When it comes to discrimination, Americans pride ourselves on how far we've come. Racial segregation is history. Explicit sex discrimination is banned. Same-sex marriage is the law of the land. But amidst all the progress, the male-female wage gap persists, and it's big.
A new essay by Cornell economists Francine Blau and Lawrence Kahn offers by far the most comprehensive and illuminating discussion to date of that gap. They find that for every dollar earned by a man working full time, women working full time earn about 79 cents. More alarming, the gap hasn't closed much since 1990. Sex discrimination is probably a big part of the explanation.
It's true that things were a lot worse in 1980, when women earned about 62 percent as much as men. By 1989, women were earning about 74 percent as much, cutting the gap by nearly one-third. But since then, progress has been slow. Interestingly, the gap is now highest at the top of the income distribution, suggesting the possibility of a glass ceiling.