As in the past, too, male chemists typically make more than their female colleagues. However, this comparison is incomplete. Similarly, nearly two-thirds of Ph.D. chemists in industry who are women obtained their baccalaureate degrees less than twenty years ago, but only a little more than a third of the men with a Ph.D. are so freshly fledged. This experience bias can be eliminated by statistical manipulation of the data, using mean rather than median salaries. Even when this is done, however, salaries of women in industry have tended to fall short of those of men by about 10 percent during the past decade or more.
Older women seem to be especially at a salary disadvantage.
One reason women chemists are likely, as a group, to earn less than men is that fewer of them, proportionally, work in management positions. These are the jobs that are the highest paying for industrial chemists. More than half of industrial Ph.D. chemists hold jobs predominantly in applied research. Overall, a fifth of the chemists employed by industrial firms are women. But only 8 percent of them hold management positions.