Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SATURDAY, October 15, 1994                   TAG: 9410170065
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A3   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

WORKING WOMEN FEEL CHEATED

Based on more than 250,000 questionnaires received over four months, the survey by the Women's Bureau of the Department of Labor also found that working women mentioned stress as a serious problem more often than any other obstacle.

And many women, in very different fields, complained of discrimination. An Alabama coal miner, who said she was the first woman to be hired in a Birmingham mine, reported that she earned about $20,000 a year less than the men with comparable experience.

A Milwaukee woman with a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering said male co-workers with less education got the challenging work, and a Maryland woman in a three-person shipping and receiving department told how two male co-workers were paid more but had less accountability.

``The concern about discrimination and equal pay surprised me,'' said Karen Nussbaum, director of the Women's Bureau.

``The popular wisdom had been that we don't talk about things that way anymore, but clearly it is the way women talk about it. I was also surprised by the consensus that emerged. We tend to think of training as a blue-collar issue, child care as a low-income issue, the glass ceiling as something professional women care about and discrimination as a concern for women of color, but each of these issues cut across all the lines.''

In 1993, government figures show, women earned 71 cents for every dollar earned by a man, up from 61 cents in 1978.

Still, nearly four out of five women said that they liked or loved their jobs - and only 4 percent said they disliked their work or found it ``totally miserable.''

For the Women's Bureau survey, known as Working Women Count!, questionnaires were distributed through more than a thousand businesses, community organizations, labor unions, newspapers and magazines, and more than 250,000 women returned the questionnaires from May to August.

Because that was not a scientific sample, the Women's Bureau also conducted a telephone survey in June, asking a nationally representative random sample of 1,200 women the same questions, to provide a benchmark for evaluating the overall responses. The margin of sampling error was given as plus or minus 5 percentage points.

Women in both the scientific and popular samples said their top priorities for changes were improved pay and health insurance. And the No. 1 issue women said they wanted to bring to the president's attention was the difficulty of balancing work and family.