“Seattle ranks worst for gender pay gap nationally,” blares the KING 5 headline. Expressed as a ratio, the story explains, “women in Seattle make 73 cents for every dollar their male counterparts bring home,” which the National Partnership for Women & Families claims is the absolute worst showing among major metropolitan areas (pdf).  Portland — our usual benchmark — performs six cents better, though as a state, Washington is just middle of the inequity pack, and only one penny off Oregon.

The National Partnership’s numbers are, in fact, from the 2011 American Community Survey, which is a statistical survey done by the U.S. Census. The estimates produced for  2011 show a distinct, sex-based disparity for median income in the Seattle-Tacoma-Bellevue MSA: men working full-time year-round pulled in $60,881 and women, just $44,535. Women do fare slightly better in the city proper, making a median of $49,165.

But the survey also breaks out income into tranches, and by education level, and that’s where it gets even more interesting.

In the Seattle MSA, the largest single group of women working full-time (23.6 percent) made between $35,000 and $50,000 annually. For men, the largest group (23 percent) made $100,000 or more. Just nine percent of women reached that top earner’s bracket.

If you add it up, you see it’s not just a glass ceiling, it’s the proverbial glass pyramid: 45 percent of men made $65,000 or more per year. Just 25 percent of women did. Fully three-quarters of women who put in full-time work made less than $65,000 in 2011. (For the record, margins of error range from plus or minus about $500, men’s median MSA sample, to $1,950, women’s median Seattle-proper sample).

On the education side, absolute inequity increases with educational attainment. The 2011 Seattle MSA estimates, however, were drawn from people 25 years of age or older, who had earnings (not necessarily full-time). Women who didn’t finish high school made about $9,000 less per year than men who dropped out. As high school graduates (or with equivalent), they made $10,500 less. Throw in “some college” and it was more than $14,000 less. Bachelor’s? $29,000 less. Grad school or professional degree? $35,000 less.

In the city of Seattle, women with higher education did slightly better than in the MSA. The top disparity was less still about $21,000 annually, though. High school graduates, though, were neck-and-neck with men, and a gap of “only” $4,000 was visible between men and women with “some college,” before a Bachelor’s degree conferred upon men an $18,000 advantage. (By the way, sex-based inequity persists nationally from job category to job category, with all other things being equal.)