Q. What is gender wage discrimination? A. Gender wage discrimination occurs when men and women are not paid equal wages for substantially equal work. Many people believe that the wage gap is a good measure of the extent of gender wage discrimination.
	Q. Has this wage gap been reduced since the implementation of the Equal Pay Act and the Civil Rights Act? A. The gap between men's and women's average earnings is still wide after more than a generation since the Equal Pay Act of 1963 and the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which together barred employment and wage discrimination. In 1999, women's median weekly earnings for full-time workers were 76.5 percent of men's--a gender wage gap of 23.5 cents for every dollar earned by the median man.
	Q. Are these wage differences due to discrimination? A. Wage discrimination accounts for at most only about one-fourth of the gap, with the remainder due to differences between men and women in important determinants of wages such as hours worked, experience, training and occupations. Even this one-fourth of the gap may have less to do with wage discrimination than with the accumulated effects of shorter hours and interrupted careers on women's earnings and promotion prospects.
	Q. Will the gap ever close on the wage difference? A. One way to gain insight into the unmeasured importance of childbearing is to look at the wage gap for age groups that are less likely to have children. Data show that the hourly gender wage gap for women as a whole is smallest--5.8 cents in 1998--for those aged 18-24. Additional studies indicate that among those who are aged 27 to 33 and have never had a child, women's median hourly earnings are 98 percent of men's, a gender wage gap of only 2 cents. Therefore, as long as people choose to have children, there will likely still be a gap between the average earnings of men and women.

The content for Q & A was adapted from "The Gender Wage Gap and Wage Discrimination: Illusion or Reality?" which was written by Howard J. Wall, research officer at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, and appeared in the October 2000 issue of The Regional Economist, a St. Louis Fed publication.