Gender Wage Gap Persists Despite Education And Varies By State

According to the Center for Public Integrity, simply forcing companies to be open and transparent about what they pay would give women a more equitable playing field and help to close the gender wage gap.

There is a new wrinkle to the fight for equal pay for women in the United States of America, and it is not a progressive development. According to research from the Census Bureau, not even education, generally seen as an indicator of greater financial rewards in the workforce, can bridge the gender pay gap.

The Associated Press reports that the pay gap between women and men with either a post-secondary certificate or a graduate degree from an elite university sits at 29 cents. For every dollar a man makes, a woman makes 71 cents. According to co-author and Census Bureau economist Ariel Binder, the report indicates a significant income gap.

Binder told the AP, “The main point here is that there’s a substantial gap at every single level.”

Chantel Adams, a Black woman who is a senior marketing executive with an MBA from the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flager Business School, told the AP that she believes the lack of progress in her career is due to both her gender and her race.

Adams said she was told, “I was so articulate and sharp that it was intimidating to some people. I have nearly $300,000 of post-high school education. It would be surprising if I weren’t articulate and sharp,” Adams said. She also told the outlet that a company she previously worked at promoted others without MBAs while she went without a promotion for two years.

“It’s unreasonable and unfair to hold someone’s strengths against them,” Adams said. “I would consider that as something that is race-based.”

Adams’ story is borne out in other data, including an updated Chamber of Commerce post examining the gender pay gap by state. In New Hampshire, the median gap was more than $18,000.

That gap shifted to $6,450 in nearby Delaware, the lowest gap between men and women in the nation. This dataset, in contrast to the data taken from the Census Bureau, is of median earnings for full-time, year-round workers regardless of education level.

According to the National Women’s Law Center, this dataset paints an incomplete picture of the actual wage gap for women in America. In another dataset, they focus on the inequality in pay for Black women in America.

“However, the wage gap for full-time, year-round workers doesn’t fully reflect the economic disparities faced by Black women. The full-time, year-round wage gap leaves out those who were unemployed or out of the labor force for part of 2022 or who worked part-time, even if they wanted full-time work. When part-time and part-year workers are included in the comparison, Black women were typically paid only 66 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men in 2022. This disparity varies widely by state.”

According to the Center for Public Integrity, simply forcing companies to be open and transparent about what they pay would help give women a more equitable playing field and help to close the gender wage gap that has persisted in its current state since 2004. Colorado could be an example of the positive impact such pay transparency laws could have nationwide. After they instituted a pay transparency law in 2021, wages immediately increased by 3.6%.

According to a study by Zoe Cullen of the Harvard Business School, “Cross-firm pay transparency policies have recently gained traction among policymakers. In January of 2023, California and Washington became the second and third states in the U.S. to mandate that employers include a salary range in the job postings external job candidates see, following on the heels of Colorado and New York City. This is a big step toward making pay information available at the time workers are choosing where to direct their applications, and employers expect that this will lead applicants to direct their applications toward higher-paying firms, increasing wage competition.”