Ah, graduation -- that time of optimism, of looking to the future and its possibilities. Of dreaming big.
For girls now finishing high school, the future has never looked brighter. Many will go on to college. Women comprised 55 percent of college students in 2005. They'll be equal to the men at their schools, paying the same tuition and taking the same classes. They'll be capable of becoming anything.
That's certainly what Pace University sophomore Liz Funk believes. The 20-year-old already has a contract from a major publisher for a book about overachieving girls, and she can't imagine that she'll ever earn less than a future husband will.
But unless today's women make some changes, that's exactly what may well happen. This goes beyond that conventional salary-disparity culprit, workplace discrimination. If Funk and her female classmates don't prosper as much as their male colleagues do, it will probably be because they didn't dream rich enough dreams.
As they head into the working world, most of this year's female college grads will never be equal to their male colleagues again. Last month, the American Association of University Women reported that in the first year after graduating, women working full time make 20 percent less on average than their male classmates.
That's certainly the fate of one young graduate from Tulane University. Laden with honors and boasting killer GRE scores, she is hoping to get hired as an intern in psychology, at a salary of about $30,000 a year. Her more business-oriented classmates -- mostly male, as she recalls -- are already making more than twice that.
The conventional wisdom assumes that employers are discriminating against young women, despite the laws against it. And some of the disparity -- about 5 percent -- does appear to be at least partly discrimination. But most of it isn't. Somewhere during their four years in college, women develop into candidates for the world of work with 15 percent less market value than men.
Why does this happen? It's not as though the women are 15 percent dumber. After all, they enter college with better grades and graduate with better grades. Nor is it self-inflicted, driven by women who opt out to care for children or pick up socks. Most of the competing workers are single and childless and have no gaps in their nascent résumés.
What the AAUW report reveals is that, at almost every step of the way, women could make decisions that would keep them even with their male classmates. But they don't.
The biggest decision any student keeping an eye on the bottom line can make is the choice of a major. According to the AAUW report, women who major in education make 60 percent of what female engineers make in their first year of work. But far more women still choose education over engineering.
Despite the talk of discrimination, the same disparity holds true for the guys. (A male accounting trainee just out of the University of Albany is making close to six figures, while another young man I know, who has a degree in anthropology and political science from Brandeis, is hoping it won't be too cold in Boston this winter so he can live on his $20,000 internship salary.) But here's a difference: Unlike the female Tulane psych grad, the Brandeis guy is thinking about his long-term income and going to law school.
Even within the same major, students can prepare for the jobs that pay better. Teaching math (which many women choose) pays less than working for a computer company or going into business. And there is the choice of employer. Even when men and women pick the same majors and go into the same fields, the woman who chooses local government or nonprofit sectors starts out at a lower pay level than the guy who decides to get into the market economy or take a federal job.
Liz Funk, to her credit, has already figured out that she'd be better off working as a staff writer at a magazine, earning benefits, than trying to make it out of college as a freelancer. But she's an exception.
The situation in the first year out of college is bad enough, but the decisions women make in college set in motion a process that will accelerate until, 10 years after graduating, they are making only 69 percent of what men make. That's because, if women earn less from the outset, it's an easy choice as to who will bear the responsibility for child care and housekeeping when they start a family.
Stay-at-home moms often talk about the loving husbands who would gladly take time off to be with the kids, except that they earn the larger salary. But men's making more money is not a fact of nature; it's a result of the choices adults make starting out. And the crucial difference is not gender; it's mind-set.
I interviewed a young male classics major just as he was setting out for a summer trip to study Greek philosophy before his junior year. Classics was his "passion," he told me. But his plan after college is to do something in finance. He is not prepared to experience, as he put it, the "culture shock" of poverty after his affluent upbringing.
Similarly, the male accountant from the University of Albany didn't even think about majoring in accounting until he got a scholarship in that subject because his math scores were so high. As a result, "I don't have a lot of debt," he told me proudly.
By contrast, the Tulane psych major was surprised to learn what bankers earn 10 years out. "I guess I'll end up making a lot less than half," she concluded, laughing nervously. "It's OK. It is what it is."
Certainly someone needs to teach math and to work for nonprofits and local government. And, of course, money isn't everything. The Tulane psych major won a significant award for her community organizing before she even left school. She's frustrated with the "unfairness" of her classmates' earning so much more when she is "helping people." But it's alarming when the altruism is so heavily concentrated in one sex. And colleges offer precious little career counseling to tell women a different story from the one society has always told them.
And in the end, college-educated women often don't make lasting careers of mathematical pedagogy or become the head of the Ford Foundation. They weigh their 69 percent paychecks against the money their business- or computer science-oriented spouses bring in, and they leave their jobs, in whole or in part. Even the high-achieving Liz Funk thinks that writing would be a great job to do from home after the babies come. When I asked her how she planned to continue with infants crying for attention, she responded that she has screaming roommates now.
Maybe, on the whole, women just aren't as interested in worldly success as men are. According to AAUW, 25 percent more men than women go to "highly selective" schools. In that informative first year in the work world, 10 percent more men are working full time for one employer rather than holding several part-time or successive full-time jobs, as women are more apt to do.
Studies show that women don't ask for as much money as men do and that they're less willing to take the higher risks that often accompany higher-paying jobs.
If women just don't want to become engineers or run big firms, well, it's a free country. But the social consequences of these decisions are not positive.