HERE'S an old riddle: a boy and his father are in a car crash and the father is killed instantly. The boy is airlifted to the best hospital in the region and prepped for emergency surgery by one of the top surgeons in the country. The surgeon rushes in, sees the boy, and says "I can't operate on this patient. He's my son." Who is the surgeon?
When I heard this riddle as a teenager back in 1962, I was totally stumped. Had the boy been adopted, and the surgeon was the birth father?
It never occurred to me that the surgeon might be his mother.
How far we have come. Last month I attended my son's graduation from medical school, where more than half the members of his graduating class were female.
And yet last year, when the Boston University researchers Mikaela Wapman and Deborah Belle posed the same riddle to students there, 86 percent of those who had never heard the riddle still could not figure out that the surgeon was the boy's mother! It is an ironic indication of how far we have come in another direction that a higher number of students guessed that the boy had two gay fathers.
There is no denying that we have made great progress toward gender equality. Tomorrow is the 50th anniversary of the Equal Pay Act, which was signed into law on June 10, 1963. At that time, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research, women earned less than 60 percent of what men made. According to Philip Cohen, a University of Maryland sociologist, a female college graduate at that time, working full time year round, made less than the average male high school graduate.
Today women earn about 80 percent of what men make for full-time work, and education now outweighs gender as a determinant of wage rates. Because women now earn the majority of bachelor's, master's and doctoral degrees, we can expect the wage gap to narrow further in the future.
But it's not all good news, according to a report released Friday by the Council on Contemporary Families, of which I am co-chairwoman. It is a collection of papers assessing the progress toward gender equity in the last half-century. In one, by the economist Heidi Shierholz, we learn that more than a quarter of the convergence in wages has been a result of men's wage losses rather than women's wage gains. Even so, according to the economist Stephanie Seguino, the remaining wage gap means that on average, a woman has to work 52 years to earn what a man makes in 40 years. And at every educational level, women continue to earn less than men with the same credentials.
New calculations by the sociologist Leslie McCall show that most of the recent wage progress for women has occurred in the top 20 percent of earners (although they remain greatly underrepresented in top corporate leadership positions, as the Facebook executive Sheryl Sandberg reminds us).
Much of the progress that women have made in income parity has gone to childless women. Motherhood, writes the sociologist Joya Misra, is now a greater predictor of wage inequality than gender in the United States. According to her research, conducted with Michelle Budig at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, motherhood imposes about twice the earning penalty in the United States compared with what women face in countries that have expansive publicly financed child care systems.
But the motherhood penalty is not just related to the tendency of mothers to cut back their work hours because of lack of child care or other family support systems that allow them to continue working full time. The sociologist Shelley Correll at Stanford University points out that mothers earn 5 percent less per hour, per child, than comparable workers who are childless women. They are also less likely to be hired if they leave or try to change jobs.
Between 2004 and 2006, Professor Correll, then at Cornell, with her colleagues there sent fake résumés to employers who advertised high-status job openings. When a résumé indicated that the applicant was an officer in an elementary school parent-teacher association, thereby implying that she was a mother, employers were half as likely to call her back.
Today issues of gender equity are more complex than the blatant discrimination that the Equal Pay Act and its follow-up legislation addressed. We still lack comparable work legislation, so that jobs traditionally held by females are paid less even when they involve equal or more skills and training than traditionally male jobs. Both men and women still doubt women's capabilities, as the responses to the riddle show.
But we also face increasing inequality among women, so we need to not just hammer against the glass ceiling but also to raise the bottom floor on which so many low-income women remain stuck.
Stephanie Coontz teaches family studies at The Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, and co-chairs the Council on Contemporary Families. Her most recent book is A Strange Stirring: The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s (BasicBooks).