earnings resulted from "discrimination," or unequal payments for similar characteristics, while less than one-fifth of the earnings gap reflected differences in individual and job characteristics (Tienda, Smith, & Ortiz 205). Even after controlling for such variables as education, age, position level, and job tenure, women's salaries average only 72 to 88 percent of men's salaries (Trentham & Larwood 1). Although the occupational and educational achievements of women have kept pace with the men's and in fact have exceeded that of the men, the ratio of female to male earnings has declined from 0.39 to 0.38 (Featherman & Hauser 480). This is not a major decrease in the difference between male and female earnings considering all the gains they have made since the time they entered the workplace.
             Even though individual and job characteristics do not account for all of the wage discrimination, there are several reasons why it still exists. One reason why this wage discrimination exists is because labor market discrimination by sex still exists. Labor market discrimination is when "two equally qualified individuals are treated differently solely on the basis of their sex" (Marini 358). This discrimination usually affects the hiring of women for jobs that are considered to be socially inappropriate for them. Employers who hold this view hire women into predominantly female occupations and this results in the crowding of women into a limited number of occupations. Darity Jr. and Mason state that there is strong evidence of occupational crowding by gender in the United States and nearly half of the women in the United States would have to change occupations to have equal gender representation in all occupations (69). Some researchers have argued that the crowding of women into a small number of occupations inflates the labor supply for those occupations, and leads to lower wages for women (McLaughlin 909). Thus, the crowding of women ...