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New Data On Just How Bad The Gender Pay Gap Is

This article is more than 9 years old.

Earlier this week on the The Daily Show, Jon Stewart cited a new study from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) that predicts women won’t reach pay parity with men until 2058. As guest commentator Kristen Schaal joked, that’s after the expected introduction of the flying car in 2017, predictions that people will be rocketing to Mars by 2030 and the projection that 3D printers will be able to produce a human heart by 2025.

The study, which looks at the gender wage gap in each of the 50 states, shows an even longer wait for pay parity in Wyoming, where it predicts that women’s earnings won’t equal men’s for an astounding 144 years. Louisiana ranks second, with the gender pay gap ending only in 2106, followed by North Dakota in 2104.

To arrive at these numbers researchers at the IWPR, a Washington, DC think tank, used census data and past rates of women’s wage increases to predict the future. They found that rates of progress varied dramatically by state, race and education level.

Women on the East Coast are earning the most compared with their male counterparts. New York has the smallest gender wage gap, with women earning 87.6 cents for every dollar earned by men. Maryland and Washington, DC are close behind with women earning 87.4 cents and 87 cents of each dollar earned by men. The report predicts that Florida women will reach equal pay with men in 2038, before women in any other state. California and Maryland come in second, with pay parity arriving in 2042, according to the report.

Examining the gender wage gap among ethnic groups, the report finds that the gap is widest among Hispanics, with women taking home just 53.8 % of what men earn.

One statistic that both surprises and depresses me: While more women than men enroll in college today, when you look at education levels, the greatest wage gap comes among people with the most schooling under their belts. Women with graduate degrees earn just 69.1% of what men with graduate degrees earn and those with bachelor’s earn 71.4 % of men’s salaries “These data indicate that women need more educational qualifications than men do to secure jobs that pay well,” says the report.

There are a couple of pieces of marginally good news in the report. While men’s wages have stagnated over the last 30 years, from an inflation-adjusted median of $50,096 to $50,033, women’s wages have climbed in that period, from $30,138 to $39,157.

Another bright spot: The gender wage gap narrows among millennials. Women in that age group earn 85.7% of their male counterparts. But you’d think the gap would be smaller, given the report’s finding that more than one in three women in that age group works as a manager or professional, compared with one in four men.

While the IWPR report is carefully researched, using swaths of government data, it doesn’t purport to account for potentially important specifics like hours worked and levels of experience within professions, and, perhaps most important, the professions that women choose. It notes, for instance, that women’s participation in the high-paying STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields still lags men’s. According to the report, women make up only 28.8% of STEM workers. It also doesn’t account for hours worked. A 40-year-old female software developer who leaves every day at 5:45pm to pick up her kids at daycare may not get paid as well as a man in the same job who works until 10pm while his wife handles childcare and cooking. Critics of gender wage gap evidence say these kinds of details are crucial.

But there is another study out this month that gets closer to proving that men make significantly more than women in the same jobs. A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA ) looked at data on more than 290,000 registered nurses between 1988 and 2013. It found dramatic evidence of pay disparity within specialties. For instance male cardiology nurses made an average of $6,000 per year more than women. For nurses who worked in chronic care like managing diabetes or asthma, the disparity was less dramatic but still pronounced, at $3,800 per year. It found a startling pay gap among nurse anesthetists, a field that has more men, about 40%, than other areas of nursing. Men in that profession made an average of $17,290 per year more than women.

Why do such wage disparities persist? Neither study tells us for sure. But we know from other research that women have a tougher time asking for raises than men do. Also, even in a relatively regimented profession like nursing, it’s possible to earn a great deal from overtime, and men may be more likely than women to take on those hours. Female nurses could also lag behind their male counterparts because they’ve taken time off to care for their families and haven’t risen to the same level of seniority. Still, it seems unlikely to me that fewer hours worked explains that huge gap among nurse anesthetists. Sexism, whether overt or unconscious, must play a role. I’m not sure I think it will take us 43 years to catch up to men’s earnings, but this new evidence convinces me that the gender pay gap is real and that it will take time to remedy.