Today is Equal Pay Day, which marks how far into the year the average American woman must work to earn what her male counterpart earned last year. The pay gap, for full-time, year-round workers, currently stands at 78 cents to the dollar and hasn’t narrowed for the past decade. At this rate, according to a recent report by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, we won’t achieve pay equality until 2058.
Of course, in a nation of 300 million diverse people with staggering economic inequality, exact earnings are determined by a complex interaction between individual choices and structural forces.
Recent research has determined that 20 to 40 percent of the gap is entirely “unexplained”—and likely involves at least some discrimination.
Like all crude averages, the pay gap tells us a lot about the existence of a problem but little about the particular dynamics causing it. Even slicing the data further to show how the gap is worse for some subsets of women, such as women of color, doesn’t reveal much about exactly why it occurs.
And in recent years, conservatives—to justify their opposition to legislation like the Paycheck Fairness Act aimed at closing the pay gap—have attempted to brush away the inequity as a “myth.” Any gender disparity in earnings, they argue, is a consequence of women’s “choices”—going into lower paid fields, taking time off when they have kids, not negotiating a raise hard enough—instead of discrimination.
[For more of this story, written by Maya Dusenbery, go to http://www.psmag.com/business-...ay-gap-equal-pay-day]
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