Abby Lane, Fellow

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My Take

Who Needs Facts? We Do, Whatever the House GOP Leadership Thinks.

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: May 15, 2012 at 12:34 pm

Did you know…

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.

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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, House of Representatives, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Data on Poverty & Income, Tax & Budget | Add new comment

April Jobs Data Show Slower Recovery as Congress Considers Cuts

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: May 08, 2012 at 12:21 pm

Two steps forward, one step back. That’s the story of the recovery for women.

Our analysis of April’s monthly jobs data brought fairly positive news for women, who gained 73 percent of the 115,000 jobs last month, the largest share of monthly job gains for women since the start of the recovery. But the total monthly job gains in April were the lowest in 2012. And the story for women during the recovery overall isn’t as rosy.

Women have gained only 16 percent of the nearly 2.5 million jobs added during the recovery, and their slow gains are driven largely by public sector losses. In fact, for every two jobs women gained in the private sector during the recovery, they lost one in the public sector. Men also have lost public sector jobs during the recovery, but their public sector job losses are smaller both in absolute terms and relative to their private sector job gains, as the chart below shows.

Private and Public Sector Job Change in the Recovery (June 2009 to April 2012)

Other fast facts you should know:

  • Unemployment rates dropped slightly. April brought a slight decrease in the unemployment rate to 8.1 percent overall. Men’s unemployment rate also dropped slightly, to 7.5 percent. However, the unemployment rate for women held steady at 7.4 percent. The decreases in the unemployment rates are largely due to people leaving the labor force.
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Tags: Employment, Jobs, Public Sector, Recovery, Unemployment, Unemployment, Employment | Add new comment

The Wage Gap Over Time

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: May 03, 2012 at 10:01 am

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. 

The Wage Gap over Time: Ratio of Median Earnings of Full-Time, Year-Round Workers

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

Want to Shrink the Wage Gap? Raise the Minimum Wage

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Anna McClure, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: April 18, 2012 at 03:20 pm

One of the questions we often get at NWLC is what policy makers can do to close the wage gap. In addition to steps like passing the Paycheck Fairness Act and combating punitive pay secrecy policies, one thing policy makers could do is to raise the minimum wage.

People rarely think about raising the minimum wage as a fair pay issue. But one of the reasons for the wage gap is women’s concentration in low-wage jobs. In fact, women make up about two-thirds of all minimum wage workers. So, raising the minimum wage would particularly boost women’s earnings.

Just a few weeks ago, Senator Harkin introduced the Rebuild America Act (S. 2252) which would gradually raise the minimum wage from $7.25 per to hour (a wage that leaves a mother with two kids working full time, year round, well below poverty) to $9.80 per hour over the next two-and-a-half years. The Economic Policy Institute estimates that this increase would benefit more than 28 million workers, nearly 55 percent of them women.

An analysis of state wage gaps provides additional evidence that a higher minimum wage can help close the wage gap. When you rank all of the states and the District of Columbia in terms of the wage gap, half of the top ten states with the smallest wage gap (giving DC honorary “state” status for this comparison) had minimum wages set at $8.00 per hour or above, including DC, Vermont, California, Nevada, and Massachusetts. And four of these five states, DC, VT, CA and NV, had the four narrowest wage gaps.

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

Women and the Wage Gap - 23 Cents Short on Equal Pay Day

Posted by Abby Lane, Fellow | Posted on: April 17, 2012 at 12:57 pm

Today is Equal Pay Day and you might be wondering, "What exactly does Equal Pay Day mean anyway?"

Here's how it works. In 2010, the typical woman working full time, year round was paid $36,931. That same year, the typical man working full time, year round was paid $47,715. That's a pay gap of $10,784. Equal Pay Day represents just how much longer the typical woman would have to work to make as much as the typical man. So it only took the typical man working full-time, year round one year to make $47,715. But the typical woman working full-time, year round — it took her until April 17th the next year to be paid the same amount of money. That's an extra three and a half months of work.

In preparation for Equal Pay Day, we've been crunching the numbers to figure out where different groups of women stand.

Want to know where women in your state stand? Check out our fact sheets for every state.

  • The Best: Vermont, California, Nevada, New York, and Maryland were the states with the smallest wage gaps in 2010. The District of Columbia actually topped that list, where the typical woman working full time, year round was paid 91 cents for every dollar paid to the typical man.
  • The Worst: Wyoming, Louisiana, and Utah were at the bottom of this list. In each of these states in 2010, the wage gap was over 30 percent. In Wyoming, the typical woman working full time, year round was paid just under 64 cents per dollar paid to her male counterpart.
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Tags: Equal Pay, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment