AUGUSTA – While Maine has been working for years to shrink the gender gap in pay and in various occupations, a new study indicates the state ranks eighth in the nation.

The University of Massachusetts study ranked Maine second in New England.

“It certainly is good news when comparing us to the rest of New England,” said Labor Commissioner Laura Fortman. “The researchers have looked at the issue a little differently than we have, but they applied the same factors to all the states, and we look pretty good compared to some other states.”

Still, Fortman said, even with progress, her department estimates that on average a woman in Maine doing the same job as a man still gets 74 percent of his pay. The UMass study indicates a higher figure – 84 percent – because it uses methodology that only makes full-time to full-time comparisons.

“That leaves out a lot of women that work part time or hold two part-time jobs to make ends meet,” Fortman said.

Sharon Barker, director of the Women’s Resource Center at the University of Maine, said when part-time workers are figured in, most of them are women, and the wage gap increases.

“Maine has had a concerted effort for several years now – eight or nine years – to get women into occupations that they have never been in,” she said, “and many of these are higher-paying jobs than the traditional jobs they have been in.”

Barker said road construction jobs are an area where she has seen a significant increase in women in the work force. She said that when an effort to encourage women to seek jobs in nontraditional occupations was started in the late 1990s, women made up about 2 percent of the road construction workers in Maine and in the nation.

She said the most recent numbers show that women make up 11 percent of the road construction workers in the state.

“The rest of the nation is still at just about 2 percent,” she said, “so this is an area we can point to where we have had progress, and, unfortunately, the rest of the country has not.”

The researchers concluded it would be too difficult to derive an “apples to apples” comparison if part-time workers of both genders were included in the computation.

“Part-time employment accounts for a larger share of women’s employment than men’s, and not all part-time work can be classified as ‘involuntary,'” they wrote. “Among the employed women in our sample, 82 percent are employed full time.

In contrast, among the employed men in our sample, 96 percent are employed full time. Therefore, wage estimates are restricted to full-time employees to make women’s wage estimates comparable to men’s.”

Fortman does believe the methodology is valid and does provide a valid state-to-state comparison. She said that pay gap is one reason why there has been a major effort to get women into nontraditional jobs for women, like the construction industry.

“We have been involved for several years in efforts to encourage women and girls to consider occupations that have few women,” she said.

Census data indicate there are 225 job categories in which women make up less than 30 percent of the workers. By contrast there are only 88 job categories in which men make up less than 30 percent of the workers.

According to the census, there are no female roofers, petroleum engineers or masons in the state, along with 27 other occupations.

“It takes about a 30 percent level of penetration into a profession or occupation to get a critical mass that opens up a field to women,” Barker said. “That takes time to accomplish.”

Both Fortman and Barker say there clearly has been some progress in Maine in attracting women into nontraditional occupations, but it will take years to eliminate the gaps.

Both acknowledge the gap in some occupations may never be reduced enough to reach the critical mass Barker sees as necessary to really open up a field to women.

“We have an annual job conference here for high school girls that has grown very successful,” Barker said. “In fact, it has attracted so much interest, we are thinking about holding a second conference every year. I would like to see similar conferences all across the state. I think then we would see some real movement.”