WOMEN IN BUSINESS
N4 | Saturday, October 26, 2024
Special broadsheet
What’s behind the widening gender wage gap in the US?
Surge of Latinas into the workforce had an impact Hispanic women in particu- lar illustrate the complexities of this moment. They were the only demographic group of women overall whose wage gap narrowed marginally between 2022 and 2023 in comparison to white men work- ing full time, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by both the National Women’s Law Center and the National Partnership for Women and Families, research and advocacy groups. For Black women and Asian women, the wage gap widened, and for white women, it stayed the same. Despite their wages rising slightly faster than for other women, however, Latinas remain among the lowest paid workers — with median full-time earnings of $43,880, compared with $50,470 for Black women, $60,450 for white women and $75,950 for white men. Consequently, their rapid entry into the full-time workforce in 2023 helped slow down median wage gains for women overall, likely contribut- ing to the widening of the gender
are overrepresented like hospi- tality, social work and caretaking. The news is not all bad: Wages rose for all workers last year, but faster for men. And while the gender wage gap rose, it’s on par with what it was in 2019 before the pandemic hit. S.J. Glynn, the Labor Depart- ment’s chief economist, said it’s too soon to tell whether 2023 was a blip or the start of a worrisome new trend for the gender wage gap. But she said that even a re- version to the pre-pandemic sta- tus quo is a reminder of how far behind women were in the first place, and shows how the pan- demic slowed the march toward gender equity. And while the wage gap reached a historic low in 2022, that may have been a “false narrowing” be- cause so many low-wage women had been pushed out of full-time jobs by the pandemic that it drove up the average female median earnings, said Noreen Farrell, ex- ecutive director of Equal Rights Advocates and chair of Equal Pay Today, a coalition of groups ad- vocating for workplace gender equity.
wage that year, according to Liana Fox, assistant division chief in the Social, Economic and Housing Statistics Division at the Census Bureau. Latinas have increasingly become a driving force of the U.S. economy as they enter the workforce at a faster pace than non-Hispanic people. Between 2022 and 2023, the number of Latinas working full time surged by 5% while the overall number of full-time female workers stayed the same. Ariane Hegewisch, program director of employment and earn- ings at the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, said the slight narrowing of the wage gap for Latinas may be because their pres- ence in top earning occupations grew from 13.5% to 14.2% last year, according to an IWPR analysis of federal labor data. Recovery leaving behind part-time Latina workers Latina workers were among the hardest hit by the pandemic, suffering the highest unemploy- ment rate at 20.1% in April 2020
of any major demographic group, according to a Labor Department report that examined the pan- demic’s disproportionate toll on women. Domestic workers, who are disproportionately immigrant women, especially felt the effects. The Census Bureau calculates the gender wage gap by compar- ing only men and women who work year-round in full-time jobs. But a grimmer picture for women emerges from data that includes part-time workers, said Jocelyn Frye, president of the National Partnership for Women & Families. Latinas, for instance, are only paid 51 cents for every dollar paid to white men by this measure, and their gender wage gap widened from 52 cents on the dollar in 2022 according to the organization’s re- port, which analyzed Census Bu- reau microdata. Matthew Fienup, executive director of California Lutheran University’s Center for Economic Research & Forecasting, said he expects the gains in Latina wages, educational attainment and con- tributions to the U.S. GDP “to con- tinue for the foreseeable future.”
ALEXANDRA OLSON AND CLAIRE SAVAGE Associated Press
NEW YORK — Just how much of a setback was the COVID-19 pan- demic for U.S. working women? Although women who lost or left their jobs at the height of the crisis have largely returned to the workforce, a recent finding points to the price many paid for stepping back: In 2023, the gen- der wage gap between men and women working full-time wid- ened year-over-year for the first time in 20 years, according to an annual report from the U.S. Cen- sus Bureau. Women working full time earned 83 cents on the dollar compared to men in 2023, down from a historic high of 84 cents in 2022. The Census Bureau called it the first statistically significant widening of the ratio since 2003. Economists trying to make sense of the data say it captures a complicated moment during the disjointed post-pandemic la- bor market recovery when many women finally returned to work full-time, especially in hard-hit low-wage industries where they
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