lennhoff@17522.DEC (05/24/85)
********Libation to line eater*********
The following article appeared in the May 23, 1985 Boston Globe.
Reprinted here without permission.
HIGH TECH BIASED TOO, STUDY SAYS
By Jeff Biddulph
Special to the Globe
PALO ALTO, Calif - High Technology, often seen as offering equal
opportunities for women, is just as gender segregated as older industries,
according to a new national study by Stanford University researchers.
"High tech may produce integrated circuts, but it does not necessarily
produce an integrated work force or eliminate the male/female earning
differential," concludes the report, written by Myra Strober and Carolyn
Arnold, researchers at Stanford's Institute for Research on Educational
Finance and Governance.
Women's annual and hourly earnings are less than men's in certain
high-tech fields even after age and level of education are held constant,
according to the report. The researchers, basing their findings on comparisons
of 1970 and 1980 Census data, also said women in technical fields are less
likely to hold managerial or professional-technical positions than women
in non-technical fields.
Men dominate prestigious jobs in the high-paying industries that create
high technology while women are relegated to jobs in the lower paying industries
that use the technology, the report found.
The Stanford study supports similar research that found that in
Massachusetts women in high technology only earn 55 cents for every dollar a
man makes compared with 57 cents in mature industries. That study, reported
in June in the Globe, was conducted by Patricia Madson, research director at
the Center for Massachusetts Data at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.
"The notion is that new occupations, like high technology, are less sex
stereotyped than longer existing occupations and might be more open to
operational integration," Strober said in an interview. "That just is not the
case, at least not for high-tech occupations."
In 1970, women were 2 percent of all engineers in the computer industry
the study found. By 1980, women were only 2 percent of all engineers.
"Thus, in the highest paid, highest prestige computer related operation,
women are virtually absent," the report said.
The situation is similar for women who are computer specialists - the
number of women grew marginally from 20 percent in 1970 to 28 percent in 1980.
In contrast, almost 60 percent of the computer operators and 92 percent
of the data-entry operators in all industries were women. Women also
dominated the less skilled high tech production occupations, with 73 percent
of the assembly jobs held by women.
Meanwhile, women often receive smaller salaries than men even when they
hold the same jobs. Women computer specialists make only about 72 percent
as much as their male counterparts. The pay discrepancy was unchanged from
1970 to 1980, even though the number of computer specialists doubled, and
the number of female specialists nearly tripled.