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U.S. urged to act as progress stalls on equal pay

by Ellen Wulfhorst | @EJWulfhorst | Thomson Reuters Foundation
Tuesday, 10 September 2019 20:30 GMT

ARCHIVE PHOTO: A trader works inside a booth on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange September 15, 2015. REUTERS/Brendan McDermid

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Women working full-time earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men last year

By Ellen Wulfhorst

NEW YORK, Sept 10 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - The wage gap between men and women in the United States failed to budge in 2018, government data showed on Tuesday, sparking calls for action to end pay discrimination.

Women working full-time year-round earned 82 cents for every dollar earned by men last year, the U.S. Census Bureau said, meaning the size of the gender pay gap was unchanged statistically from a year earlier.

"That's an annual wage gap that adds up to more than $10,000 a year, which is really substantial," said Jessica Mason, senior policy analyst at the National Partnership for Women & Families, a Washington-based public policy advocacy group.

"We've seen that number really fail to improve very significantly in the past several years, which is very discouraging," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation."

A gender wage gap exists worldwide, and globally, the World Economic Forum reported on average women earned 63% of what men earned in 2018.

Explanations range from discrimination and bias to women who leave the paid workforce to care for families, then lag on the wage scale when they return.

The U.S. gap has shrunk since 2007, when women earned 78 cents for every dollar that men were paid, said Trudi Renwick, an assistant division chief at the Census Bureau.

"We have seen improvements over the past decade for sure," she told reporters on a telephone conference call.

But Mason said a more marked change in the wage gap required public policy changes to eliminate wage discrimination, protect pregnant women from losing their jobs and provide families with affordable child care.

"I would not call a few cents ... to be an admirable improvement," she said.

Dollarwise, the Census Bureau said women made a median of about $45,000 compared with about $55,000 for men in 2018.

The U.S. Congress formally outlawed pay discrimination based on gender in 1963.

(Reporting by Ellen Wulfhorst, Editing by Claire Cozens. Please credit the Thomson Reuters Foundation, the charitable arm of Thomson Reuters, that covers humanitarian news, women's and LGBT+ rights, human trafficking, property rights and climate change. Visit http://news.trust.org)

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

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