It shouldn’t come as much of a surprise, but women lag behind men on median salary in each of the 50 states and the District of Columbia, according to a new report out this week by the American Association of University Women.
The gap was widest in Wyoming, where the median woman’s salary is 64 percent of the median man’s salary. It’s narrowest in Maryland, Nevada and Vermont, where women earn 85 percent of a man’s salary. (The District is higher, at 90 percent.) The state-level data is pulled from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey. Reasons for the gap vary, but it is in part driven by the choices members of each gender tend to make on things such as the college majors and jobs. But even after accounting for such differences, a chunk of the gap remains unexplained, AAUW and other researchers have found.
Five states have no equal-pay laws whatsoever: Alabama, Mississippi, South Carolina, Utah and Wisconsin. Three states — Louisiana, Oregon and Vermont — passed or amended existing laws last year, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures.
Here’s a look at a few charts from the report that show how the pay gap has changed over time and how it differs by age, educational status and ethnicity.
The pay gap between genders widens with age, peaking in the prime working years, between the ages of 45 and 64.
The gap is relatively consistent across education levels, ranging from 74 percent to 81 percent.
There is perfectly equal pay equity among pharmacists and female counselors earn slightly more than men.