the so-called jobless recoveries, when employers cut staff or froze hiring during recessions and continued to do so into the ensuing economic upswings.
Americans have experienced two jobless recoveries since World War II. The second may still be in progress, although recent evidence suggests it could finally be yielding to an improving job market. Before the first, in the early 1990's, recessions invariably ended in hiring surges that benefited both men and women and in roughly equal fashion.
For some specialists, like Betty Spence, president of the National Association of Female Executives, the fact that women still earn lower pay offers an opportunity to employers bent on cutting labor costs. ''Corporations tend to lop off the highly paid guy at the top,'' she said, ''and replace him with a woman who is just as competent and is willing to work just as hard for less pay.''
For others, like Barbara R. Bergmann, a labor economist at American University in Washington, the spectacle of women gaining ground in harder times is vivid evidence that most occupations are still largely segregated by sex and that men's occupations, while often higher paying, are also more vulnerable to business cycles.
Men, for example, still hold most of the best-paying jobs in manufacturing, which has been particularly hard hit in recent years. Women, by contrast, are ensconced in white-collar occupations that tend to ride out job cuts almost untouched. These include education, health care and civil service employment.
Ms. Bergmann recognizes that this backdoor route to wage equality may not be the most desirable path. ''We would prefer that pay converge in a strong economy,'' she said, ''but however it happens, we should be happy it is happening.''
Men who work full time still earn nearly 20 percent more than women who do. The score is $693 in median weekly pay, adjusted for inflation, to $560 for women, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reports. The median means that half of the workers in each sex earn more and half earn less.
The current $133 weekly gap has narrowed from $260 in 1979. But $62 of that progress, or 47 percent, has been compressed into the two periods of stepped-up labor cost-cutting that started with the 1990-1991 and the 2001 recessions.
In the latest episode, total employment has not yet risen back to its prerecession level. The economy is reviving, but hiring has not improved as much. Employers appear to be still engaging in what David H. Autor, an economist at Harvard University, calls ''the cleansing effects of hard times.''
Men's pay during these cleansings has stagnated or dropped, while women's pay has continued to rise, although more slowly than in good times. Jared Bernstein, a labor economist at the Economic Policy Institute, argues that men's pay would still be 25 percent higher than women's, as it was in 2000, if men's pay had continued to grow at the 1995-to-2000 pace, when the economy boomed and employers hired in droves.
That prosperous five-year stretch was no help at all in closing the wage gap. These were years in which high-technology companies and dot-coms prospered, and they were big employers of well-paid men, whose high wages pulled up the median for their group.
Just as this was happening, women's pay was held down. The surge in hiring brought thousands of women from welfare into low-wage jobs, and their presence became a drag on the median wage of women. The wage gap even began to widen a bit, but starting in 1998 manufacturing jobs disappeared in large numbers, and that blow to well-paid blue-collar men pushed down the median pay of all men.
The convergence in pay, of course, also reflects the underlying achievement of women in recent years. They are graduating from college in greater numbers than men and pushing into high-end occupations once dominated by men. The share of women, for example, in ''executive, administrative and managerial occupations,'' as the labor bureau calls this category, is more than 46 percent today, up from 40 percent in 1990 and 32 percent in 1983. And there are similar or even greater gains in various administrative and professional ranks.
Women are also gradually pushing into high-paid blue-collar occupations, despite continued sexual segregation, and each step forward helps to lift the median pay of women vis-a-vis men.
Volvo Trucks North America, for example, is one of the few manufacturing companies that is hiring these days, adding 1,117 people this year at plants in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Maryland.
Enough of these hires are women to lift their presence on the assembly lines, where union wages apply, to 15 percent from 13 percent in 2003, the company says.
Driving tractor-trailers on long hauls across the country is another bastion of high-paid men's work that women have been trickling into lately.
Of the 3,800 drivers at C.R. England, for example, 10 percent are women, up from zero in the 1980's, said Dean England, chief operating officer of the family-owned company based in Salt Lake City.
Not many people are able to adjust to the rigors of a lifestyle that keeps them on the road for weeks at a time, Mr. England said. The driver turnover rate at his company is 100 percent a year, but for those who can handle it -- men and women -- the pay averages $40,000.
''They are mostly middle-aged women,'' Mr. England said, ''and they come to us because they are sick of having to work so hard at service jobs that pay only $10 an hour.''
As for the DeSistos in the Boston suburbs, Marie is working her way up the pay scale while her husband, Tom, is starting a new career as a high school math teacher earning $50,000, half his old pay.
''I'm teaching the basics at the start, algebra and geometry, moving along with the kids,'' he said. ''You work with freshmen and sophomores and as the years go by, you teach them trig and higher math.''
Mr. DeSisto, a civil engineer, had 30 years at Verizon and its predecessors, Bell Atlantic and before that, AT&T. He had expected to work at Verizon into his 60's. But management, bent on downsizing, offered enhanced early retirement packages, with the clear message, Mr. DeSisto said, that layoffs would ensue if the retirement offer was undersubscribed.
It was not. Last year, 21,600 people took early retirement at Verizon, a number of them men like Mr. DeSisto with enough tenure to qualify for lump sum pension payouts in the high six figures. After nine months of unemployment, he took the teaching job in the school system that employs his wife.
Mrs. DeSisto went back to work as a nurse 11 years ago, when the youngest of the DeSistos' three children was 10, working first in the Framingham schools where her salary rose in time to $36,000 -- and then to $56,000 when she shifted to the supervisor's job in Waltham five years ago.
Her salary has risen annually ever since, partly through raises but also in recognition of a recently earned master's degree in nursing and business administration.
But what truly drives the expansion of school nursing and the rising pay, in her view, is the growing incidence of health problems among students, now that more disabled and ailing children are accepted into the public schools. Her staff has expanded to 16 nurses from 9 when she arrived.
''I like to hire nurses with master's degrees and experience,'' she said. ''They are in buildings where they are the only ones with medical knowledge.''