Podcast: Women Are Winners

Following is the draft script of the weekly “Only in New York” audio podcast. Listen at left or download the mp3 to a portable player. Here is a list of other podcasts.

Maybe this won’t come as a surprise to you, but it sure surprised me: Among young adults in New York who work full time, women for the first time now make more than men.

Back in 1970, New York women in their 20s made $7,000 less on average than comparable men. By 2000, they were about even. In 2005, according to a new analysis of census results, those women made $5,000 more — about $36,000, compared to about $31,000 among men.

Nationally, women’s wages still lag. And among older workers, men generally make more. But women have been catching up and even edging ahead.

If you’re a woman in your 20s and work full time, chances are you make more than a comparable man not only in New York, but in Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston and Minneapolis.

In New York, those women made 117 percent of what men made, according to the most recent census survey. Among the nation’s biggest cities they made more than that only in one, in Dallas, where they made 120 percent of men’s wages.

The gap is by no means universal. It varies greatly by profession, too.

In New York, young men still make more than young women in lots of job categories, including psychologists, registered nurses, high school teachers, bank tellers, bartenders.

But women in their 20s are now making more than young men in a variety of other jobs: as doctors, personnel managers, architects, economists, lawyers, stock clerks, customer service reps and — I’m not jealous — as editors and reporters.

There are a couple of reasons why young women have closed the wage gap in recent years: The biggest one is college. You can argue all you want about whether women are smarter. No question that they are now better educated.

By 1980, more women than men were entering the workforce armed with a college degree.

In 2005, 53 percent of New York working women in their 20s were college graduates. Only 38 percent of comparable men were.

The wage gap was widest among white women with some college education, blacks and Asians with advanced degrees, and Hispanic women who were high school or college graduates.

There’s another reason women have edged ahead: jobs that were once defined as male preserves have become more accessible, including civil service jobs. Among police and private investigators, for instance, young men and women in New York reported exactly the same median wages, a little more than $40,000.

Still another reason for the differential is that in some categories women are heavily outnumbered by men. They may be more in demand.

Now, not all the news is bright. People without a college education are worse off, altogether, but a degree doesn’t always guarantee the kind of higher wages that it used to. And the gender gap could have implications for marriage rates if women, who are already more financially independent, are seeking mates with at least equivalent salaries and education.

“When New York college women say there are few eligible men around, they’re right if they mean they’ll only settle for someone with an education akin to their own.”

That, from Andrew Hacker, the author of “Mismatch: The Growing Gulf Between Men and Women.”

“Sorry to have to predict this,” he says, but, quote, “the spinster syndrome’ will become more pronounced.”

N.Y.U. Professor Mitchell Moss offers another view: “New York,” he says, “is more attractive to women because they can work, build a career, raise a family without devoting 25 hours a week to commuting. And New York is an achievement-based city. Achievement here is based on how well you use your brain, not what you do on your back.”

Dr. Andrew Beveridge, the Queens College demographer who analyzed the wage gap, sums it up more bluntly, I’m afraid.

Men, he says, are losers.