Census Bureau and Census Data

Lilly Ledbetter, the tireless advocate for equal pay, knows firsthand how wage discrimination affects women and their families. Speaking at the Democratic National Convention last week, she reminded the country of her wage discrimination story. Lilly Ledbetter worked for Goodyear for nearly 20 years before discovering that she’d been paid unfairly, losing out on thousands of dollars over the course of her career there. After securing a jury verdict in her favor, in 2007 the Supreme Court determined that she would never receive the lost wages for all those years of discrimination because she didn’t complain about being paid unfairly in her first six months on the job. Less than two years later her namesake bill was passed, restoring the law to ensure that future workers could challenge their unfair pay. Under the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act of 2009, the time period for challenging pay discrimination begins with the most recent paycheck that reflects unequal wages.

The data released today show that the typical woman is still paid 77 percent of a man’s wages. And when race and sex are considered together, the gap in earnings for women of color are especially stark: African American women make only 64 percent and Hispanic women make 55 percent when compared to white men.  This disappointing news is the sort that should spark policymakers to move forward quickly with additional improvements to the fair pay laws. Yet, opponents of fair pay laws are continuing to attack even the Ledbetter Act. In a recent National Review online piece Carrie Lukas shockingly suggests that women are now worse off because of the Ledbetter Act. Never mind that the Ledbetter Act was passed with bipartisan support in both the House and Senate. And never mind that the cases that have been restored since that Act was passed show that the Ledbetter Act had a critical impact. So, as we are faced with the news of a decade of no progress on the wage gap, what’s quite clear is that we cannot waste time revisiting the merits of the bipartisan Ledbetter Act.  Below are just a few of the reasons that it is time to move forward on the next step in achieving fair pay – the Paycheck Fairness Act.

The Ledbetter Act restored longstanding law

The rule outlined in the Ledbetter Act, that as long as employees receive discriminatory paychecks they can continue to challenge wage discrimination, restores prior law to that applied by the EEOC and nine of the twelve federal courts of appeals before the Supreme Court’s decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear. In other words, it put the law back to what everyone thought it was in 2007. With today’s news that the 23 cent wage gap has remained the same over the last decade, there is no doubt that more is required to overcome 10 years of stagnation. And we have yet to move forward with the policies that will actually update the outdated fair pay laws. Read more »

We all want girls to grow up believing they can be whatever they want to be. Girls’ empowerment slogans have found their way into pop songs, onto t-shirts and into girls’ hearts. Girls rock! Girls rule! Girl power!

But there’s some data out today that makes all that seem like magical thinking: the new wage gap numbers.

Equality minus 23%. Don’t try putting that on a t-shirt.

The wage gap for women has barely budged in over a decade, according to new data released today. The typical woman working full time, year round is paid 77 cents for every dollar paid to the typical man. This is unchanged from 2002, ten years ago. For women of color, it’s much worse, with the typical African-American woman paid 64 cents and the typical Latina woman paid 55 cents for every dollar paid to a white, non-Hispanic man.

The Census Bureau just released new data on poverty in the U.S. in 2011. In the second full year of the recovery that began when the recession officially ended in June 2009, poverty began to stabilize, though at a very high level: the overall poverty rate was 15.0 percent, statistically unchanged from the rate in 2010 (15.1 percent). Here’s a quick look at the numbers for women and families:

• The poverty rate among women was 14.6 percent in 2011, statistically unchanged from 14.5 percent in 2010, but still the highest rate in 18 years. Men’s poverty rate was lower, at 10.9 percent in 2011 (statistically unchanged from 11.2 percent in 2010). A 14.6 percent poverty rate means 17.7 million women were living in poverty in 2011.
• The poverty rate for women 65 and older was 10.7 percent in 2011, unchanged from 2010 and lower than the poverty rate for women overall. However, the poverty rate for elderly women living alone increased significantly to 18.4 percent in 2011 from 17.0 percent in 2010.

The news just came out. The typical woman still earns 77 cents on a man’s dollar. The wage gap is the same today as it was ten years ago, according to Census Bureau data just released today. We’ve been stuck in park far too long. Read more »

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.

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 will tell us about health insurance.

Where does this data come from?

Every month, the Census Bureau surveys approximately 50,000 households to estimate the unemployment rate. This is known as the Current Population Survey (CPS). Once a year, they supplement these questions with additional questions regarding health coverage and income and survey 78,000 households. This supplement is known as the Annual Social and Economic Supplement (ASEC). The ASEC questions regarding health insurance explore whether each member of the respondent household had insurance coverage throughout the previous calendar year, and if so, what kind of coverage.

There is some lag time between when the data are collected and when they are released. The survey is conducted in March and asks respondents about their insurance coverage over the entire previous year. It then takes several months for the data to be cleaned up and ready to release to the public in September. This means that the data released on Wednesday were collected in March of 2012 and will show insurance coverage at some point during 2011. According to the Census Bureau, the ASEC is the most widely used source of data on health insurance coverage in the U.S.

This Wednesday, 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 poverty. Here are a few FAQs on poverty and the Census Bureau data.

What does the poverty rate measure?

The poverty rate measures the percentage of the U.S. population with income below the federal poverty threshold, often referred to as the “poverty line,” for their family size (e.g., $22,811 in 2011 for a family of four with two kids). Income is calculated before taxes and includes only cash income such as earnings, pension/retirement income, Social Security, unemployment benefits, and child support payments.

What doesn’t the poverty rate measure?

A number of federal and state benefits that help support lower-income families are not counted as income in the official poverty measure. “Non-cash benefits” like food stamps (SNAP) and housing assistance, and tax benefits like the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) and the Child Tax Credit, do not count as income for purposes of calculating the official poverty rate.

The official poverty measure also does not account for any expenditures, such as those on medical needs or child care, which can be very large for some families and leave them little income to meet other basic needs.

Did you know…

• DC has the smallest gender wage gap, while Wyoming has the largest.
• Mississippi has the highest rate of child poverty, New Hampshire has the lowest.
• Texas has the highest percentage of non-elderly adult women who don’t have health insurance, while Massachusetts has the lowest.

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. Read more »

Poor families who paid for child care spent two-fifths (40.0 percent) of their income on care in 2010, according to a new Census report.  This is a sharp increase from 2005, when poor families who paid for child care spent 29.2 percent of their income on care.  Families just above poverty (those with incomes from Read more »

For more about state poverty and wage numbers, please go to our overview page on the state-by-state 2010 Census data.

Just last week, the Census Bureau released data that showed no improvement in the wage gap – nationally, women who worked full time, year round were paid 23 cents less for every dollar paid to their male counterparts. This gap in earnings totals to nearly $11,000.

The wage gap for women of color was even worse. Black and Hispanic women working full time, year round were paid only 62 cents and 54 cents, respectively, for every dollar paid to their white, non-Hispanic male counterparts – no substantial differences from 2009. Read more »