Career Spotlight: Men's wages fall behind
If you didn't buy your dad a tie for Father's Day, you might want to run out and buy him a belated gift. While everyone's been having a rough time in the workplace recently, men, especially, have been taking it on the chin.
Women (who, admittedly, still earn less than men on average) have at least been getting real raises. Men haven't. The average married man, for example, made $37,293 in 2003, the last year for which statistics are available. He was making the inflation-adjusted equivalent of $38,147 in 2001.
That's bad enough for the men themselves. But it also bodes ill for their families, especially the sons. Belying America's myth of class mobility, studies show that a son's earnings are highly correlated to his father's. The research is mixed on daughters.
So how can you help your dad (and, thus, yourself)? Well, surveys indicate that career success is linked to professional dress. Thus, a tie isn't such a bad gift after all.
But a credit at a local community college would be even better. Education is one of the single biggest predictors of career success. And one of the reason men are falling behind financially is that they are falling behind educationally. Right now, there are more than 8.4 million women enrolled in some kind of college course, yet only 6.2 million men.
Ties are good for your career. But mortarboards are better.
Senior writer Kim Clark covers the workplace for U.S. News.