Chattanooga women outearning area men

Chattanooga is one of the few cities where women earn more than men.

A new study of wage data found that in 2013 the typical female worker in Chattanooga made $103 more annually than her male counterpart. Among the nation's 368 metropolitan areas, Chattanooga was one of only 22 cities where women outpaced men in average pay.

But the female advantage in Chattanooga wasn't necessarily due to women doing better over time. The relative advantage for female workers came primarily because women's paychecks weren't hit as hard as men's during the Great Recession and its aftermath.

"It may appear that women are doing better, but in many cases it may just be a function of women working in industries that are doing better and that haven't had the wage cuts we've seen in some other industries," said Courtney Miller, an analyst for NerdWallet.com, the online news service which studied the gender pay gap in all U.S. metropolitan areas. "We saw some fairly dramatic geographic differences, and much of that undoubtedly reflects the changes in the makeup of the local economy."

Nationwide, the typical woman earned only 79 percent as much as the typical man did in 2013 -- and in some cities like San Francisco median pay for men was 85 percent higher than that for women.

That translates into a loss of about $10,000 each year for the typical woman. But the wage gap nationwide in 2013 was an improvement from 2005, when the median annual income for women who worked full time was 76.6 percent of a man's, and the yearly loss in wages was $11,686 in 2013 dollars.

In metro Chattanooga, the average woman earned 0.3 percent more than the average man in 2013. But the gain for women came entirely from the loss in median pay for male workers since 2005.

Chattanooga's manufacturing-based economy has yet to regain all of the jobs lost since its employment peak nearly a decade ago, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The biggest job losses came in traditionally male-dominated field, such as manufacturing, construction and engineering which tend to pay higher salaries than most other jobs.

The 2009-2010 economic downturn, dubbed the "mancession" because of its disproportionate cuts in higher-paying, male-dominated fields such as construction and manufacturing, cut men's pay more than women's pay, on average, from 2005 to 2013, according to NerdWallet study.

The typical male worker in Chattanooga saw his paycheck shrink in inflation-adjusted wages by more than 17 percent from a median pay of $42,970 in 2005 to a median of $35,504 in 2013.

By comparison, median pay of women workers in Chattanooga, adjusted for inflation, fell 3.3 percent from $36,982 in 2005 to $35,607 in 2013.

From 2005 to 2013, male-dominated manufacturing employment in Chattanooga dropped by nearly 13 percent, or by 5,200 jobs, and construction employment, also filled primarily by men, fell by 21 percent, or 2,400 jobs.

Conversely, education and health care, which employ a bigger share of women, grew by more than 29 percent, or 8,200 jobs from 2005 to 2013 in the 6-county Chattanooga metro area.

In most of the 22 cities like Chattanooga where women earn more than men, median pay was below the U.S. average, Miller said.

In Inglewood, Calif, where women make 120.6 percent of what men do -- the highest relative share -- median earnings are $25,749, which is $4,705 below the U.S. median.

"The gap in wages is complex because income inequality is linked to more than gender," Miller said. "Women and men work different hours, in different industries and they also earn bachelor's degrees at different rates. All of these factors have shifted from 2005 to 2013, making it difficult to determine if cities are seeing a real reduction in inequality or if the changes are coming from differences in education and the jobs that follow -- which influence the wage gap."

Contact Dave Flessner at dflessner@timesfreepress.com or at 757-6340.