The Gender Pay Gap Wont Close for Another 33 Years (at Least): Report
Nasdaq Sixty years after the passage of the Equal Pay Act, the landmark U.S. labor law forbidding pay discrimination based on sex, women have made a lot of progress in the workforce but a new report shows theyre still decades (and probably more) away from achieving pay parity with men.
Analysis from the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank, found that the effects of pay inequity between sexes runs so deep that earnings for median full-time, year-round women workers wont be on par with men for at least 33 more years. Women in the workforce are also still struggling to get on equal footing when it comes to their occupations and opportunities.
What the data says
- When the Equal Pay Act was passed in 1963, for every dollar earned by a man, the average full-time, year-round-working woman earned 59 cents. The report found that as of 2021, that gap had narrowed: Those women earned 84 cents for every dollar a man made.
- While thats a significant improvement, the analysis shows that women wont achieve pay parity with men until 2056, should the gender wage gap continue shrinking at the rate it has since 1963.
Thats an optimistic estimate as the report notes, the path to pay equity is hardly straightforward.
