NEW YORK – Women who want to earn more on Wall Street than their male colleagues have one reliable option. They can set up a shoe-shine stand in Lower Manhattan.

Female personal care and service workers, which include butlers, valets, house sitters and shoe shiners, earned $1.02 for every $1 their male counterparts made in 2010, according to census data compiled by Bloomberg.

That job category, which covers 38,210 full-time workers, was the only one of 265 major occupations where the median female salary exceeded that of men.

The six jobs with the largest gender gap in pay and at least 10,000 men and 10,000 women were in the Wall Street-heavy financial sector: insurance agents, managers, clerks, securities sales agents, personal advisers and other specialists.

Advanced-degree professions are no better equality predictors. Female doctors made 63 cents for every $1 earned by male physicians and surgeons. Female chief executives earned 74 cents for every $1 made by men.

The Census Bureau figures underscore the lack of financial progress made in the generation since women began leaving the home and moving into the workforce in large numbers.

While the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression initially hit women less severely, their median earnings still trailed men in 505 of 525 occupations tracked by the federal government.

“We don’t see the pay gap closing,” Ilene Lang, president and chief executive officer of Catalyst, a nonprofit advocacy group in New York, said in a telephone interview. “It’s persistent.”

With full-time female employees now better educated, less likely to be married and more likely to delay childbirth, the median-pay disparity for all occupations has shrunk to 77 cents for every $1 earned by men from 61 cents during the last 50 years, census figures show.