News
What the Pay Gap Means for You
How Does the Pay Gap Impact You?
Equal Pay Day is held annually in April to designate the point into a year that a woman must work to earn what a man made the previous year. This year, Equal Pay Day 20 fell on April 20. In 2008, women working full-time, year-round earned, on average, 77 cents for every dollar earned by men. Even though gender wage discrimination has been illegal since President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, the wage gap persists. Women earned 59 cents to every dollar earned by men in 1963, but progress has slowed and the gender wage gap widened slightly from 77.8 to 77.1 percent between 2007 and 2008.
What this means if you are:
- An African American woman: You earn on average 61 cents for every dollar earned by a white man.
- A Latina woman: You earn on average 52 cents for every dollar earned by a white man.
- A newly minted MBA graduate: Women MBAs on average are paid $4,600 less on their first job than men.
- An Education major one-year out of undergrad: Women in this female dominated profession earn 95 percent as much as a male Education major one-year out of college.
- A recent Biology major graduate: Women earn only 75 percent as much as men earn, just one year after graduation. In general, one year after college graduation, women earn only 80 percent of what their male counterparts earn. Ten years after graduation, women fall further behind, earning only 69 percent of what men earn.
- A woman with children: Women with children earn about 2.5 percent less than women without children, while men with children enjoy an earnings boost of 2.1 percent, compared with men without children.
- A woman retiree: The gap between the average retirement income that men and women receive annually is $8,000. Two-thirds of this disparity can be attributed to the pay gap and occupational segregation.
- A woman in the Life Sciences: Women earned from $6,000 to $15,000 less per year than men of similar levels of accomplishment in academic medicine. Over a 30-year career, an average female faculty member with a PhD would earn almost $215,000 less that a comparable male.
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A woman in Wyoming, Louisiana or West Virginia: You live in states with some of the worst wage gaps and earn on average 37%, 35% and 33% less than your male counterparts. In California and DC you would be earning only 16% and 9% less.
Quick Look
Health Care Reform and Women
Women are 50 percent of the population, 49 percent of the U.S. workforce and we are “paying” more for health care. The recently passed Health Care Reform bill makes health insurance more affordable and easier to obtain and that will help women. Women will benefit from the ban on gender-biased premiums and from the affordable access to breast and cervical cancer screenings. Working moms benefit from the stipulation requiring employers to offer breaks and space for nursing mothers to pump breast milk. Additionally the new tax credits for small-business owners who provide insurance to their employees, benefits women, as women own the majority of small businesses in the United States.
Health Care Reform and Women
Women are 50 percent of the population, 49 percent of the U.S. workforce and we are “paying” more for health care. The recently passed Health Care Reform bill makes health insurance more affordable and easier to obtain and that will help women. Women will benefit from the ban on gender-biased premiums and from the affordable access to breast and cervical cancer screenings. Working moms benefit from the stipulation requiring employers to offer breaks and space for nursing mothers to pump breast milk. Additionally the new tax credits for small-business owners who provide insurance to their employees, benefits women, as women own the majority of small businesses in the United States.
The Gap in Women’s Power in Politics
Although a record number of women serve in the United States Congress, women comprise only 17 percent of the 535 members. According to the Inter-Parliamentary Union, 25 nations have passed a 30-percent mark for women in parliament, with 22 using some sort of quota to jump-start participation. The United States ranks 73rd in the world for its paltry number of women in Congress.
How to Make Shift Work Family Friendly
A low-wage workplace can be flexible and family-friendly. This could mean posting schedules farther in advance, making it easier for workers to trade shifts or cross-training more people for the same job. According to a National Institute of Health (NIH) Study on flex-work, the key is making sure managers understand their employees’ predicaments. The NIH matched manager flexibility against various measures of employee well-being and found that the most accommodating managers "had better physical health reports, better sleep quality, higher job satisfaction, and less stress over work-life conflicts."
BPW Foundation Advises the Administration a Lot
On March 29, BPW Foundation CEO Deborah L. Frett attended a symposium on women in finance hosted by the Treasury Department and on March 31, she participated in the White House Forum on Workplace Flexibility.
Public-Private Partnership to Address US Infant Mortality
text4baby is a new free mobile information service providing timely health information to pregnant women and new moms from pregnancy through a baby's first year. Women can sign up for the service by texting BABY to 511411 (or BEBE for Spanish) and receive three free SMS text messages each week timed to their due date or baby's date of birth. The program is made possible through an unprecedented public-private partnership which includes the White House Office on Science and Technology Policy, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Voxiva, CTIA-The Wireless Foundation, Grey Healthcare Group (a WPP company) and founding corporate sponsor Johnson & Johnson. Wireless carriers are distributing text messages at no charge to recipients.
Want to Improve Your Bottom Line?
Learn how to recruit and retain Gen Y women. Host a focus group of your Gen Y women employees and their managers and receive customized research. For more information contact Kara Nichols Barrett (kbarrett@bpwfoundation.org).
Fast Facts
- Of the over 500 individual occupational categories for which there are sufficient data to calculate a wage ratio, in only five occupations do women earn as much as or more than men.
- The wage ratio in the ten most common occupations for women ranges from 71.2 percent of men’s earnings for retail sales managers to 93.6 percent of men’s earnings for ‘customer service representatives.’
- The most common single occupation for women is ‘secretary and administrative assistants,’ employing over five percent of all full-time women workers, but very few men.
- Average weekly earnings for women are 83.4 percent of those for male ‘secretaries and administrative assistants.’
- Only one of the most common occupations for women, ‘retail sales managers,’ also appears in the top ten most common occupations for men.
You Should Know
Foundations are funding research on women and girls because otherwise the information is unavailable. Invisibility is the highest form of discrimination. When you try to find statistics on women and girls, you come up empty handed.Thanks to the following organizations for their generous support and/or sponsorship:
