Catherwood LibraryILR School

Reversing an almost decade-long trend of increasing wage inequality, the U.S. wage gender gap decreased to a record low in 2002 as women's wages increased on average to 77.5 percent of men's wages, after declining from 77.1 percent of men's wages in 1993 to seventy-six percent of men's wages in 2001. Resulting both from gains by women in union representation, and from the economy's increasing shift away from manufacturing and towards the public and service sectors, the gains helped women's wages keep pace with inflation even as rising prices cut into men's wages, and were especially important for working families. While cautioning against cautioning against reading too much into a single good year, Professor Francine Blau of Cornell University's School of Industrial and Labor Relations School did point out that the 2002 decrease in the wage gap was quite large for a single year.