Earnings of men and women: a look at specific occupations

As a result of growing concern over the persistence of earnings differences between men and women, policymakers, researchers, and others have become increasingly interested in obtaining earnings data by sex at the finest level of occupational detail possible. Wide-ranging information of this nature can generally be collected only through a household survey such as the Current Population Survey (CPS). Until 1978, reliable estimates of earnings from the cps could generally be presented only for aggregated groupings of occupations because of the limited number of sample observations in many occupations. However, changes in the collection of the CPS earnings data since 1979 have made it possible to construct annual average estimates to examine the earnings for a much larger number of detailed occupations.' This report presents 1981 annual average data on the number of men and women working full time in each occupation and on their usual weekly earnings . Earnings data are shown only where wage and salary employment is at least 50,000, because estimates of earnings derived from a smaller base are considered too unreliable to publish. For the most part, this allows earnings comparisons at the Census Bureau's "threedigit" level of classification of occupations .z However,