Women pay higher interest rates on mortgages and are more likely to take career breaks, such as time off to care for family - which leads to White women having just 32 cents for each dollar of wealth a White man has. And while the wealth gap is harder to decipher because of marriages and other factors, the wealth gap for single women versus single men is stark. The gender pay gap is just one factor contributing to an overall wealth gap.

President Biden has also called for policies like paid family and medical leave and affordable child care to keep women tied to the workforce, but efforts are stalled in Congress. The Biden administration has also touted support for collective bargaining, directing steps to advance equal pay at federal agencies, as well as raising the minimum wage for federal contractors which would benefit women. President Biden will also sign an executive order to consider limiting the use of salary information in federal contractor employment decisions. On Tuesday, the Biden administration announced additional actions to pay federal workers equitably, including a proposed regulation on salary history, as banning the use of prior salary information can help end the cycle of discriminatory pay. Also, employers can conduct pay audits, and take a hard look at what they are paying workers for the same jobs with the same level of experience. Paving the way for more unions could also help shrink the gender pay gap, as women in unions make more than women not in unions, Tucker said.

'So putting measures that are going to keep women attached to the labor force are going to help.' 'When you take time out of the labor force, it's hard to come back in at the same level that you left, and because you've been out for so long you might be willing to accept a job that's lower than when you left or with lower wages, and that's going to follow you around,' Tucker said. Tucker and other experts suggest that as more women return to work, especially those in lower-paid jobs who've been out of the workforce longer, the pay gap could widen again. But median earnings for both men and women went up in 2020, she said, 'because people who remained insulated from the pandemic in terms of job losses tend to be those who had higher wages.' 'All these millions of jobs and especially among low-paid workers jobs were lost in 2020,' said Tucker. The latest numbers may actually look like the gender pay gap shrank by a penny or more depending on the group, but because the latest data is from 2020, it paints a false picture. While the number of women working full-time has increased from 2020 to 2021, there are still 1.1 million fewer women in the labor force last month than in February 2020. When the pandemic hit, both men and women lost their jobs – but women, who disproportionately work in customer-facing service positions, were particularly affected, including being responsible for child care as schools and daycares shut down.

That means the gender pay gap increases substantially for women 45 and above, according to research by Payscale. Women with advanced degrees are paid less on average than men with bachelor's degrees, according to the Economic Policy Institute.Īnd as women get older, earning power declines. But it has not improved much since, even as women have made great gains in educational attainment – going from less likely having a college or advanced degree compared to men – to surpassing men in education. From 1979 to 1994, it fell from 37.7% to about 23%, the Economic Policy Institute found. Women's full-time earnings are less than men's in almost all of the top 20 most common occupations for women and all of the top 20 most common occupations for men, the Institute for Women's Policy Research found.Īt the same time, the gap has remained relatively unchanged over the past three decades. The gap also falls across almost all occupations.

Womens equal pay day