Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow

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My Take

2012 State by State Wage Gap Rankings: Fair Pay Still a Long Way Off in Most States

Posted by
Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow
Lauren Frohlich, Fellow
| Posted on: September 19, 2013 at 04:15 pm

Today, 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. Some of our key findings:

  • In 2012, Wyoming again had the largest wage gap, with women working full time, year round typically making just 63.8 percent of what their male counterparts made.
  • Both Louisiana (66.9 percent) and West Virginia (69.9 percent) also had wage gaps of 30 cents or more. The gap in Wyoming amounts to $18,780 annually — equivalent to more than half of the typical woman's earnings in Wyoming in 2012.
  • In 2012, the District of Columbia once again had the smallest wage gap — women working full time, year round in the nation’s capital, were typically paid 90.1 percent of what their male counterparts were paid. 
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Tags: Equal Pay, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

Let’s Talk About Choices

Posted by Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow | Posted on: September 18, 2013 at 10:11 am

Not too long ago, employers advertised for higher-paying jobs in a section of the newspaper labeled, “Help Wanted—Male.” When Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sandra Day O’Connor graduated from law school, they got no job offers. And, in the more recent past, when Michele A. Roberts went to court as a public defender, she was often mistaken for someone charged with a crime, a mistake she attributes to her race and gender. Ms. Roberts is now a Partner at Skadden.

These attitudes about women in the workplace have not gone away. Their vestiges can be seen today in women’s continued lower pay for the same job; segregation into a set of jobs that are perceived as “women’s work,” the vast majority of which are low paying; and exclusion and underrepresentation of women in high-wage jobs. And that doesn’t even cover the severe penalty that mothers face in the workplace, simply for being mothers. Each of these factors depresses women’s wages, and each is linked to practices and policies that are woven into the fabric of the American workplace.

So it’s hard not to feel a little bewildered when discussions about the wage gap—which has stayed stagnant at 77 cents for over a decade—devolve into assertions that we should chalk it all up to women’s choices and go home.

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

THIS JUST IN: Women and Families Face a 23-Cent Wage Gap Again This Year

Posted by
Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 17, 2013 at 04:29 pm

77 cents on the dollar – does that have a familiar ring to you? You guessed it—it’s the amount that women working full time, year round typically made for every dollar that men made in 2012. It’s now been more than a decade with no progress on narrowing the wage gap. That means that American women have been working for over a decade without seeing the wage gap diminish. The wage gap typically cost women $11,608 in 2012. Based on the 2012 wage gap, over the course of a 40-year career a woman would lose $464,300.

The wage gap is even worse for women of color:

  • In 2012, African-American women working full time, year round were typically paid only 64 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
  • Hispanic women working full time, year round were typically paid only 54 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men.
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Tags: Census Bureau and Census Data, Employment, Equal Pay, Wage Gap, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, Employment | Add new comment

The Story Behind the Numbers: The Wage Gap

Posted by
Beccah Golubock Watson, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
Liz Watson, Senior Counsel
| Posted on: September 16, 2013 at 10:48 am

Tomorrow, the Census Bureau will release new data on poverty, income, and health insurance in the U.S. in 2012. 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 2011. For women of color, the gaps are 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.

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