Atlanta top city for Gen Y women earners

Atlanta top city for Gen Y women earners
September 3, 2010
Atlanta Business Chronicle

There are more college-educated, unmarried and childless women than men taking higher-paid knowledge-based jobs in Atlanta, according to data from Research Advisors.

Atlanta has a 121 percent ratio of median full-time wages for single childless women, when compared with their male counterparts. That puts Atlanta at the top among American cities for that female demographic.

Research Advisors said for almost every community where the median income for young single women without children has clearly exceeded men, at least one of the following characteristics, if not two or three of them, exists:

The community has a heavy dependence on knowledge-based jobs, which in turn serves as a magnet for well-educated women.

The community has majority-minority population, since Hispanic and African-American women are almost twice as likely as their male peers to earn bachelor and graduate degrees.

The community has seen a decimation of the manufacturing employment base, making it more difficult for men without similarly high levels of education to earn solid incomes.

However, on average, a woman working full-time in America still earns about 80 percent of what men earn, a figure that has held steady for most of the past decade.