Gender Wage Gap Is Higher On Wall Street Than Anywhere Else

The Huffington Post  |  By Alexander Eichler Posted: 03/19/2012 11:09 am Updated: 03/19/2012 11:10 am

Wall Street is one place where it pays to be a guy.

For people in financial-sector jobs -- such as insurance agents, security sales agents, financial managers and clerks -- men out earn women by a wider margin than in any other area of the economy, according to a recent analysis of Census data by Bloomberg News.

Nationwide, across all occupations, women still earn just 77 cents for every dollar that men make. And in the 265 major job categories measured by the Census, there's only one -- personal care and service workers -- where women collect a higher salary than men. Those jobs include positions like butler, valet, house sitter and shoe shiner, Bloomberg reports. Still, the gap is highest on Wall Street, where women only get between 55 and 62 cents for every dollar their male colleagues earn.

Financial-sector work has grown more and more lucrative in recent decades, and bankers have collected massive paychecks even during the economic downturn of the past four years. But the Bloomberg analysis suggests that the women of Wall Street have to some extent not shared in this prosperity.

The number of women on Wall Street has dropped off since 2000, according to FINS, a Web property of Dow Jones & Company. At the same time, in 2008 and 2009, the number of sexual harassment charges per woman in the financial industry grew higher.

Women often report feeling belittled and marginalized in the male-dominated financial world. FINS reported that some women say they've gotten passed over for big bonuses because they don't socialize with male management as much, and NPR reports that some male bankers are known to talk about visiting strip clubs and even bring prostitutes to the office.

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While the gender pay gap on Wall Street is especially striking, the post-recession economy has not been kind in general to women, with men gaining some 768,000 new jobs since mid-2009 even as women lost about 218,000, according to the Pew Research Center.