Gender Pay Gap, Once Narrowing, Is Stuck in Place Throughout the 1980s and early '90s, women of all economic levels—poor, middle class and rich—were steadily gaining ground on their male counterparts in the work force. By the mid-'90s, women earned more than 75 cents for every dollar in hourly pay that men did, up from 65 cents just 15 years earlier. Largely without notice, however, one big group of women has stopped making progress: those with a four-year college degree. The gap between their pay and the pay of male college graduates has actually widened slightly since the mid-'90s. For women without a college education, the pay gap with men has narrowed only slightly over the same span. These trends suggest that all the recent high-profile achievements—the first female secretary of state, the first female lead anchor of a nightly newscast, the first female president of Princeton, and, next month, the first female speaker of the House—do not reflect what is happening to most women, researchers say. A decade ago, it was possible to imagine that men and women with similar qualifications might one day soon be making nearly identical salaries. Today, that is far harder to envision. 'Nothing happened to the pay gap from the mid-1950s to the late '70s,' said Francine D. Blau, an economist at Cornell and a leading researcher of gender and pay. 'Then the '80s stood out as a period of sharp increases in women's pay. And it's much less impressive after that.' Last year, college-educated women between 36 and 45 years old, for example, earned 74.7 cents in hourly pay for every dollar that men in the same group did, according to Labor Department data analyzed by the Economic Policy Institute. A decade earlier, the women earned 75.7 cents. The reasons for the stagnation are complicated and appear to include both discrimination and women's own choices. The number of women staying home with young children has risen recently, according to the Labor Department the increase has been sharpest among highly educated mothers, who might otherwise be earning high salaries. The pace at which women are flowing into highly paid fields also appears to have slowed. Like so much about gender and the workplace, there are at least two ways to view these trends. One is that women, faced with most of the burden for taking care of families, are forced to choose jobs that pay less—or, in the case of stay-at-home mothers, nothing at all. If the government offered day-care programs similar to those in other countries or men spent more time caring for family members, women would have greater opportunity to pursue whatever job they wanted, according to this view. The other view is that women consider money a top priority less often than men do. Many may relish the chance to care for children or parents and prefer jobs, like those in the nonprofit sector, that offer more opportunity to influence other people's lives. Both views, economists note, could have some truth to them. 'Is equality of income what we really want?' asked Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who has written about the revolution in women's work over the last generation. 'Do we want everyone to have an equal chance to work 80 hours in their prime reproductive years? Yes, but we don't expect them to take that chance equally often.' Whatever role their own preferences may play in the pay gap, many women say they continue to battle subtle forms of lingering prejudice. Indeed, the pay gap between men and women who have similar qualifications and work in the same occupation—which economists say is one of the purest measures of gender equality—has barely budged since 1990. Today, the discrimination often comes from bosses who believe they treat everyone equally, women say, but it can still crea