This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2007, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
After Brooke Anderson completes her three-year union apprenticeship next May to become a journeyman commercial painter, she will be making the same wages as her male counterparts - $17.90 an hour plus benefits.
One of the pluses of a union job is that all journeymen receive equal pay for equal work, said Anderson, a member of the International Union of Painters and Allied Trades Local 77 in West Valley City. "And being a single mother of three, that's important to me," she said.
A lot of women in Utah may not count themselves as fortunate as Anderson.
The U.S. Census Bureau reported Tuesday that, as a group, Utah women last year made only 71 cents for every dollar earned by men.
It is a wage discrepancy that has some crying foul and others offering explanations for the disparity in pay among the sexes. Nationally, women on average earn 77 cents for each dollar earned by men, although that number varies from state to state.
"Even after you factor in differences in education and the fact that women take time away from their job to have children, you're still left with the conclusion that discrimination is playing at least some role in what is happening," said Michele Leber, chairwoman of The National Committee on Pay Equity.
There remains a persistent view throughout the American economy that men work to support their families, while women work for "pin money," Leber said. "It is an idea that has been around almost forever."
Linda Parsons at Utah Jobs with Justice agrees. "Employers in Utah often will pick men for their high-paying positions. There is this cultural mentality here that a man's place is to be the breadwinner."
Yet there are those who also have looked at the same numbers and come to far different conclusions - namely that the disparity in wages has little, if anything, to do with discrimination and everything to do with the choices women make.
And those choices, they say, can have a big impact on their wages and salaries.
Women, for instance, are much more likely than men to take off work to spend time at home with their children. Historically, fewer women sought degrees in mathematics and the hard sciences, such as chemistry and engineering - an education that often led to more technical and higher-paying jobs.
Economist Diana Furchtgott-Roth of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C., and a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor under the second President Bush, said that several years ago when she compared the earnings of childless men and women aged 27 to 33, the wage gap shrank to two cents.
Women earned 98 cents for every dollar earned by men.
"The [Census Bureau's] number is valid but what it doesn't take into account is the differences in women's and men's occupations," she said. "You're a lot more likely to find men working in logging - a high-pay, high-risk occupation - while more women are administrative assistants."
There also are differences in education, experience and age that need to be considered, said Erica Williams of the Institute for Women's Policy Research in Washington, D.C. She argues, however, that even after taking into account such factors as child rearing and union membership, there still is about 33 percent of the wage gap that remains unexplained.
"A lot of researchers out there are trying to quantify what is taking place, and so far no one really has come up with a good explanation," Williams said. "It is possible that [33 percent] is where the discrimination lies."
Or it might not be. "We just don't know."
Williams, though, suggests that there are steps policymakers can take to help narrow the gap between men's and women's wages.
"They can invest in training programs that encourage women to go into more nontraditional jobs and fields that pay better," she said. "And they can encourage employers to evaluate their wages to ensure that women are being paid equitably."
Ed Welnia, chief of the income surveys branch at the U.S. Census Bureau, said the wage gap nationally has been narrowing slowly since 1991, when women earned just 70 cents for each dollar earned by men.
"We just report the numbers, though. We don't try to interpret them."