The gender wage gap in the Washington area: A slim difference or a wide margin?

A study by the National Women’s Law Center found that the District had the slimmest gender wage gap in the nation. According to that report, which evaluated pay on a state-by-state basis, women in the District make 90.4 cents for every dollar a man makes. That’s significantly higher than the national average of 77 cents.

[…]
Government workers or prospective employees can often leverage such information in pay negotiations, said Fatima Goss Graves, vice president for education and employment at NWLC.

[…]
“You can’t break out the champagne, because the gap between white men and women of color is really just disturbing,”said Goss Graves.

[…]
The findings of the NWLC study indicated an even greater divide: African American women in the District made 53 cents on the dollar, and Hispanic women made 44 cents on the dollar. This means that while it concluded that the District had the smallest pay gap for women overall, it has the third largest pay gap for each group of minority women.

Goss Graves said this is largely because of what she called “occupational segregation,” in which minority women are overrepresented in low- and minimum-wage jobs.