Ventura County Star (California), January 1, 2005, Saturday

Copyright 2005 Ventura County Star
All Rights Reserved
Ventura County Star (California)

January 1, 2005 Saturday

SECTION: BUSINESS AND STOCKS; Pg. 1

LENGTH: 1184 words

HEADLINE: Women trim wage gap in lean years

BYLINE: Louis Uchitelle

BODY:
High-paid men more prone to layoffs
New York Times News Service
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, Tom 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 Marie DeSisto, 50, brings home $63,000 as the supervisor of nurses in the same school district.
In contrast to her husband's downsized pay, Marie DeSisto's salary has risen 75 percent over the past 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 1990s, women did not continue to move ahead, but they held their own, chiefly because so many men, like Tom 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."
Economic shifts
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 1990s, 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 responds 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 1990s, 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."
Segregation remains
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, healthcare and civil service employment.
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."
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."
Early retirement
Tom 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 60s. But management, bent on downsizing, offered enhanced early retirement packages, with the clear message, 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 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.
Marie 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 nine 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."