Dive Brief:
- The pay equity gap between men and women closed to its narrowest point in 2015, but that's not saying much. A woman working full time still earned just 80 cents for every dollar earned by a man working full time, according to the Census Bureau and reported by the Wall Street Journal.
- In real dollars, the median male worker (full-time, 15 and older), earned $51,212 in 2015. For women, the same worker earned $40,742.
- Over the past three years, in fact, the ratio has remain fairly the same. But the Journal reports that in 1980, women working full time earned less than 60 cents for every dollar than a comparable man. In the 1990s and 2000s, the gap closed sharply, but slowed right before the 2008 recession, the Census Bureau reports.
Dive Insight:
The gender pay equity gap is one of the trickiest problems employers face today, as the complexity seems to be a stumbling block for employers trying to tweak their compensation programs. States, like Massachusetts and California, have enacted pay equity laws. And employers such as Apple, Microsoft, Facebook and SAP, among others, have claimed to have reached gender pay equity status. But they are in the minority.
The good news is while it may take more than two decades to really get there nationwide, many employers are working hard to achieve compensation equity. The Obama White House also took a strong step in the pay equity direction in early 2016, touting pay transparency and discrimination enforcement in order to close the gap sooner rather than later.
