Elections? Equal opportunity. Workplace? Not so much.

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When I consider the narrowed field of Democratic presidential candidates, I don’t think that much about them in terms of race or gender. That, to me, is a huge development. Sure, those factors will loom in our final choice. But it’s not everything. And that shows how far we’ve come.

You’d think that if we’re considering a black man and a white woman for the nation’s highest office, we’re concurrently seeing more equality in our nation’s offices. Nope, says this report on WSJ.com about the Bureau of Labor Statistics latest numbers.

In fact, progress for women and minorities in both pay and power has stalled or regressed at many of the U.S.’s biggest companies. This inequality shapes perceptions about who can or should be a leader.

How so?

More than 40 years after job discrimination was outlawed in the U.S., the wage gap between white men and just about everyone else persists. The one exception is Asian-American men, whose median wages were just 1% less than those of white men who worked full-time, year round, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics survey in 2005, the latest year for which this data are available.

Specifically,

Black men, by contrast, earned 74% of the wages of white males; Hispanic men earned 58%.

As for gender,

Women, overall, are substantially lagging behind men in pay. Fulltime female employees earned 77% of all men’s median wages. Breaking it down in terms of race, Asian-American women earned 78% of the median annual pay of white men; white women earned 73%; black women, 63%; and Hispanic women, 52%.

Why do white men continue to outearn everyone else? I think it has to do with some ingrained stereotypes. Dee Dee Myers was just on NPR flogging her new book, Why Women Should Rule the World. She told of being selected as the nation’s first female press secretary under Bill Clinton—a huge get, of course, and one that elated her…until she found out she was earning less, had less authority and would get a smaller office than her predecessor. Another time, she learned she made less than a male colleague who held fewer responsibilities. When she confronted her supervisor, she was told, well, yes, but the man left a higher-paying job to come here, and plus he had a family.

Whatwhatwhat?

Getting a person of color or a woman into the Oval Office is a start. But we’ve clearly got a lot of work to do.