Facts about Pay Equity

The wage gap between men and women stubbornly remains despite the passage of the Equal Pay Act nearly 40 years ago. Women are still not receiving equal pay for equal work, let alone equal pay for comparable work. This disparity not only affects women's spending power; it penalizes their retirement security by creating gaps in social security and pensions.

• The General Accounting Office compiled data from the Current Population Survey regarding the ten industries that employ 71 percent of U.S. women workers and 73 percent of U.S. women managers. The pay gap between full-time working women and men managers widened between 1995 and 2000, in seven of the ten industries examined.
• A full-time working woman currently receives only 73 cents to every dollar received by a man.
• African-American women are paid only 65 cents for every dollar received by white men while Hispanic women are paid only 53 cents to the dollar.
• If women received the same as men who work the same number of hours, have the same education, union status, are the same age, and live in the same region of the country, then these women's annual family income would rise by $4,000 and poverty rates would be cut in half. Working families would gain an astounding $200 billion in family income annually.
• Pay equity in female-dominated jobs (jobs in which women comprise 70 percent or more of the workforce) would increase wages for women by approximately 18 percent.
• Fifty-five percent of all women work in female-dominated jobs (jobs in which women comprise 70 percent or more of the workforce) whereas only 8.5 percent of all men work in these occupations. However, these men still receive about 20 percent more than women who work in female-dominated jobs.
• Women are paid less in every occupational classification for which sufficient information is available, according to the data analysis in over 300 job classifications provided by the U.S. Department of Labor Statistics.
• In 1963, the year of the Equal Pay Act's passage, full-time working women were paid 59 cents on average to the dollar received by men, while in 2000 women were paid 73 cents for every dollar received by men. In other words, for the last 37 years, the wage gap has only narrowed by slightly more than one third of a penny per year.

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Sources:
U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Reports P60-213: Money Income in the United States 2000 6 (2001).
AFL-CIO & the Institute for Women's Policy Research, Equal Pay for Working Families: National and State Data on Pay Gap and Its Costs (1999).
A New Look Through the Glass Ceiling: Where are the Women? Commissioned by Representatives John D. Dingell (D-Mich.) and Carolyn B. Maloney (D-N.Y.) (2002).