Here’s one way for women to stay out of poverty

Published: Mar 24, 2016 12:03 a.m. ET

One way to put a dent in the gender pay gap: Getting more women in high paying jobs that don’t require a degree.




When Erin Cuellar first showed up at a factory to train in their apprenticeship program shortly after graduating high school, the men around her didn’t think she would last six weeks. She later became the first woman to graduate from the program.

Fast forward a few decades and Cuellar, now 36, is a manufacturing engineer and assembly supervisor for the assembly centers at her employer, which makes agricultural equipment. In that role, Cuellar manages the floor and writes standard work processes when her company launches new products. Cuellar is also the sole breadwinner for her family of four, a goal she achieved without a college degree (though she recently earned one with the financial help of her employer).

“I’m completely aware of the man’s world,” Cuellar said, noting that her male-dominated industry could use more women to point out when certain product features, such as the height of a tractor seat, need to be adjusted to better suit a wide swath of customers or when she and her colleagues should be working “smarter not harder.”

Erin Cuellar
Cueller and her family.

Increasing the number of women in manufacturing would have other benefits too -- namely providing more women with a path to a decent paying career that doesn’t require higher education, a new study finds. Cuellar’s story is a quintessential example of how these jobs can lead to family-sustaining wages; she’s the sole breadwinner for her two kids and husband, who is a stay-at-home dad.

IRS will pay you $10,000 to make it better

The IRS has debuted its first-ever crowdsourced challenge, calling on the public for ideas on "the taxpayer experience of the future.”

Extensive research has shown that women on average make less than men. But the reasons why and the path toward pay equity are much murkier. The study from the Washington-based nonprofit, the Institute for Women’s Policy Research outlines one possible route to at least putting a dent in the gender pay gap: Getting more women into traditionally male-dominated careers that don’t require a college degree and pay a living wage.

The research notes that women make up just 36% of workers in middle-skill jobs that pay at least $35,000 a year and just 27% of workers in growing middle-skill jobs. But women account for 83% of workers in middle-skill jobs that pay $30,000 or less a year.

Women make up a small share of workers in middle-skill jobs that pay well.

The median earnings in female-dominated fields that typically don’t require a college degree, such as customer service, is roughly $17,000 less than gender integrated or male-dominated middle-skill fields, like cargo and freight. Because women without college degrees are more likely to be segregated in lower-paying fields, women typically need a lot more education than men to earn enough money to stay out of poverty.

“For women to climb out of poverty wages, you really need to get to college, or at least have some college courses and a lot of the jobs in manufacturing or transportation at the moment, you need less,” said Ariane Hegewisch, the employment and earnings program director at IWPR and one of the authors of the report. “You don’t need to make major investments into college education to get to a decent income,” in those fields.

This so-called occupational segregation explains roughly half of the gender pay gap overall, but it’s particularly pronounced in middle-skill jobs, Hegewisch said. Moving just 10% of women to the closest higher paying occupation would increase their median annual earnings by 50% -- to $55,860 from $36,779—and boost the earnings of women overall by 5%. The analysis is just a thought experiment, Hegewisch says, but “it shows you the differences in terms of how we value skills for women and men.”

There are so many contributing factors at play, Hegewisch said. The median wage figures don’t control for hours worked, so part of the reason women are earning less may be because they’re working fewer hours. Another reason may be that male-dominated, middle-skill fields typically involve more automation, which increases productivity and the amount of money companies can share with their workers.

The gap between female-dominated and male-dominated middle-skill jobs is frustrating Hegewisch said, but there is some good news. The study notes that jobs in both buckets actually require a lot of the same skills. For example, cooks are more similar to truck drivers skill-wise than 70% of 473 occupations the researchers analyzed in a Bureau of Labor Statistics database that tracks the characteristics required for a given job. For example, they both require similar levels of instruction to learn the job, similar use of inductive and deductive reasoning and similar levels of English knowledge. Their differences are relatively limited -- one requires more standing, the other more sitting -- and in many cases can be addressed through training.

Now the male-dominated sectors just need to do a better job portraying themselves as attractive places for women to work, she said. “It’s not easy to be the one person that’s different,” she said.

Lauren McIntosh, a 29-year-old plant manager for Priority Plastics, said part of her goal as the Colorado chapter chair of Women in Manufacturing, a national trade association focused on supporting and promoting women in the field, is to demystify the manufacturing industry for women and others. She plans to go into high schools and colleges to promote the sector.

McIntosh often encounters surprise when she’s introduced to older, male colleagues as the plant manager. “They just look at me and they’re like ‘you’ve got to be kidding me,’” she said. Despite being an outlier, McIntosh said she loves her job.

Lauren McIntosh
Lauren McIntosh is a 29-year-old plant manager.

“If it was promoted better we could get more women in, for sure,” McIntosh said from her Colorado plant. She noted it’s a well-paying sector that provides many opportunities for people without higher education. McIntosh, who has an M.B.A. and is working on another master’s degree, estimates that most of the people in her office don’t have college degrees.

“Manufacturing, in my opinion, is a very rewarding career,” she said. “You get to see the product made from these little tiny plastic beads then the product gets shipped out over the world. At the end of the day it’s kind of cool to be able to say ‘hey we made that.’”

Mortgage Rates

Powered by


Data Provided By
Today's Interest Rates

Credit Cards
  1. 3.84%
  2. 3.43%
  3. 2.7%
  4. 2.69%
  5. 3.45%
  6. 2.74%
  7. 2.92%
  8. 3%
National averages from
  1. 1.21%
  2. 0.75%
  3. 0.56%
  4. 0.24%
  5. 0.37%
  6. 0.26%
  7. 0.36%
National averages from
Avg. APR Last Week 6 Months
Low Interest 11.98% 11.98% 11.87%
Business 13.12% 13.12% 13.11%
Student 13.42% 13.42% 13.42%
Balance Transfer 14.38% 14.38% 14.30%
Airline 15.08% 15.08% 15.16%
Reward 15.29% 15.29% 15.25%
Cash Back 15.32% 15.32% 15.23%
Instant Approval 18.04% 18.04% 18.18%
Bad Credit 22.56% 22.56% 22.88%


MarketWatch Partner Center


We Want to Hear from You

Join the conversation