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Working with wealth
Recently we came across an article by Sandra Tsing Loh in the Atlantic on the age-long debate about whether it’s good/bad for mothers to stay at home/work. While people love to argue about that particular topic, we’ll pass that up for the moment to focus on an initially shocking (to us) number mentioned in the piece.
Here it is: in 2003, 3.5% of women in the US earned $75,000 or more per year.
In other words, being a woman working as a science professor in the US, I am in the top 3.5% of incomes earned by women. We immediately wondered: is it really true? And is it particularly different for men?
It turns out these numbers are not hard to look up. There are lots of income data available on the US census web site. We looked in particular at this page, which has information on income by sex for 2006. We compared women and men of all races. The results are intriguing.
- 5.05% of women earned $75,000 per year or more in 2006.
- 14.2% of men earned that much.
So the percentage of male high earners is 2.8 times higher than the female percentage, if we define 75K per year as the threshold. The ratio is even a bit higher, at 3.1, if we look at higher incomes.
- 3.2% of women earned $90,000 per year or more.
- 10.0% of men had the same earnings.
So you say you’re not at a university that pays quite that well? Let’s drop the cutoff to 50K per year. Still, the percentage of high-earning men is over twice that of women.
- 13.1% of women earned $50,000 per year or more.
- 28.4% of men were above the $50,000 cutoff.
So assuming the US census bureau knows that they are doing in their Current Population Survey, women science professors are another odd minority: we’re in the top 3-13% of earnings by US women. We work, and we’re wealthy.