The Gender Wage Gap Hits an All-Time Low, but Hold the Confetti
The US Census Bureau released a new report on income last week, and there’s some good news: the gender wage gap in America is the lowest it’s ever been in history.
The bad news: the gap is still 21 cents, meaning that women now earn 79 cents for every dollar a man earns. That amounts to a one-penny improvement since 2013, and no statistically significant improvement since 2007.
So while we’d like to hold at least a little party (nothing fancy!—along the lines of, say, a modest birthday dinner with a few close friends) to acknowledge the wage gap hitting a record low, even that may not be warranted. According to Heidi Hartmann, president of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, “There’s really no reason to celebrate…It’s just not a picture of strong and rapid improvement in the wage gap.” Researchers also think that the slightly narrowed gap is more a result of men’s wages stagnating than it is an indicator that gender bias in earnings is diminishing.
Well, rats. We’ll just put away that champagne for now.
If you want to help jump-start real progress on the wage gap again, here are five things you can do today for equal pay. Let’s get to work so that this time next year, we have real cause to celebrate how far we’ve come.
About the Author
Julianne Helinek is Take The Lead's blog editor and writer of the newsletter Take The Lead This Week. She thinks the women she knows are too talented not to be running the world, and she’s especially interested in bringing more men into the gender equality conversation. Julianne is an MBA student at NYU’s Stern School of Business. For more on feminism in the business school world, follow her on Twitter at @thefeministmba.