E C O N O M I C R E P O R T O F T H E P R E S I D E N T

ensuring equal opportunity for all workers through the passage of the 19thAmendment, and later through such legislation as the 1964 Civil Rights Act,the 1967 Age Discrimination in Employment Act, the 1990 Americans withDisabilities Act, and, most recently, the 1999 Work Incentives ImprovementAct. This last piece of legislation eliminated institutional barriers that hadlimited the employment opportunities of persons with disabilities. Thanks tothese and other initiatives, jobs that were once closed to women, minorities,the disabled, and the aged are now open to all, regardless of their work-irrelevantcharacteristics. Rising demand for labor in general may have contributedto growth in opportunities for groups that have traditionally lackedaccess, but it should not be forgotten that these and other acts of governmenthelped open the door.The Economic Progress of WomenThe progress made by women in the paid labor market has been one of themost important economic changes of the 20th century. In the early 1900s,men and women, if they were in the labor market, typically worked in differentjobs. Whereas some 79 percent of men worked in manufacturing oragricultural jobs, the comparable figure for women was only about 47 percent.A plurality (28.7 percent) of women in the labor force were employedas private household workers, but fewer than 1 percent of men held suchjobs. The differences for African American women are even more striking. Itis estimated that among African American women who were in the labormarket in 1890, over 90 percent worked as servants or agricultural workers.Disparities remain even today, but today’s occupational categories aremuch more likely to contain substantial numbers of both men and women.Table 4-1 examines the participation of female workers in a range of detailedoccupational groups and how it has changed over recent years. Many occupationsexperienced sizable increases in the percentage of women employed,beyond the overall rise in female labor force participation. For instance, theshare of engineers who are female rose from 1.2 percent to 10.6 percentbetween 1950 and 1999, and the share of lawyers who are female increasedeightfold, from 3.5 percent to 28.8 percent.The opening of opportunities in the labor market for these groups hasgone hand in hand with improvements in labor market outcomes. An extensivesocial science literature documents these gains and attempts to identifytheir sources. One way of assessing progress is to consider the earnings of onegroup relative to another: Chart 4-6 shows the ratio of female to male medianannual wage and salary income for all workers from 1967 to 1998 and thecomparable ratio for annual earnings of full-time, full-year workers from1960 to 1998. In 1967 the median woman worker earned about 40 cents forevery dollar that a man earned. Among full-time, full-year workers, the ratio138 | Economic Report of the President