Abby Lane, Fellow

Equal Pay Day provides a moment to take stock of our progress during the 50 years since the passage of the Equal Pay Act: today more women are in the labor force, women are pursuing post-secondary education at higher rates, and the pay gap between men and women has narrowed by 18 cents.

 Here’s what was happening back in 1963 . . .

• The Beatles released their debut album, Please Please Me.
• Leave that rotary phone behind! The touch-tone phone was introduced!
• In 1963, the typical woman working full time, year round made just 59 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. The wage gap was 41 cents.

 And where things stood in 2011 . . .

• In another act from across the pond, Adele’s album 21 topped charts around the world.
• Touch-tones gave way to touch-screens. I personally joined the ranks of what many people now considered the norm: owning a smartphone. Other technology that probably sounded like sci-fi in the 1960s but was commonplace in 2011: iPads, Kindles, Roku, and so on.
• In 2011, the typical woman working full time, year round made just 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. The wage gap is 23 cents.

When you look at the way some things have changed, 1963 feels like ancient history. . Yet there wage gap is one vestige of our past that’s alive and well – five decades later.

April 9 is Equal Pay Day –the day more than three months into the year when women’s wages finally catch up to what men were paid in the previous year. In “honor” of the occasion National Women’s Law Center is releasing fresh data and analysis on the persistent wage gap between men and women.

This is also a big birthday year – something actually worth celebrating – the Equal Pay Act turns 50 in June! But on the eve of that happy occasion, here’s another downer: As reported in The Wage Gap by State for Women Overall, 50 years in, the wage gap is still going strong all across the U.S.

Since 1963, when the Equal Pay Act became law, we’ve narrowed the wage gap by only 18 cents, and in the last ten years that gap hasn’t closed at all. For the last decade, the median annual earnings of women have lagged behind men – women working full time, year round have made roughly 77 cents for every dollar made by men working full time, year round. We’ve still got a whopping 23 cents to go before we close the wage gap. Even if the wheels of progress were to start turning again today, if we only close the gap another 18 cents in the next 50 years, we’ve got 64 years before the wage gap closes.