From the U.S. Government Accountability Office, Transcript for: Gender Pay Differences among Low-Wage Workers Audio interview by GAO staff with Andrew Sherrill, Director, Education, Workforce and Income Security Related GAO Work: GAO-12-10: Gender Pay Differences: Progress Made, but Women Remain Overrepresented among Low-Wage Workers Released on: November 3, 2011 [ Background Music ] [ Narrator: ] Welcome to GAO's Watchdog Report, your source for news and information from the Government Accountability Office. It's November 3, 2011. While women represent an increasingly larger share of the total U.S. workforce, their average pay has been, and remains, lower than that of men. A group led by Andrew Sherrill, a director in GAO's Education, Workforce, and Income Security team, recently reviewed the differences in representation, characteristics, and pay among women and men with less education and low wages. GAO's Jeremy Cluchey sat down with Andrew to learn more. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] This report builds on GAO's body of work looking at the difference between men's and women's pay in the workforce. Can you talk about what you focus on particularly in this report? [ Andrew Sherrill: ] That's right, last year we issued a report on women in management, in which we compared women and men to see to what extent they're represented in management, their pay levels, etc. This report we're issuing today is a bookend to that. This report focused on women's progress in the workplace compared to men for two less advantaged populations. First, less educated workers, those with a high school degree or less, and second, low wage workers, which we defined as those earning in the bottom 20 percent of hourly wages. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] For the low wage workers, what did you find that the differences are between men and women currently? [ Andrew Sherrill: ] We found that women have made progress in earning higher wages over the last 3 decades but that they remain overrepresented among workers who earn low wages. In 2010, women were about 49 percent of the total workforce, but constituted 59 percent of the low wage workforce. But we didn't find any differences between men and women in this group in terms of pay differences in part because the minimum wage provides a floor. When you shift and look at the weekly earnings of men and women in this group, we did find some differences, and that's in part because women's weekly earnings were less than for men on average because women are more likely to work part-time. In this low wage group, 41 percent of women worked part-time compared to 26 percent of men. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] And for women and men who are in the group considered to have less education, what differences did you identify? [ Andrew Sherrill: ] Our key finding was that women with a high school degree or less earn lower wages than men who have a high school degree or less. And this is the case even though women in this group had greater high school graduation rates than men and were on average about 3 years older than men. The key part of the explanation is that women tend to work in occupations and industries that pay lower wages than in those where the men worked. For example, the largest industry for women was healthcare and social assistance, where women earned about $14 per hour. In contrast, two of the industries that have sizeable percentages of men--construction and transportation--men earn more than $19 an hour. We also found that even when less educated women and men worked in the same broad industry or occupation, women tended to earn less on average as well. However, when we looked over time, we saw that pay differences have decreased somewhat. In 2000, less educated women earned 81 cents for every dollar that less educated men earned after we adjusted for different factors that can affect pay. Compare that to 2010, where we found that the pay difference had decreased by 5 cents down to 86 cents on the dollar for every dollar earned by men. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] In terms of women's representation in the workforce, how have you found that the situation has changed over the past 30 years? [ Andrew Sherrill: ] As the workforce has grown over that period of time, women have represented an increasingly larger share. Women now constitute nearly half of the workforce, which is an increase of about 6 percentage points over the last 30 years. Also, over this 30-year-period, women have surpassed men in obtaining high school diplomas and college degrees. For example, younger women, those aged 25 to 34, now complete high school and college at somewhat higher rates than men, and we've found that education plays an important role in reducing the likelihood of being low wage. [ Jeremy Cluchey: ] For people interested in the trends around pay disparity between men and women, what's the bottom line of this report? [ Andrew Sherrill: ] The bottom line is that while women have made progress over time in both wages and education levels, we still find that there's differences in pay, for example, between less educated men and women and also women being overrepresented among low wage workers. And these raise questions about to what extent the remaining pay differences that we find are due to the choices women make--for example, balancing work and family responsibilities--and to what extent they might be due to other factors like barriers or discrimination that women encounter. 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