December 31, 2004 9:02 AM

Women gain ground on wages
Posted by Jason Butlerat 9:02 AM

A good trend for the new year: the gap between men's and women's wages is closing.

That pattern of improving employment prospects and rising wages for women - while many men stood still or got hurt - has done as much if not more than class-action lawsuits, quotas and equal opportunity laws to narrow the gap between men's and women's pay.

Working women now earn just over 80 percent of what men do, up from 62 percent 25 years ago, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. It turns out that almost half of that gap closed during two comparatively short periods of relatively hard times, totaling about six years. Those periods correspond with the recessions and cutbacks in the work force that marked the opening years of the last decade and the current one.