Susan Estrich recently wrote a column on women’s wages compared to men’s. A lot of you probably remember the buttons from the late 70s and early 80s that said “$0.69″ — the amount, at the time, that women earned for every dollar earned by a man in the same job.

Since then, we made progress. Slow, small progress, but progress, until sometime in the mid-1990s, when we hit $0.75.

However, according to Estrich, more recent trends are cause for concern:

According to Labor Department data, women with college degrees who are between 36 and 45 earned 74.7 cents on the dollar last year, DOWN a penny from 10 years ago.

Women with high school educations are still making 75% of what their male peers make, which is obviously less than what most of us with college degrees earn, but the whole picture is ugly.

The fact that we’re losing ground really took me by surprise.

I assumed that, since the 1970s and the “$0.69″ buttons, we’d been slowly creeping towards equality. I didn’t think we were there yet, but I would have guessed that we were in the high 80s, not less than 75%.

What I really find distressing and hard to think about in all of this, though, is the implications for lesbian families. Are we going to be able to afford things like college tuition etc at the same rate as straight families? How could we?

Let’s do some example math:

Couple A: Mr and Mrs AAA, each college educated. To keep the math simple, Mr AAA makes $100,000 per year. He and Mrs AAA met in college, with the same major and similar grades. She earns Estrich’s average of 74.7% of what he earns, or $74,700, for a combined household income of $174,700. (I never said we were feeling sorry for the couples in this example.)

Couple B: Mrs and Mrs QQQ, actually went to college with the AAAs. They all hung out and studied together. Both of the Mrs QQQ earn $74,700, for a combined household income of $149,400, which turns out to be only 85.5% of the AAA’s household income. (Still a nice income, but are QQQs really worth 14.5% less than the AAAs?)

Over time, this problem gets worse:

If the AAAs were to save that money every year for 10 years, even if they only earned 4% (a very conservative figure), at the end of the 10 years they would have $353,354.87 more than their lesbian friends. In 20 years at 5%, the straight couple is up almost a million dollars: $945,525.50.

That’s a lot of tutors, summer camps, college education, special coaches or classes, unpaid internships funded by parents, etc.

Over the course of a 40 year career, using the average annual rate of return for the stock market between 1892 – 1997, 7%, Mrs and Mrs QQQ under-earn their friends by $5,783,175.90.

I know, they wouldn’t all be earning the same salary over all that time, but trying to figure out the math on that is more than I’m up to right now. And the easy math still makes the point; I suspect that the real world version would actually be more dramatic, because Mr AAAs numbers would keep getting further apart from his wife’s or the QQQs.

Estrich makes two general suggestions for addressing the pay gap:

But there are two obvious answers to this – other than passive acceptance, that is. One is to look hard at the pay scales, and recognize that part of the reason certain specialties make less is not because they’re easier or less important, or even require less training, but because there are more women doing them. Another is to recruit more women to the high-paying ones.

On a societal level, sure. But easier said than done. On a “but what about my family?” level, kinda empty.

What do you think we should do? Either kind of suggestion is more than welcome.