A new York The gender pay gap, which measures how much women make for every dollar a male makes, is most often expressed in monetary terms.
Due to the fact that women often earn less than males and must consequently put in more hours of work to achieve parity, this disparity is also indirectly a measure of time.
For how long? Input Equal Pay Day, a roughly calculated indicator of the number of months a woman must work to earn as much as a man did the previous year.
Equal Pay Day falls on March 14 this year. In order to earn what the average man made last year, the average full-time working woman must work almost 2.5 months longer than the average man.
That is based on the Census Bureau’s most current estimate of the gender pay gap, which found an 84 cent difference among full-time, year-round employees. When part-time, seasonal, and gig workers are included, the disparity widens and the period of time needed to catch up lengthens.
The good news is that over the past 20 years, the pay disparity has been slowly closing. Moreover, Equal Pay Day, which was first observed in 1996 by the National Commission on Pay Equality, is currently observed about one month earlier.
The bad news is that Equal Pay Day will still exist in 2023 since pay fairness will not be achieved until much later.
Many groups experience Equal Pay Day differently.
Due in large part to the fact that the actual date varies greatly depending on race and ethnicity, occupation, region, age, and other factors, Equal Pay Day is generally only observed symbolically for women in March.
According to Noreen Farrell, the chair of the advocacy group Equal Pay Today, “March 14 marks the beginning of an entire year of Equal Pay Days that will highlight pay gaps experienced by women of different races, ethnicities, sexual orientations, and gender identities, as well as by those who are also mothers.
For instance, the group notes that this year’s Equal Pay Day will fall on April 5 for women who are Asian American and Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islanders, on July 27 for Black women, on October 5 for Latina women, and on November 30 for Native and Indigenous women, relative to the average earnings of a White man.
The pay gap is broken down by occupation in an annual report published by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. According to its most recent analysis, women will earn less than men for full-time weekly employment in nearly all professions in 2022, including 19 of the top 20 professions for women and all 20 top professions for men.
In other words, except for the position of teaching assistant, women still earn less than men in professions where they predominate. Only in that profession did IWPR discover no difference between full-time working women and men’s median weekly earnings by gender.
Permanent pay disparities result in significant financial losses over time.
The gender wage gap results in significant financial losses for families as well as for women individually.
This limits their capacity to gradually acquire financial security and raises the possibility that they may have to incur debt in order to pay for necessities and unexpected expenses. A woman’s career-related lower pay will also have an impact on her retirement Social Security benefit.
Consider the current pay disparity, which, according to the National Women’s Law Center, equals $9,954 in median annual wages. According to the group, the difference in one woman’s life could pay for all of the following expenses plus interest: two months of child care ($1,883), three months of rent ($3,573), three months of health insurance premiums ($1,544), two months of student loan payments ($544), and six tanks of gas ($316).
According to the NWLC, the current gender wage gap can cost women and their families up to $400,000 over the course of a 40-year career. For women of colour, the loss is even higher: about $1 million throughout their lifetimes.
