[Excerpt] Women who work full time, regardless of age, race, or educational attainment, earn less, on average, than men. Overall, in 1998, median weekly earnings of female full-time wage and salary workers were $456 compared to $598 for men. Twenty years earlier the pay differential was even greater, however. In 1979, women who were full-time wage and salary workers had earnings that were only about three-fifths those of men. By 1998, however, women’s earnings were approximately three-quarters those of men.