Department of Labor Logo United States Department of Labor
Dot gov

The .gov means it's official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you're on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Earnings by educational attainment and sex, 1979 and 2002

October 23, 2003

Women with less than a high school diploma earned $323 per week in 2002, compared with $809 for those with a college degree.

Median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by educational attainment and sex, 1979 and 2002
[Chart data—TXT]

Among men, high school dropouts had earnings of $421 a week, compared with $1,089 for college graduates.

At all levels of education, women have fared better than men with respect to earnings growth over the 1979 to 2002 period.

Although both women and men with less than a high school diploma have experienced a decline in inflation-adjusted earnings since 1979, women’s earnings have fallen significantly less—from $348 to $323 (down 7.2 percent), compared with a 27.2 percent drop from $578 to $421 for men.

Earnings for women with college degrees have increased by one-third from $605 to $809 since 1979 on an inflation-adjusted basis, while those of male college graduates have risen by only one-fifth from $908 to $1,089.

These data come from the Current Population Survey. For more information, see "Highlights of Women’s Earnings in 2002," BLS Report 972 (PDF 188K). Earnings data in this article are annual average median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers 25 years of age and older expressed in constant 2002 dollars.

SUGGESTED CITATION

Bureau of Labor Statistics, U.S. Department of Labor, The Economics Daily, Earnings by educational attainment and sex, 1979 and 2002 at https://www.bls.gov/opub/ted/2003/oct/wk3/art04.htm (visited March 29, 2024).

OF INTEREST
spotlight
Recent editions of Spotlight on Statistics


triangle