For the second year in a row, the gender pay gap widened.
Equal Pay Day, the annual observance marking how much women make compared with their white male counterparts, highlighted the first consecutive widening of the wage gap since the 1960s.
It fell on March 26, a date representing how many additional days into the year women must work to earn what men did the previous year.
Women working full-time, year-round, earn 81 cents for every dollar men earn, down from 83 cents the year before and 84 cents in 2022, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
This translates to $13,570 less per year, according to the National Women’s Law Center. A woman who works full-time, year-round, stands to lose $542,000 over a 40-year career and would need to work nine more years to close the gap.
“We need proactive attempts to steer us in the direction of progress, which includes pay range transparency from employers, strengthening child care and reproductive health supports, and taking these unethical employers to court, which we have done time and time again,” Jasmine Tucker, vice president for research at the National Women’s Law Center, said in a statement. “It’s not an accident that white men’s pay and opportunities are increasing. But everyone deserves that.”
Payscale, which makes compensation analyses, determined that women earn 82 cents for every dollar earned by men, meaning $1.1 trillion in lost earnings every year and an estimated $86.4 trillion over women’s lifetimes.
The wage gap widens for mothers and women of color.
Native American women earned $33,659 less in their median income than white working men, and the gap was larger for Hispanic women, who earned $37,796 less, according to 2024 data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
Women’s median earnings were 83% of men’s, but the widest gap was in natural resources, construction and maintenance occupations at 74%.
Women are overrepresented in the lowest-paying jobs, shouldering caregiving duties, in turn pushing the median wages down for women.
