Women's wages rising faster than men's

WASHINGTON, Oct. 17 (UPI) -- Wages for female U.S. workers have risen faster than those for men over the past two years, statistics indicate.

Data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the wages of the median woman -- at the statistical middle -- rose 3.2 percent when adjusted for inflation, while the wages of the median man rose only 2 percent, The Wall Street Journal reported Saturday.

The Journal noted that the typical full-time female worker earned $657 a week in the third quarter, while the typical man earned $812 a week. However, men are still more likely to be unemployed -- the BLS data showed that male jobless rate is 11 percent while for women it was 8.4 percent.

"This is a situation where everyone's losing but men are losing more, and that's not really a victory for women," Heidi Shierholz of the Economic Policy Institute told the newspaper.

"Male employment has been in relative decline for some time, and I would not be at all surprised that the industries and occupations in which males are most concentrated have been hit relatively hard by the recession," added David Autor, an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.