The numbers tell a story. Women-owned businesses in the United States mushroomed by 400 percent between 1977 and 1987. But a significant portion of those companies were tiny firms, with less than $5,000 in annual sales.
On the education front, in 1988 more women were enrolled in college than men, and in 1989, female students earned the majority of all levels of college degrees except doctorates. Yet women continued to shy away from the traditionally male-dominated fields of engineering, science and mathematics.
A political snapshot: The number of women mayors across the country more than doubled in the last two decades, but even now the more than 150 current female city leaders account for only 17 percent of the more than 900 mayors of sizable cities nationwide.
These patterns of both giant strides and baby steps mark the progress of American women toward equality, according to a book published this month by the Women`s Research and Education Institute, a non-profit, independent organization in Washington.
Through a compilation of government and other statistics, ”The American Woman, 1992-93” (Norton, $24.95), highlights the success and stagnation that women have encountered in politics, education, health and the workplace.
Groups that concentrate on women`s issues reflect the same ambivalence demonstrated by the data.
Barbara Otto, spokeswoman of 9-to-5, a Cleveland advocacy group for issues affecting working women, finds reason to cheer in the sometimes-extraordinary advances made by women in a generation. She is heartened that matters once dismissed as purely women`s concerns-child and health care and other ”family” issues-now are much higher up on the nation`s political agenda.
But Otto says the gap between men`s and women`s salaries in similar jobs, the concentration of women in low-paying occupations and reluctance of companies to grant parental leave, among a host of other problems, mean that equality and fairness still are far off.
”We are in a better position than we ever have been, but we still have a long, long way to go,” Otto says.
Leslie Wolfe, director of the Institute for Women`s Policy Studies, a feminist research and advocacy center in Washington, prefers to view the same measuring cup as ”three-fifths full,” as she puts it.
While not minimizing the often-enormous potholes and obstacles remaining on the road to parity, Wolfe finds much to be optimistic about.
”It takes a lot longer than 20 years to make these sorts of revolutionary changes in every major institutional structure,” she says. ”I frankly think we`ve made astounding progress, more than I would have guessed in so short a period of time.”
What follows is a statistical snapshot of that progress, or lack thereof, as depicted in the institute study:
– Education: In the last few years, women have equaled or even exceeded men in several measures of academic achievement. But only a relative few ventured far into areas of study that historically have been the domain of men, such as computer science and mathematics.
Still, more women are graduating from high school and completing college. In 1989, setting an all-time record, 41 percent of all women over 25 years of age had finished high school.
Once in college, however, women continued to choose undergraduate majors that traditionally have been dominated by females, such as the social sciences and education. Women represented just 31 percent of computer science majors, 30 percent of physical science majors and 46 percent of mathematics majors. In engineering as an undergraduate major, only 15 percent were women, but that marked an almost astronomical increase from 1959, when fewer than 1 percent were women.
In 1989, women earned a historically high number of post-graduate degrees-52 percent of all master`s and 36 percent of all doctorates, although they accounted for only one-fourth of all dentistry degrees, one-third of all medical diplomas and two-fifths of all law degrees.
– Employment and income: Most women in the work force still hold the lowest-paying positions, and remain almost twice as likely as men to work at minimum-wage jobs.
A record 58 percent of the female population was in the labor force in 1990, up from 34 percent in 1950. By the year 2000, 63 percent of all women are expected to be employed.
The number of working mothers also has shot up. In 1975, the proportion of married mothers of children under 6 years old in the workplace amounted to only 37 percent. In 1990, that figure catapulted to 59 percent.
Overall, more than two-thirds of all women worked in two general industries-services, such as teaching, waitressing and nursing, and the retail trade. Most occupations continued to be segregated by gender, with 99 percent of all secretaries being women in 1990 and 98 percent of all workers in the construction trades being men that year.
Since 1975, the proportion of women in the upper ranks of administration and management increased from 5 percent to 11 percent.
Women did better in some occupations than in others. Women engineers made about 90 percent of what their male counterparts did in 1990; policewomen earned 94 percent of what policemen did; woman secretaries made 88 percent;
female farmworkers earned 86 percent; electrical repairwomen, 87 percent;
female financial managers, 67 percent; women butchers and bakers, 64 percent. – Politics and government: The nation`s 127 million women, who make up about 51 percent of the population, remain woefully underrepresented in the halls of government, although more female faces can be found on the back benches of public life. At the rate at which women are being sent to Capitol Hill, it will take 410 years until their percentages match their proportion in the population, according to the Center for the American Woman and Politics at Rutgers University.
– Health and social issues: In general, women are marrying and having children later than their mothers did, are increasingly contracting AIDS and breast cancer and are more likely than ever before to live alone.
Still, women continue to outlive men. A baby girl born in 1988 is expected to outlive by seven years a boy born at the same time.
