ABSTRACT
Sixty cents on the dollar. Few social science statistics have become as well known as this estimate of the gender wage gap, in part because it remained unchanged for close to half a century, despite women's progress on social, political, and legal fronts. When the wage gap finally began to narrow in the 1980s, this was interpreted by many as a sign that full gender equality might be moving within reach (Hartmann, in Nasar 1992). Now, more than a decade later, estimates of the earnings ratio range from a low of 0.65 to a high of 0.72, with the media often citing the figure of 0.70. 1 The trend in the median earnings ratio can be seen in Figure 7.1, which shows the ratio of female to male median earnings from 1967 to 1987 for workers who will be the focus of this chapter: white, fulltime, full-year, male and female workers. 2 For this group of workers, the narrowing of the gender gap during the 1980s is evident.
