I had always known of the inequality that has been running on forever when it comes to women being paid in the work force. But for some reason I never paid attention or never learnt more about it until I saw one particular episode in the series ‘The Bold Type’. It is surprising how being a woman myself I didn’t really heed to it. The first thing that came to my mind was googling it and I came to know that for every dollar a man earns women earn 83 cents.
The gender pay gap — also referred to as the gender wage gap — is the disparity in median earnings between men and women in the workforce.
March 15 was Equal Pay Day, a year added to the inequality of pay women face. Despite the fact that the Equal Pay Act was passed more than half a century ago, American women as well as women all over the world still suffer a significant salary difference across the board. Based on median earnings data from the Census Current Population Survey, women who worked full-time, year-round in 2021 earned 83 cents for every dollar earned by males. This indicates that women earn around 17% less than males.
Women with full-time wage and salary jobs had median normal weekly earnings of 82 percent of males in 2020.
In 1979, the first year for which comparable earnings data are available, women’s earnings were 62 percent of men’s.
Historically, women have been paid less than men for the same work, and the gender pay gap measures how large that difference is.
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Based on data for 2021 by U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the gap is significant and evident in all major occupations. Legal occupations lead the gender pay gap while farming, fishing and forestry have the minimum gap. Definitely there are many factors that might play a role in this but this is an overview of how the current pay gap women face in the United States.
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Women’s earnings data provided by US Bureau of Labor Statistics, CPS Current Population Survey, shows how the ratio of women’s to men’s earning looks over a period of 20 years for women and men of different race and ethnicity.
Another graph shows how women of different color were paid minimum wage in contrast to average men being paid minimum wage over the years since 1979. We can see that no matter the race or ethnicity of women, men have been historically paid more.
**No data for Asian women before 2000 was found