After nearly two decades in which the wage gap between men and women was steadily narrowing, it is widening again, piquing confusion and concern among economists and women's groups.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median weekly earnings of full-time working women are just under 75 percent of the men's median, down from 77 percent four years ago.
"It's a puzzlement," said Francine Blau, a labor economist at Cornell University. "In my head, at this point, it doesn't mean we're actually going backward. It's more a slowdown, a plateau, a consolidation after a period of rapid social change. The concern is what's happened to that robust upward trend we had for so many years, and what's going to happen in the future."
From 1979 to 1993, women's median earnings rose from 62 percent of men's to 77 percent. And in the early 1990s, the narrowing gap was widely trumpeted as evidence of women's greater opportunities, education and work experience -- trends that were predicted to continue indefinitely, edging women ever closer to pay equity.
"The narrowing wage gap got a huge amount of attention five years ago," said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard University. "But right now, we're a little quiet. Questions of gender and economics are going to be with us forever, and it's all connected to political and social change. The social movements that led to women's advances came in with great force. It was an enormous tide. Now we're coming into a new equilibrium. I see this as a household issue, and the new equilibrium is that all those strollers are still being pushed by women."
While some labor economists suggest that the gender gap may have something to do with welfare reform unleashing unskilled women on the job market, most warn that it is far too soon to say with any certainty just what, if anything, the earnings data portend.
"There's definitely something real going on, and it's worth worrying about, but we don't have a good explanation," said Jared Bernstein, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, a Washington research organization. "I've been wanting to point out to the world that it was happening, but I didn't know why, and I wanted to have some causal information before writing about it."
Most experts in the field caution against any conclusion that the earnings numbers are evidence of growing discrimination against women: They say it is more likely that the numbers reflect changes in the makeup of the work force, overall economic trends, or statistical flukes, than any real reversal of women's workplace status.
