Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst

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.

If you’ve been following our work on the minimum wage over the past several months, you know that the federal minimum wage is just $7.25 per hour and the minimum cash wage for tipped workers is a mere $2.13 per hour. These wages, which are not adjusted for inflation, are falling farther behind every year. In fact, the earnings of a single mom with two kids who works at a minimum wage job full time are thousands of dollars below the poverty line.

Although Congress is out of town for a few weeks, work on federal and local minimum wage campaigns continues to move forward. Nationally, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) just released a great analysis that underscores the economic and social benefits of the minimum wage. EPI’s analysis, How raising the federal minimum wage would help working families and give the economy a boost, shows that the bills introduced just a few weeks ago in the House and Senate that raise the minimum wage to $9.80 over three years (and adjust for inflation after that) and the cash minimum wage for tipped workers to 70 percent of the minimum wage would lift the wages of more than 28 million workers, the majority of whom (55 percent) are women. The analysis also shows that raising the minimum wage would create an estimated 100,000 new jobs by putting money in the pockets of people who are ready to spend it on goods and services, thus increasing consumer demand. Interested in how raising the federal minimum wage might affect your state? EPI has those numbers, too.