Abby Lane, Fellow

Did you know…

• DC has the smallest gender wage gap, while Wyoming has the largest.
• Mississippi has the highest rate of child poverty, New Hampshire has the lowest.
• Texas has the highest percentage of non-elderly adult women who don’t have health insurance, while Massachusetts has the lowest.

These facts aren’t trivia; they have important implications for public debate and public policy. And they all come from the American Community Survey (ACS) a dataset that almost all House Republicans and a handful of House Democrats voted to eliminate last week.  

The ACS is invaluable to researchers, businesses, non-profits and the government. The ACS is the only source of annual data on the social, economic, and demographic characteristics of our country down to the neighborhood level.

The arguments to eliminate the ACS are tenuous at best. Some policy makers, like Congressman Daniel Webster (R-FL), have stated that the survey is a violation of privacy. This is simply ludicrous – the Census Bureau takes extreme caution to make sure that all survey results are confidential. No one’s responses are identifiable – from looking at the public data, it is impossible to tell who answered a survey question a specific way.

77 cents.

That’s what the typical woman working full time, year round makes for every dollar paid to her male counterpart.

Just a few weeks ago, we “celebrated” Equal Pay Day – the day that represents how much longer the typical woman working full time, year round would have to work to be paid as much as the comparable man makes in one year. For the typical woman who makes just short of $37,000 a year, that means working three and a half months longer.

Three and a half months is a lot of extra work. Sadly, it used to be even longer.  In 1963, the year the Equal Pay Act was passed, the typical woman working full time, year round made 59 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart. By 1973, the wage gap reached its widest point since the Census Bureau began tracking earnings – the typical woman working full time, year round made less than 57 cents for every dollar made by her male counterpart. Now we’ve been stuck at 77 cents for about a decade. So while the wage gap has shrunk since the Equal Pay Act became law in 1963, it hasn’t come anywhere close to disappearing.