Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst

Katherine Gallagher Robbins

Katherine Gallagher Robbins is a Senior Policy Analyst for Family Economic Security at the National Women’s Law Center where she examines how tax and budget policies influence the financial stability and security of low-income women and families.  Before joining the Center in 2010, Ms. Gallagher Robbins worked as an organizer for the California Public Interest Research Group at the University of California, San Diego. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Political Science at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and a graduate of the College of William and Mary.

Expert in: Data on Poverty & Income, Poverty & Income Support
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My Take

Wage Gap FAQ

Posted by
Abby Lane, Fellow
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: June 07, 2012 at 03:41 pm

As the Paycheck Fairness Act headed to the floor for debate and a vote earlier this week, the Washington Post's Fact Checker blog questioned the validity of the figure most often referenced (and the figure we use at NWLC) – that the typical woman working full time, year round is paid just 77 cents to her male counterpart (the 23 cent gap). We produced this FAQ in response.

  1. What is the wage gap figure?

    Our blog post from September explains all the details of how we calculate the wage gap – like how earnings are defined, which workers are included in our calculations, and which Census Bureau data we use – basically, we compare how much money the typical woman and the typical man make when they work full time, year round.

  2. Why do we use this figure?

    Here at NWLC, we use the 77 cent figure because it captures the effects of many elements that produce the wage gap – including discrimination, caregiving responsibilities and occupational segregation – and demonstrates just how strongly they impact the economic security of women workers.

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

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

When Poverty is Personal

Posted by Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst | Posted on: May 11, 2012 at 11:34 am

This blog post is a part of NWLC’s Mother’s Day 2012 blog series. For all our Mother’s Day posts, please click here.

My mother and meI spend a lot of time working with and thinking about the statistics of poverty – I think it is a valuable job and I love it. But poverty is more than statistics. Poverty is a personal issue and it is especially personal for me.

When my mom was a child, growing up in New England in the 1950s, she was poor. What did being poor mean for my mom? It meant that her family didn’t have enough to eat – sometimes they would divide up a head of lettuce and call it dinner. It meant that she and her three brothers had to decide who got to go to school on which day because there wasn’t enough money for everyone to have shoes – and if it was your day to be barefoot, you had to stay home.

When I think about my mom’s childhood, it pains me to think about all of the safety net programs we have now that her family could have benefitted from but didn’t have access to.

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Tags: Family Support Programs, Medicaid, Mother's Day, Poverty & Income Support, Safety Net, SNAP (Food Stamps), Data on Poverty & Income, Poverty & Income Support | Add new comment

Where the Women Are – and Aren’t

Posted by
Anna McClure, Fellow
Julie Vogtman, Senior Counsel
Katherine Gallagher Robbins, Senior Policy Analyst
| Posted on: May 07, 2012 at 09:00 am

Women deserve a raise!

Women deserve a raise!

Some more numbers that underscore the importance for women of raising the minimum wage:

  • Annual earnings for a full-time minimum wage worker: $14,500;
  • Minimum cash wage for tipped workers: $2.13;
  • What the typical woman working full time, year round makes for every dollar paid to her male counterpart: 77 cents.
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Tags: Minimum Wage, Tipped Minimum Wage, Equal Pay and the Wage Gap, 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