Run the numbers… This Tuesday marked Women’s Equal Pay Day — the date women’s earnings finally catch up to what men earned last year. That's nearly 15 months to make what men made in 12. Put another way, in a 9-to-5 job, women start working for free at 2:40 p.m.
- The gap starts early: A 20% pay gap is apparent in starting salaries for recent college grads, even before motherhood and other factors come into play.
- Women’s work: The gender pay gap is often dismissed as a consequence of women working more jobs in lower-paying fields like teaching. But there’s research to suggest that when women enter higher-paying industries dominated by men, the pay drops for everyone.
- Pandemic accelerant: Globally, 64M+ women lost their jobs in 2020, which resulted in $800B in lost income. There are now about 2M fewer women in the workforce than pre-pandemic (cue: she-cession).
Mind the gap… Women have made some gains in pay equity. Pew estimates that the average pay gap for young workers shrank by half from 1980 to 2020. But when race is taken into account, the gap still looks more like a chasm. Black women will have to work until September 22 to catch up to what men made last year.
One potential solution: building more protections into the hiring process… President Biden just signed an executive order recommending that federal contractors stop asking about job applicants' salary history in hopes of stopping the pay-gap cycle for gov jobs. On a local level, NYC is about to enact a law requiring employers to publish pay ranges for job postings to improve transparency. A handful of states including Colorado, Maryland, and Connecticut are taking up similar laws.