Wheeler says she did the same job, worked on the same project and yet made $4 an hour less than most of her male colleagues.

"It's not a good feeling to come into work and look at that," Wheeler says. "If I didn't have self-esteem to spare, it just would have destroyed me."

Complaints to management went unheard, she says, and finally she reported the company to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, which last month filed two lawsuits against her employer, Convergys Corp.

While Wheeler's workplace trouble may have been outright discrimination, thousands of other Utah women have the same wage-gap problem for various reasons.

A new federal report shows Utah has nearly the largest wage disparity between women and men in the United States. It's nothing new for the Beehive State, which has been stuck near the bottom of pay-equity rankings for five of the past six years.

In 2004, Utah ranked 50th out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics said in a report issued last week. Wyoming took last place.

That means that last year, women working full time in Utah made only 69 percent of what men made, or about $219 a week less, based on median wages. Only a portion of the pay gap can be attributed to straight-up discrimination. There are also disparities in education, seniority and socialization.

"Utah's a little behind in women's rights and gender equality probably because of the predominant culture in Utah: That women shouldn't be in the work force, unless you're a teacher or something like that," says Brooke Bastian, a teacher at Hillsdale Elementary in West Valley City. "I guess I'm not surprised by the statistic, but anytime pay isn't equal it isn't a good thing. I'm not surprised, but I'm not willing to accept it."

Explanations for the gap center on the profile of Utah workers.

"We do tend to be toward the bottom of the states and a lot of that tends to be because of another gap that we have in education," says Lecia Langston, regional economist for the state's office of Workforce Services. "Men continue, obviously, to do well, but the women are not keeping up."

Nationwide, 26 percent of men have at least earned a bachelor's degree. In Utah, it is 30 percent, according to the 2000 Census. On the other hand, about 23 percent of women nationwide have at least a bachelors degree, compared with 22 percent in Utah.

Utah also has a higher average of men between the ages of 25 and 54 in the labor market when compared with the national average, while there are fewer women in Utah's work force compared with the national average.

That profile of Utah workers leads to a big gap, and a constant one.

With the exception of 2003 - when Utah's ranking in the federal survey was 35 out of 51 - the Beehive State has not left the group of eight states with the highest disparity. While men's median wages grew by $112 a week from 1998 to 2004, women's wages increased only $81.

Sarah Wilhelm, an economist for the nonprofit Utah Issues, says the wage difference can be attributed to what she calls "channeling," where girls are told to go into different professions than boys.

"Look at the examples of a female equivalent of a job versus a male: It's a seamstress versus a tailor," says Wilhelm, who wrote her doctoral dissertation on gender gaps. "That's all part of the channeling. Not only do [women] focus less on their education, or take a break on their education or the work force, they're also channeled into English [literature] instead of computer science."

Nationally, women are faring better now than they were in 1979, the first year of comparable data, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In that year, women nationwide made 63 percent as much as men. By last year, they made 80 percent nationwide.

California led states with the lowest disparity - 87 percent - while Wyoming hit dead last at 66 percent.

Pam Perlich, a senior research economist at the University of Utah's Bureau of Business and Economic Research, chalks up the higher gap in Utah to two reasons.

"They're having more kids," taking them out of the labor force during a time when most workers are gaining salary, Perlich says. "And their college educational attainment is lower than men."

Then there are women like Wheeler, who accuses her old employer of paying men more because they are men.

In another case pending in U.S. District Court for Utah, the EEOC charges that Stevens-Heneger College paid women between 6 percent and 33 percent less than men in similar jobs and fired one woman because of her gender.

"At least a portion of the wage gap probably comes from discrimination of men over women as far as paying the breadwinner more," says Salt Lake City lawyer Lauren Scholnick, a partner in Strindberg, Scholnick & Chamness, which specializes in employment law. The firm, she says, usually has two or three cases going at one time over discrimination in the workplace.

There are other, longer-term solutions outside the courtroom, but they may take generations.

"There are many women talking to the young women to make them realize that math is good, science is good, and that you need to focus on those things," says Langston, the state economist. "But they're not quite hearing it."

tburr@sltrib.com