If you’re making more than $250,000 in the commercial real estate industry, you're most likely a man.

A new, in-depth comparison of women and men in the commercial real estate field finds the pay gap narrowing, but men are still much more likely to be making the really big bucks.

The survey found that 31 percent of men and 11 percent of women in the commercial real estate industry reported more than $250,000 in total annual compensation in 2010. In 2005, 34 percent of men and 8 percent of women were in that top-tier wage bracket.

On the other hand, 28 percent of women but just 12 percent of men reported that they take home less than $75,000 in the most recent study. In 2005, 32 percent of women and 11 percent of men said they were taking home less than $75,000.

“The gap definitely still exists,” said Kristin Blount, senior vice president and partner with Colliers Meredith and Grew in Boston, and current president of the CREW Network, an industry networking organization for women.

The research is based on a survey of nearly 3,000 commercial real estate professionals in fields ranging from brokers to engineers, and it uses comparisons from a similar study done in 2005. It was sponsored by the CREW Network and prepared by researchers at Cornell University Program in Real Estate.

The narrowing pay gap can be partly seen as a sign that women are making headway in the most lucrative positions and commercial real estate fields.

But the researchers said the changes may also partly be explained by the recession, which may have hit men in the profession harder than women. That's because, especially at the upper pay levels, more of men's pay is coming from things like bonuses and commissions that are more likely to drop in a difficult market.

“I think it’s probably a little bit of both,” Blount said.

Still, the survey found that women’s pay was lower even when the women were the same age and had the same years of experience as their male counterparts.

The recession has been hardest on the millions of workers who lost their jobs, but that doesn’t mean it’s been easy on those who have kept working.

Now some reprieve may be coming.

Three-quarters of the companies that instituted pay freezes in the past 18 months have either lifted them or plan to by the end of the year, according to a new survey of 239 employers done by Buck Consultants, a Xerox subsidiary.

The survey also found that 70 to 80 percent of employees can expect a pay raise this year, and that figure should reach around 90 percent next year.

That’s a big improvement over 2009, when 50 to 60 percent of employees received raises.

But don’t start dreaming about a new house or car yet. The survey found that salary increases will average 2.8 percent in 2011, up from from an average 2.5 percent this year and 1.8 percent in 2009.

“Employees shouldn’t expect big gains in pay until there is a sustained economic recovery and significant improvement in the unemployment rate,” Tom Burke, principal at Buck Consultants, said in a release.

It’s hard being a woman in a male-dominated world (just ask a woman about this). Guys are generally paid more than their female peers and they don’t even have to go through childbirth. But should women really have to pay more for being overweight?

Researchers at George Washington University have found that a man pays $2,646 annually for being obese (on such things as medical expenses, loss of wages or diminished productivity), while a woman pays almost twice that amount ($4,879).

The overall annual costs of being overweight are $524 and $432 for women and men, respectively. When they added the value of lost life to these costs the researchers found that obese men must pay $6,518 while the cost to women is $8,365.

All this is disheartening enough for women, but it’s made all the more depressing when you factor in the findings of another study, this time from the University of Florida, which finds that the skinnier a woman is, the more she gets paid.

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Separate studies of 11,253 Germans and 12,686 U.S. residents found that very thin women (who weigh 25 pounds less than the group’s norm) earned an average $15,572 a year more than women of “normal” weight, according to the study published in the Journal of Applied Psychology the findings of which are reported in The Wall Street Journal.

For overweight men, however, the trend is reversed. Overweight guys tend to earn more than their skinnier colleagues, the study found. Thin guys earned $8,437 less than men of average weight, and they were consistently rewarded for getting heavier. The highest pay point, on average, was reached for guys who weighed a strapping 207 pounds, the Journal said.

Maybe employers will start examining their assumptions about employees’ weight? Fat chance.

Feel like you can never get ahead of your bills? If you’re in a family with a stay-at-home mom, your gut feeling may be right.

A new report from the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, “Women and the Economy 2010,” finds that married couples with a working wife saw income grow by 1.12 percent per year above inflation, on average, between 1983 and 2008.

That’s not much of a gain, but consider this: According to calculations by the Joint Economic Committee, families where the wife stayed home actually saw their annual incomes decrease by 0.22 percent each year on average, when including the impact of inflation.

Again, that’s not much of a decline, but it’s definitely worse than what you’d like to see – an income on the rise.

The report puts it bluntly: “Families need a working wife in order to see their incomes grow.”

The fact is, many more moms are in the work force now than a generation ago. According to the report, 78 percent of moms with kids ages 6 to 17 were in the work force in 2008, compared with 68 percent in 1984. In addition, 64 percent of moms with kids under age 6 were working in 2008, compared with 52 percent in 1984.

In 2009, the report found that 66 percent of employed moms with kids under 18 years old were married in household where both parents work. The other 34 percent were the families’ sole breadwinner, in most cases because they were single parents.

Women now make up around half the work force, although that’s partly because so many men have lost their jobs in the past few years.

The Great Recession that began in December 2007 has taken the hardest toll on traditionally male-dominated industries such as construction and manufacturing, and jobs continue to be scarce in virtually every field. The Labor Department reported Thursday that new jobless claims fell sharply last week but remain much higher than they would be in a healthy economy.

Do you feel like your family can never get ahead of the bills? Why?