Abby Lane, Fellow

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My Take

State by State, the Wage Gap Lives On

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: September 24, 2012 at 05:00 pm

The Census Bureau recently released data that showed no improvement in the wage gap — nationally, the typical woman who worked full time, year round was still paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart in 2011. This gap hasn’t changed in a decade and it's even worse for women of color.

Last week, the Census Bureau released data from the American Community Survey, a survey that provides median earnings for men and women by state. Based on that data, NWLC has calculated the wage gap for each state. In 2011, the District of Columbia had the smallest wage gap — women working full time, year round, were paid 90.4 percent of what their male counterparts were paid. Following D.C. were Vermont (86.7 percent) and Maryland (86.0 percent). However, even in these states with smaller wage gaps, the difference in earnings was substantial. For example, while D.C. had the smallest wage gap of all the states, this gap in earnings still amounted to the typical woman earning $6,400 less in a year, as compared to her male counterpart.

In 2011, Wyoming had the largest wage gap, with the typical woman working full time, year round making just 66.6 percent of what her male counterpart made. Both Louisiana (68.8 percent) and Utah (69.0 percent) also had wage gaps of more than 30 cents. The gap in Wyoming amounts to more than $17,200 annually — equivalent to half of the typical woman's earnings in Wyoming in 2011.

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Tags: Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

Insecure and Unequal: 2011 Poverty Data in Pictures

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: September 19, 2012 at 03:43 pm

Last week, the Census Bureau released new poverty data and NWLC has been crunching the numbers. Today, we released our full report showing that poverty rates stabilized in 2011, but remained near historically high levels. As policy makers face critical budget choices in the coming months, we hope that they will remember the real people behind these numbers. We can do more to reduce these numbers.

Poverty Rates for Adults by Gender, Race, and Ethnicity, 2011

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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, Poverty, Data on Poverty & Income, Poverty & Income Support | Add new comment

The Story Behind the Numbers: The Wage Gap

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 11, 2012 at 03:37 pm

Tomorrow, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2011. As we get ready to crunch numbers, we thought it would be helpful to take a deeper look at what these numbers tell us – and don’t tell us – about the wage gap.

The typical American woman who works full time, year round was still paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to her male counterpart in 2010. For women of color, the gap is even larger. This blog post provides details about the wage gap measure that the Census Bureau and the National Women’s Law Center use, factors contributing to the wage gap, and how to shrink the gap.

What’s behind NWLC’s wage gap figure?

The wage gap figure that NWLC reports at the national level is the same as that reported by the Census Bureau – the median earnings of women full-time, year-round workers as a percentage of the median earnings of men full-time, year-round workers. Median earnings describe the earnings of a worker at the 50th percentile – right in the middle. Earnings include wages, salary, net self-employment income but not property income, government cash transfers or other cash income – so basically the money people see in their paychecks. Working full time is defined as working at least 35 hours a week and working year round means working at least 50 weeks during the last twelve months.

The national wage gap data come from the Current Population Survey and include workers 15 and older. The wage gap is not broken down by occupation or industry, though data on earnings by industry and occupation for women and men are available from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, Wage Gap, Women at Work, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Data on Poverty & Income, Employment | Add new comment

School’s Out for Teachers

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: September 07, 2012 at 03:50 pm

We’re back this Friday with your monthly update on the BLS jobs numbers. Other things are back too – cooler temps are back, Monday night football is back, and kids are back to school – but one thing that isn’t back are teachers. Local education lost jobs last month, capping a year of losses totaling over 83,000. In fact, since the recovery started in June 2009, local education has lost 301,000 jobs. This is bad news for kids and for women, who make up over 70 percent of the positions in this sector.

These education losses are just part of the ongoing public sector losses. I know we hammered it home last month, but the big story for women this month is still public sector job losses. Over the recovery, women’s public sector job losses have wiped out a whopping 45 percent of their private sector gains. Since June 2009, women have now lost 450,000 public sector jobs, while they gained 999,000 private sector jobs.

How Public Sector Job Loss is Hurting the Recovery

Though the month wasn’t great all around - the economy added 96,000 jobs in August and the overall unemployment rate dropped slightly to 8.1 percent, hovering near the level it has been at since the start of 2012 - one positive trend is a slight decline in adult women’s unemployment rate– it is now 7.3 percent, the lowest rate since April 2009, though not by much.

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Tags: Jobs, Public Sector, Recovery, Unemployment, Employment, Poverty & Income Support | 1 comment

Retail jobs in the recovery go to men while women are left behind

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: August 22, 2012 at 01:43 pm

It’s officially back-to-school season and the shopping is in full swing. Families around the country are out buying school supplies, new clothes, or maybe picking up a few things for that last summer project they haven’t quite finished yet.

But this August, you may have noticed a difference at your local stores – more men staffing the cash register, the customer service desk, or helping you search the aisles for that elusive item on your shopping list.

That’s because since the recovery began in June 2009, men have gained 395,600 jobs in retail – almost 2.5 times the number of jobs that women have lost (163,400) in the same period.

Change in retail jobs over the recovery

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Tags: Employment, Jobs, Recovery, Unemployment, Employment, Poverty & Income Support | Add new comment