Closing pay gap: areas where women have overtaken men
The gender pay gap has remained relatively stable over the past 15 years or so in the US but new analysis of salaries show that the young can hope for a better balance. Women continue to earn less than men on average but the gap is narrower among younger workers. And in some metropolitan areas, women younger than 30 earn more, or the same amount, as their male counterparts, according to Pew Research Centre.
Women’s median earnings were 84% of what men got in 2020. With an average pay gap of 84%, it would take an extra 42 days of work for women to earn what men get.
”The gender wage gap is narrower among younger workers nationally, and the gap varies across geographical areas. In fact, in 22 of 250 US metropolitan areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts.”
Nationally, women under 30 who work full time, year-round earn about 93 cents on the dollar compared with men in the same age range, measured at the median.
The New York, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles metropolitan areas are among the cities where young women are earning the most relative to young men. In both the New York and Washington metro areas, young women earn 102% of what young men earn when examining median annual earnings among full-time, year-round workers.
In the Los Angeles-Long Beach-Anaheim metro area, the median earnings for women and men in this age group were identical in 2019 which means it just took another couple of years for young women to overtake male colleagues.
Overall, about 16% of all young women who are working full time, year-round live in the 22 metros where women are at or above wage parity with men.
In the European Union, working women earn on average 14% less than men. The European Parliament’s committees for women rights and employments employees recently sharpened proposals in a Pay Transparency Directive to get better tools working for equal pay.
The committees want companies with at least 50 employees to be fully transparent regarding salaries while the original proposal was to set the original proposal set the border at 250 employees.
To disclose information makes it easier for those working for the same employer to compare salaries and expose any existing gender pay gap within the organisation. Tools to assess and compare pay levels should be based on gender-neutral criteria and include gender-neutral job evaluation and classification systems, the committees said.
If the EU pay reporting shows a gender pay gap of at least 2.5% (versus 5% in the initial proposal), member states would need to ensure that employers, in cooperation with their workers’ representatives, conduct a joint pay assessment and develop a gender action plan, the committees said.
The Commission should create a dedicated official label to award to employers who do not have a gender pay gap in their companies, the MEPs added.
The text stipulates that workers and workers’ representatives should have the right to receive clear and complete information on individual and average pay levels, broken down by gender. MEPs also propose to prohibit pay secrecy, via measures forbidding contractual terms that restrict workers from disclosing information about their pay, or from seeking information about the same or other categories of workers’ pay.
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