Tiana Mikes Project - Alaska Pacific University

Insights into Feminism 16
Women Wages
In 1997, Betty Friedan wrote about how women’s wages were around 72% of
men’s, “They are not equal at the top…but women are now represented in all levels
below the top” (p. xix). She found it disturbing that the main contributing factor to this
diminishing of the earnings gap was from a drop in men’s earnings at 66% rather than
from an increase in women’s earnings at 34% (p. xix).
In 1997, David Colander and Joanna Woos, viewed women and men college
professors and concluded that the pay disparity reflects systematic demand-side
institutional discrimination (p. 60). They believed that women are withheld institutionally
from tenure, because institutions do not offer alternatives to women during their
childbearing years (p. 60). They proposed an alternative track toward tenure to eradicate
the institutional discrimination (p. 61). In 2005 and 2006, Sandra Perry reviewed case law
dealing with the Equal Pay Act as it applied to claims of pay discrimination by faculty in
higher education. She found that the women earned 80% to that of the men. According to
Perry, the reasons were; women are frequently employed at the lower paid rank of
nontenure track or unranked positions and that women are usually employed at associate
and baccalaureate colleges (p. 21).
In 2002, Charles Baum researched the effects of work interruptions on women’s
wages. He used the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth data from 1979 to 1994 with
women respondents ages 14 to 21 in 1979 (p. 9). His research found that work
interruptions contributed to a 2-3% per year of interrupted work decrease in wages which