- Women still earn less than men, but gap narrows, By Ruth Mantell, April 21, 2010, Philadelphia Inquirer: “Decades after women entered the labor force en masse, pay disparity between genders has fallen but not disappeared, according to a report from the Labor Department. For the first quarter of this year women had median usual weekly earnings of $665, or almost 79 percent of the $844 that men earned, according to the study released Tuesday, which was Equal Pay Day. In the first quarter of 2000, women earned about 76 percent of men’s income. ‘Not only has the education gap between men and women narrowed, but labor market experience has narrowed because women have been working more and more, and more consistently,’ said Harry Holzer, an economist at Georgetown University and the Urban Institute…”
- Census says women equal to men in advanced degrees, By Hope Yen (AP), April 20, 2010, Washington Post: “Women are now just as likely as men to have completed college and to hold an advanced degree, part of an accelerating trend of educational gains that have shielded women from recent job losses. Yet they continue to lag behind men in pay. Among adults 25 and older, 29 percent of women in the U.S. have at least a bachelor’s degree, compared with 30 percent of men, according to 2009 census figures released Tuesday. Measured by raw numbers, women already surpass men in undergraduate degrees by roughly 1.2 million…”
Poverty-related issues in the news, from the Institute for Research on Poverty