Today is Equal Pay Day, but it isn’t exactly a date worth celebrating. April 12 symbolizes how far into the current year women would have to work in order to match what men earned the previous year. In other words, women have to work an extra 104 days in order to get paid the same amount of money as a man.
Last month, the World Cup champions and Olympic gold medal–winning U.S. Women’s Soccer team announced their very public fight for equal pay (if you haven’t already read Carli Lloyd’s rousing New York Times op-ed, do it now). And just this morning, Hillary Clinton sat for a roundtable discussion hosted by Glassdoor with soccer player Megan Rapinoe and others to discuss the issue. “Last time I checked, there’s no discount for being a woman,” the presidential candidate said at today’s event. “Groceries don’t cost us less, rent doesn’t cost us less, so why should we be paid less?”
While we’re all familiar with the often-quoted statistic that women make 79 cents to every dollar a man makes, there are actually many more troubling figures to learn. Below, we share five other important facts you definitely should know about the gender pay gap.
The pay gap is even bigger for working mothers and minority women.
It’s been well documented that minority women and working mothers earn less than their white and single working counterparts annually. If you’re a working mom, your Equal Pay Day would actually fall on June 4. African-American women would have to work until August 23, and Hispanic women would have to work until November 1 of this year to match men’s wages in 2015.
The pay gap varies greatly from state to state.
If you’re looking for less pay disparity, head to Washington, D.C.: Women there are paid 90 percent of their male counterparts (the smallest gap in the country). Louisiana, meanwhile, has the largest gap, with women earning just 65 percent of their male coworkers’ salaries.
Women start at a disadvantage right after graduating college.
A recent study by the American Association of University Women found that exactly one year after graduating college, full-time women workers earn 7 percent less than what men were making a year after graduation. And if you’re thinking it’s probably because male graduates chose more lucrative career paths, think again: The study compared female and male students who worked in the same field, clocked the same hours, and graduated with the same degree, and yet women still tended to make less money.
Once women start to work in male-dominated fields, salaries in those jobs tend to go down.
The pay gap used to be justified by pointing out that women often worked in lower paying jobs than men. But as women have started to move into previously male-dominated careers, the pay in those jobs has begun to decline. For instance, parks and recreation median hourly wages went down 57 percent after women began crowding out that job field. And the same trend occurred once large numbers of female designers (a 34 percent decrease) and biologists (an 18 percent decrease) entered those fields.
It’s going to take more than 100 years to close the pay gap.
Back when the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, women made 59 percent of what men earned. As more women joined the workforce, the gap had closed to 72 percent in 1990. But in more than 20 years, advancement on pay equality has stalled and the gap currently stands at 79 percent. If we continue with such modest gains, the World Economic Forum predicted it would take 118 years until the global pay equality is finally achieved. As Kristen Schaal sadly put it, at this rate, it’s more likely we’ll have flying cars and life on Mars before we get equal pay between men and women.