A Long Road for Women

Fittingly enough, the first CEA report to be prepared partly by a woman --Marina von Neumann Whitman, the council's only female member--is also the first to contain a chapter on the role of women in the economy. The chapter was included because CEA Chairman Herbert Stein was asked to write an article for the Ladies' Home Journal on the subject; looking into the matter, he discovered what Mrs. Whitman calls "a mass of ignorance." The CEA report cuts through that ignorance in rather gloomy fashion and indicates that women have made startlingly little progress toward job equality with men.

Many more women nowadays are finding jobs, and thus adding to the increase in national output, 43.8% of all working-age women now are employed. But their unemployment rate has been persistently much higher than that for men; last year it was 6.6% v. 4.9%. Surprisingly, women's earnings have actually fallen farther behind the incomes of their husbands, brothers and male colleagues in the past 15 years or so. In 1956 the average full-time female employee earned 63.3% as much as the average male worker; in 1971 she grossed only 59.5% as much, or $5,593 a year.* The CEA suspects that this comparison is distorted by the fact that the normal work week is about 10% longer for men. Even adjusting for that difference, a woman's pay averages only 66.1% of a man's wages.

Women are still clustered in relatively low-pay, low-status jobs. In 1970, of all working women, 32% were classified as clerical employees and 14% as blue-collar operatives (semiskilled workers like packers, wrappers and sewing-machine operators). Women have had next to no success cracking some of the high-status professions. In 1970 they made up 28% of college faculties, about the same proportion as 40 years earlier. Some 6.3% of managers of manufacturing firms were women, slightly fewer than 20 years ago, and the percentage of women dentists, 3.5%, is little higher now than in 1910. The only professional category in which the CEA found a steady and large increase is editors and reporters. In 1970 women made up 41% of that category, v. 25% in 1940. With much reason, even this figure is questioned by newswomen, and the CEA has no separate breakdown of the number of editors.

The CEA was also unable to say how much of the inequality is caused by discrimination and how much is due to the cultural role traditionally assigned to women. It leans toward the latter reason by stressing that few women can match the intense, continuous and lifelong dedication to a career typical of men. Many women temporarily drop out of the labor force because of pregnancy, child rearing and other home responsibilities. Even a woman who devotes herself continuously to a job' faces drawbacks. "A wife seldom is free to migrate to wherever her own prospects are best," says the report. It recognizes, however, that "some may label [the social-cultural role of women] as a pervasive societal discrimination which starts in the cradle." In any case, the CEA usefully points out that in seeking job equality with men, the nation's women still have a long road to travel.

*Mrs. Whitman, one of the highest-ranking women in Government, earns $38,000.

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