Majority Minority

ALTHOUGH 51% of Americans are female, women face many of the problems of a minority. Only 1% of the nation's engineers are women, 3% of its lawyers, 7% of its doctors. For the same jobs, women's pay is often less than half that of men, and nearly one-fifth of employed women with a B.A. have jobs in such categories as clerks, factory workers and cooks. Moreover, the status of American women is, in many ways, deteriorating:

-- Median wages and salaries of fully employed men were $4,713 in 1957, as compared with $3,008 for women. In 1968, men's income had risen to about $7,800, or 65%, while women's had gone up to $4,550, or 51%. The gap is widening.

-- In the past ten years women have lost 50 seats in state legislatures. Margaret Chase Smith is the lone woman in the U.S. Senate, and there are only ten Congresswornen, compared with 17 in 1960.

-- In 1879, women held more than a third of the faculty positions in colleges and universities. By the 1960s, that ratio had dropped to less than a fourth. The proportion of women will probably dwindle even further as the new flood of Ph.D.s enters the teaching market. In the 1920s women received 15% of the nation's doctorates. The percentage is now down to 12.6.

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