REAL CASH. To follow up on Kay's item, it's worth pointing out that the amount of money women lose to gender inequality is quite a bit higher on a per-person basis than the amounts politicians normally talk about when they promise even generous middle-class tax relief. A full-time year-round female employee whose salary, 10 years out, is only 69 percent of that of her male college-educated equivalent, as the AAUW study reported is the case, will be earning, say, $50,000 while her male college classmates will be earning nearly $73,000. That's a more than $22,000 loss to the woman on an annual basis. That's huge. The gap is less, according to the study, when you control for hours, occupation, and parental status, but each of these things is so gender-influenced that ultimately controlling for them can wind up erasing the impact of gender rather than describing it. By the late 1960s, for example, only 3 percent of this nation's lawyers were female and anyone who measured pay who controlled for occupation would have failed to measure the impact of the gendered way women were tracked into certain occupations and not others. That's still true today. Even the legal profession was only 27 percent female by 2000, according to the American Bar Association, thanks to the residual impact of fixed gender roles.
--Garance Franke-Ruta
