Dive Brief:

• While everyone from President Obama on down talks about closing the gender pay gap, it continues to widen. Men’s earnings are growing this year at twice the rate of women’s, according to a Wall Street Journal blog post.
• The Department of Labor reported Tuesday that the median weekly earnings for full-time male workers was $889 in the third quarter, a 2.2% increase from 2014. By comparison, full-time female workers’ earnings were $721, up 0.8% for the same time period.
• The latest DOL data represents three straight quarters whereby the increase in male earnings was at least double that of female workers. Translation: women who work full time earned 81.1 cents for every dollar a man earned from July through September - more than than a penny from a year earlier, reports the WSJ.

Dive Insight:

Until this year, says the WSJ, ecomomic expansion had helped narrow the gap. That was most likely because male earnings weakened (declining in five quarters between 2010 and 2014) and women enjoyed modest gains.

Further explaining this trend, the WSJ post says increasing pay for men in higher-wage, professional fields could be behind the setback for women. Median weekly pay for men working full time in professional jobs (engineers, lawyers and teachers) was $1,345 in the third quarter, up 7.4% from a year earlier. Similar women earned $970 a week, a 2.2% increase from a year earlier.

Closing the gender pay gap is still more perception than reality, based on the DOL data this year.