Gender Gap Narrowing as Men’s Pay Drops at Faster Rate Than Women’s Pay : Workplace: The recession is causing men to lose ground more quickly.

As in most places, there is news of two kinds in Gender Gap, the persistent gulf between men’s pay and women’s.

The good news is, the gap is narrowing. The bad news: It’s because men are losing ground faster than women.

This is happening because recession, corporate restructuring and a massive reduction in manufacturing jobs have hurt high-wage earners most, and these are typically men.

The U.S. government says that women last year earned 74 cents for every dollar earned by men, up from 59 cents in 1977. For most of that time, women have narrowed the gap by making more money. But lately, that has changed.

Men’s average wages dropped from 1989 to 1991 as the economy slumped. Average wages earned by women increased slightly in 1990 over 1989, but dropped back a bit in 1991 as the recession caught up with the service job sectors that are dominated by women.

“We are closing the gap,” says Susan Bianchi-Sand of the National Committee on Pay Equity, a coalition of civil rights, labor and women’s groups. “But it’s not because women are making big progress, but because men are doing worse.”

Since it became a civil rights goal more than two decades ago, minorities and women have made progress in reaching pay equity, but the gap is still a lot wider than a gulch. And while discrimination based on gender or race is illegal, it undoubtedly persists. Many other factors also keep women from earning as much as men:

* Women aren’t in positions of authority. A 1990 USC study showed that women held 2.6% of corporate officer’s jobs at the vice presidential level and above in Fortune 500 companies.

“We continue to find a general absence of minorities and women at the highest levels in the corporate work force, in the developmental programs and in the credential-building assignments,” Labor Secretary Lynn Martin said recently.

* Women’s experience and training aren’t equally valued. In fact, the more education a woman has, the less she makes relative to a man at the same age, experience and education level.

Men earn about 24 cents an hour for each additional year of work experience, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research has found, while women get 7 cents. And studies done for the federal government show that men with four years of college average $50,000 a year. A woman with a college degree averages $30,000.

* Women are vastly likelier to take time off for childbearing. Many prefer part-time work. Some women attorneys opt for jobs that don’t involve the punishing hours required by high-powered firms. Such career paths--the notorious “mommy track”--are more compatible with family obligations, but they’re less lucrative.

* Fewer women own businesses. A recent study by Cognetics Inc., a Cambridge, Mass. economic research firm, found that women own 28% of U.S. businesses, but the Census Bureau has found in the past that firms owned by women account for a much smaller proportion of gross receipts.

Change is occurring, but slowly. For example, young men and women make almost the same money. Women fall behind as they get older, and the gap is traditionally widest in the peak earning years, from 45 to 54, but that gap is also narrowing. In 1981, for instance, those women made only 56.8% of their male peers’ pay. A decade later, women in that group earned 64.8% of comparable men’s wages.

Jay Meisenheimer of the Labor Department’s labor force statistic unit sees marked progress in closing the pay gap and hopes that in the future, it will narrow faster. He says women typically have earned less than men because they traditionally go into lower-paying occupations. That will change, he says, as more women choose higher-paying fields, such as law or engineering, over social work, nursing and teaching.

But what about all those women who are now nurses, teachers and social workers?

“The Labor Department said they chose the wrong job, but those happened to be the jobs that were open to them,” says Peg Yorkin, chairwoman of the Feminist Majority Foundation. “The low-paying jobs are open to women because they are low paying.”

Anne Ronce, co-editor of the Glass Ceiling, a newsletter published in San Francisco, insists that it’s still not certain that the pay gap will close as more women move into higher-paying occupations.

In the mid-1970s, women began making up nearly 40% of the law school graduating classes. But today less than 15% of partners at big law firms--and of state and federal judges--are women.

“It doesn’t take 16 years to make law partners,” Ronce says. “If women and men were treated equally, the makeup of law firm partnership ranks would look totally different today.”

In some occupations, such as acting, women suffer not only from lower pay but from limited opportunities to work. Among movie and television stars, men get the big bucks and the majority of the roles.

A 1989 study by the Screen Actors Guild found that while SAG is 57% male, they got 68% of total earnings from film, television and commercials tracked by SAG.

Just look at how the stars do. Jack Nicholson gets $11 million for his role in “Batman”; Barbra Streisand reportedly makes $6 million a film--when she stars, produces and directs. Michael Douglas gets about $9 million for a film role, Meryl Streep about $5 million.

Film executives often justify the money gap by contending that it’s based on a star’s ability to draw an audience. But women in Hollywood say stars such as Sigourney Weaver, whose “Alien” series is a big success, can’t get as much money as men whose movie appeal seems to be flagging, such as Bruce Willis.

More prosaically, while women get 41% of all roles in TV commercials (the easiest place for actresses to find work), they get 19% of voice-over roles in commercials, where the actor is heard but not seen.

Moreover, the pay gap between men and women may be wider than government figures indicate.

The Labor Department says women earned 74% of what men did in 1991, but women’s groups say the government overstates women’s pay because it tracks earnings on a weekly basis. Roberta Spalter-Roth, research director of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington, says when full-year wages of full-time employees are compared, women earned 72% of what men did last year. Other women’s groups claim that the figure is closer to 70%.

The pay gap isn’t limited to women. In 1990, according to the National Committee on Pay Equity, Latino men and women earned 54% of what white males did. Black women earned 62 cents for every dollar paid a white male, and white women’s wages were 69% of white men’s.

Of all the groups tracked by labor specialists, black males’ earnings most closely trail white men’s. For nearly a decade, black men earned about 75 cents for every dollar a white male earned. But during the recession, black men dropped back to 72%-73%, according to the Labor Department.