Wage Gap

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. 

Census Bureau data released yesterday show that women continue to experience high rates of poverty and a nasty wage gap.

In 2012, the poverty rate for women was 14.5 percent, substantially higher than men’s rate of 11 percent. Nearly 17.8 million women lived in poverty last year.

Poverty rates were particularly high for families headed by single mothers – more than four in ten (40.9 percent) were poor. More than half (56.1 percent) of poor children lived in female-headed families in 2012.

The poverty rates for other vulnerable groups of women were also high: black women (25.1 percent), Hispanic women (24.8 percent), and women 65 and older living alone (18.9 percent).

The wage gap figures also paint a bleak picture for many women.

The cold hard facts are that women working full time, year round continue to be paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts, and the numbers are far worse for women of color, at 64 cents for black women and 54 cents for Hispanic women.

With women as primary breadwinners in over 40% of families today, women and their families simply cannot afford to make do with less.

Read more »

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. Read more »

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.

Because of a new rule out today from the Department of Labor, home care workers will no longer be left out of the basic wage and hour protections guaranteed by the FLSA. Today’s rule extends wage and hour protections to all direct care workers employed by home care agencies and other third parties. This is excellent news, and it’s about time!

The exclusion of home care workers from the FLSA is emblematic of all that is wrong with the way our society values (or doesn’t value) women’s work. This 90% female workforce does vitally important work for their clients, such as bathing, clothing, and administering medication. Yet, this work – like work in many female-dominated jobs – is among the most poorest paid. Home care workers typically earn below $10 an hour.

In 1975, only one year after Congress extended the FLSA’s protections to domestic workers employed by individual households, the Department of Labor took these protections away from home care workers through an expansive reading of the “companionship” exemption. This interpretation was upheld by the Supreme Court in 2007, and home care workers and their advocates have been clamoring for the rule released today ever since. Read more »

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. Read more »

Each September the U.S. Census Bureau puts out information on the annual earnings of male and female workers. We’ll soon know the numbers for 2012, but we already know that in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, women working full time, year round were typically paid just 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts – a loss of $11,084 in 2011. Read more »

This afternoon I’m headed to the Lincoln Memorial for the 50th Anniversary celebration of the March on Washington. Today’s event is both a commemoration and call to action. Thousands are gathering to remember the 1963 March and to outline the remaining civil rights agenda. Read more »

A new report came out from Bloomberg last week on the topic of negotiation and the gender pay gap. It caught my eye for two reasons: (1) last year I was part of a team that worked on this issue under the direction of gender and negotiation powerhouse, Dr. Linda Babcock (check out “Women Don’t Ask” for a great introduction to the topic), and, (2), shortly afterward, I failed at negotiating my own salary in real life. Less than a month after I spent my entire “Spring Break 2012” holed up in a coffee shop working on our project focused on, once again, the VERY issue of encouraging more women to negotiate, I accepted a summer position at the offered wage without missing a beat. Why didn’t I negotiate? Two main reasons are commonly identified for women not negotiating, the first is that they aren’t aware it’s an option, and the second is that they’re concerned about negatively perceived for doing so. For me it was the latter and I had good reason – a 2006 study found that when women initiate negotiations, both men and women are less likely to want to hire them. Read more »

As the single mother of two young children, Losia Nyankale’s job is what keeps her family afloat. But between earning low wages and having no paid sick days, Losia is just one child care emergency away from losing her job. This pressure made it difficult for Losia to care for her mother when she suffered a stroke, and it forced Losia to return to work immediately after the birth of her second child—despite her doctor’s orders. Losia works long hours to be able to afford her basic living expenses and child care. And she often finds herself in an all-too familiar bind: if she picks up more shifts to earn a better living, the child care costs that she can barely afford now will rise, and she’ll have even less time with her family. Losia would like to go back to school to improve her situation, but the combination of low wages, lack of paid sick days, and lack of affordable child care, keep that dream from coming true for now.

For many years Teresa worked on call as a banquet server and had an extremely difficult time arranging child care at the last minute for her children because of her unpredictable schedule. She found herself turning down jobs or quitting jobs where she wasn’t able to arrange child care, even though she needed the income badly. Like Losia, Teresa was a single mom who often didn’t earn enough money to pay for care. Read more »