Same old, same old for women on the verge

Coming a little more than 40 years after women were routinely - and legally - banned from whole professions or fired for getting married, this would seem a milestone worth celebrating. Surely now the nation is on the cusp of the brave new workplace we believed would come when working women achieved critical mass: parity in raises and promotions, universal onsite child care, flextime, paid family leave. Not to mention million-dollar business deals cut over white-wine spritzers at book club.

Sad to say, the increasing prominence of women at work is less feminist fantasy than reality bites. Armies of women on the job haven’t remotely translated into family-friendly workplaces. Worse, the wage gap between men and women hasn’t closed. Women working full time now make 77 cents for every dollar men earn, which is just about where the ratio was in 1993.

Even in the fields where women are in the majority, men earn more. In 2008, according to the AFL-CIO, female elementary and middle school teachers earned 12 percent less than men in the same jobs, despite being 81 percent of the field. Registered nurses earn 13 percent less than male nurses, even though 90 percent of nurses are women. So much for the 50 percent tipping point.

The work environment may be even more resistant to change than the paycheck. Nearly half of all workers, including 22 million women, still don’t receive paid sick days, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. Even more rare are workplaces that allow mothers paid time off to care for a sick child. “There really isn’t a marked improvement in the supports that families have,’’ said Arianne Hegewisch, a study director at the institute.

It gets worse. Women are overtaking men in the labor force not because they now hold more college degrees - though they do - but because men’s jobs are disappearing. The jobs traditionally held by men, from manufacturing and construction to high finance, have been hit hard by this recession; men have lost 74 percent of the 6 million jobs that have vanished since the recession began, in December 2007. The so-called pink-collar jobs traditionally held by women, especially in health care and some service sectors, are holding steady or increasing.

The irony is that those disappearing jobs traditionally held by men - which are more likely to be full time, for large companies, and unionized - are precisely those that are more likely to offer the paid benefits that make juggling work and family possible.

As Vladimir Lenin once said: What is to be done? Plenty, actually, and it won’t take a socialist revolution.

Evelyn Murphy, the state’s former lieutenant governor and an economist, runs the WAGE project (Women Are Getting Even), leading workshops for women - from graduate students to surgeons - on salary negotiation. She is struck by how many young women “don’t have a clue’’ about inequities in the workplace. “They think that’s what their mothers solved for them,’’ she said. Murphy said there needs to be a grass-roots movement to educate workers about the persistence of wage discrimination, using data increasingly available on the Internet.

There is a role for government, of course. If paid sick leave or other benefits are required or regulated, as in many other advanced societies, it would no longer be a competitive disadvantage for companies to provide them. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, underfunded and overburdened pretty much since it was created in 1964, could go back to investigating and prosecuting discrimination cases if it were taken seriously.

But attitudes about women and work are deeply socialized and will take changing on a personal level, one boss at a time. Some studies are beginning to show that companies with women chief executives have narrowed or closed the wage gap, at least at the management level. Getting women to 50 percent of the nation’s CEOs - now there’s a milestone worth waiting for.

Renée Loth’s column appears regularly in the Globe.