The Gender Pay Gap: One Size Does Not Fit All

Unequal paychecks for the same job. Fewer opportunities for career advancement. Overrepresentation in low-paying jobs. More hurdles to jump through to reach professional goals. You’ve heard these stories before, and you may even have some of your own. These stories are backed up by data. The United States has a persistent gender pay gap.

But what does that gap really look like from woman to woman? How does it differ based on race, ethnicity, disability, and parental status? And how does that difference in pay accumulate over time? We analyzed women’s earnings to find out and add nuance to the ongoing pay-gap discourse.

Let’s start with the basics: On average, women in the United States earn 82 cents for every $1 earned by men (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2022).

Eighteen cents less on the dollar. What does that mean for a worker over a year? Over 40 years?

The picture doesn’t look the same for all women. The numbers indicate that even within that 82-cents statistic, there is disparity based on race and ethnicity, with women of color earning less (Human Rights Campaign Foundation, undated; U.S. Census Bureau, 2022).

In 2021, among full-time workers, Black and Latina women earn less than non-Hispanic White and Asian women. So did American Indian, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian, and other Pacific Islander women (American Association of University Women, 2018). The LGBTQ+ population is similarly penalized. When considering race and ethnicity, the wage gap increases, with the largest penalizations among Latinas within the LGBTQ+ population (72 cents) and Native American women within the LGBTQ+ population (75 cents) (Human Rights Campaign Foundation, undated).

Average Weekly Earnings, by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

  • White Women (Non-Hispanic): $1,201
  • Black Women: $1,001
  • Asian Women: $1,394
  • Latinas: $864
  • White Men (Non-Hispanic): $1,463

Source: Features data from the 2022 Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) Current Population Survey (CPS) (Flood et al., 2022).

Note: Based on average weekly earnings for workers who are full-time (35 or more hours per week), ages 16 and older, between January 2022 and December 2022.

Disparities within Categories

Now let’s put these numbers under the lens and take a closer look at the people whom they affect.

The average weekly earnings for women over age 25 vary by more than $100 per week depending on race and ethnicity. Asian women make nearly as much as White men, but Black and Latina women earn a little over half as much as White men (Flood et al., 2022).

Magnify the image even more, and you’d see income disparity among women in each racial and ethnic grouping as well. For example, even though Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women as a whole rank higher in earnings than women in the other groups listed in the above figure, the pay gap varies widely among women workers in this group. A wage gap persists for Asian women at every education level in America, but it is widest for those with the lowest education levels.

Compounding Factors

The picture continues to change as you add other factors, such as motherhood, into the mix. With the exception of Asian women, people across all groups—including the White male baseline—tend to earn more money if they have children. However, the pay gap increases when considering the average earnings for parents by gender, with White males making substantially more than White, Black, Asian, and Latina women (Flood et al., 2022).1 For instance, women are often affected by the “motherhood wage penalty,” which refers to the reduced earnings and career advancement opportunities for women after they become mothers (Gough and Noonan, 2013). Conversely, as men become fathers, they often receive a pay bump known as the “fatherhood wage premium” (Glauber, 2008).

People with disabilities are generally paid less than non-disabled people, as a result of factors including discrimination, access to education, and job opportunities (Yin, Shaeqitz, and Megra, 2014). For instance, thousands of individuals with disabilities are paid wages that are permitted to be far below the federal minimum wage. Most disabled individuals earning this category of wage take home less than $3.50 an hour (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2023). On top of that, the gender pay gap persists among this population, with White women with a disability earning 75 cents and White men with a disability earning 83 cents to the dollar when compared with earnings of a White man without a disability (Flood et al., 2022).2

We know that women make an average of 82 cents for every $1 men earn. But that 18-cent gap can grow even larger as people carry two or more socially marginalized identities. Consider the gap for a Black woman who is also disabled. She already has the 18-cent gap for gender. But she also has an additional gap for race. And then a third gap for disability. These multiple social categorizations pile on each other and affect how much someone can earn. (Paul, Zaw, and Darity, 2022).

It All Adds Up

Let’s zoom back out to those weekly average earnings numbers. When calculated across 40 years, the disparity is even more striking. Although we often think about the pay gap in terms of each dollar earned, over a lifetime of earnings, it can amount to a difference of more than $1 million.

Accumulated Earnings over a 40-Year Period, by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

  • White Women (Non-Hispanic): $2.5 million
  • Black Women: $2.1 million
  • Asian Women: $2.9 million
  • Latinas: $1.8 million
  • White Men (Non-Hispanic): $3 million

SOURCE: Features data from the 2022 IPUMS CPS (Flood et al., 2022).

NOTE: Based on average weekly earnings for workers who are full-time (35 or more hours per week), ages 16 and older, between January 2022 and December 2022.

The average weekly earnings for White men, calculated over a working life of 40 years, are $3.0 million. Over that same span of time, Latinas will earn only around $1.8 million (Flood et al., 2022). With that million-dollar disparity, Latinas are participating in a rigged competition. Over a 40-year timespan, men and women theoretically have the same number of hours to build the lives they want. But with stunted earnings, women have fewer options and opportunities for pursuing the same goals men are striving for: a house, a family, retirement savings.

That difference in earnings affects how women can accumulate, grow, and pass on wealth. As of 2021, the homeownership rate of households headed by women was 63 percent, compared with 68 percent for households headed by men (Choi, 2023). Across genders, White Americans are more likely to own their homes compared with members of other racial and ethnic groups, with a 74.5 percent homeownership rate. The Black or African American homeownership rate is 45.7 percent, the Hispanic or Latino rate is 49 percent, and the AAPI rate is 61.8 percent (Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, 2023).

When women retire, they also receive less from Social Security, pensions, and other retirement funds. According to Bank of America, on average, men have over 50 percent more retirement savings than women. Men have an average 401(k) account balance of $89,000, compared with women’s average balance of $59,000 (Bank of America, 2023). Retirement account balances differ by race and ethnicity, too. In 2019, on average, account balances ranged from $168,500 for White families to $38,300 for Black families to $27,300 for Hispanic families (Federal Reserve Board of Governors, 2022).

Consider where you fit into the data. What factors might have added up to put you higher or lower on the earnings scale? How would your potential to buy a house or retire change if you were a Black woman, a Latina with a disability, a White woman with children, or a White man?

What’s My Wage Gap?

We used the average weekly earnings data to illustrate the general wage gap for different groups of women relative to White men. This is an exploration at the population level and may not apply to everyone in each grouping. Use this chart to gain a general understanding of your wage gap.

Explanation of Terminology

Our analysis considers how the gender pay gap affects individuals differently. In this report, we utilize the following terminology to represent some of these groups, with a focus on using people-first and identity-first language:

  • Gender: We use the terms gender and sex interchangeably. In this tool, our analysis includes only male and female gender identities to reflect the available data, but the tool does discuss the impacts of the gap across other gender identities throughout the tool (U.S. Census Bureau, 2021).3 The Current Population Survey (CPS) asks respondents about their sex and allows respondents to choose between “male” and “female.” (IPUMS USA, undated-b). Sex is a biological characteristic associated with the number of X chromosomes in an individual’s genotype, whereas gender invokes social and cultural norms, such as how an individual identifies (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022).
  • Disabled: We use the terms disabled and people with disabilities interchangeably (Rahman, 2019).
  • Non-disabled: We use the terms non-disabled and people without disabilities interchangeably (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023).
  • Mothers: We use the terms mother and women with children interchangeably. This terminology describes women with children who reported having one child or more and being over 16 years of age. This includes women with adult children in their household.
  • Fathers: We use the terms father and men with children interchangeably. This terminology describes men with children who reported having one child or more and being over 16 years of age. This includes men with adult children in their household.
  • Hispanic, Latino, and Latina: We use the terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. Notably, there are some differences between this terminology; some describe “Hispanics” as those with ancestry from Spain or Latin America, primarily Spanish-speaking countries, and describe “Latinos” as those only from Latin America (Lopez, Krogstad, and Passel, 2023). Our dataset, the CPS, asks respondents about Hispanic origin and allows individuals to choose from various locations, ranging from Mexico to Central and South America. 4 Furthermore, we use Latino to denote men of Hispanic or Latino origin and Latina to denote women of Hispanic or Latino origin.5
  • Intersectionality: We use the term intersect to reference intersectionality. Crenshaw (1989) used the term intersectionality to describe how identifying with different and, at times, overlapping characteristics—such as but not limited to an individual’s race and ethnicity, class, gender, abilities, sexual orientation, and nationality—affects their lived experience, particularly how they experience discrimination. The origins of the term shed light on the interaction of race and gender: “The intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism” (Crenshaw, 1989).

Methodology

To shed light on the gender wage gap, this tool examines how race, ethnicity, disability, and parental status affect earnings today and how these disparities accumulate over time.

The gender pay gap is computed by calculating the earnings ratio among men and women. The calculations that underlie this tool use average earnings of working men and women and further disaggregate earnings by race, ethnicity, parental status, and disability (Anderson et al., 2022). The baseline group for all calculations is White (non-Hispanic) men, the largest demographic group in the labor force in the United States (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2023).

Our tool uses data from the monthly Current Population Survey (CPS) in partnership with the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. CPS is the primary source for the national unemployment rate and provides insight into various labor force characteristics (U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, 2011). We used Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) data from January 2022 to December 2022 (Flood et al., 2022). IPUMS provides public-use household and individual-level representative samples (IPUMS USA, undated-a; IPUMS USA, undated-b). The primary variables were average weekly earnings by gender, race, and ethnicity. We also created binary variables for disabled, non-disabled, parental status, and Hispanic/Latino designations. Additionally, we did not specify a particular race for Hispanic/Latino designation to encompass the multiple races with which individuals in this group may identify (Noe-Bustamante et al., 2021). To produce the final earning figures, we computed the average weekly earnings and further stratified the population to those working full-time (at least 35 hours or more per week) and over age 16, and we further disaggregated by sex, race, ethnicity, and disability. This analysis was conducted using the programming language R.

Endnotes

  1. We calculated the weighted average of the CPS “EARNWEEK” variable, which “reports how much the respondent usually earned per week at their current job, before deductions” (IPUMS CPS, undated-a). Return to text
  2. We used seven variables from the CPS to identify disability, and we recorded an individual as having a disability if they report a disability in at least one category. These categories include work disability or one of the six-question sequence wherein respondents report difficulty in hearing, vision, cognition, mobility, personal care, or independent living due to a physical or mental health condition. Variable definitions can be found at U.S. Census Bureau, 2021. Return to text
  3. Our analysis utilized the CPS, which currently does not have questions that ask about sexual orientation or gender identity. However, as of July 2021, the Household Pulse Survey (HPS) has begun fielding questions regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. For more information, see U.S. Census Bureau, 2021. Return to text
  4. Refer to Refer to IPUMS CPS (undated-b) for more information on the various locations available within the IPUMS Current Population Survey (CPS) to designate Hispanic origin. Return to text
  5. Spanish is a gendered language that designates an “o” or an “a” at the end of words to designate masculine or feminine associations. To attempt to remove these designations, the gender-neutral terms Latinx and Latine have emerged to refer to the Hispanic/Latino population. Return to text

References

  • American Association of University Women, The Simple Truth About the Gender Pay Gap, 2018.

  • Bank of America, “BofA Data Finds Men’s Average 401(k) Account Balance Exceeds Women’s by 50%. Bank of America,” press release, June 28, 2023.

  • Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “Health Considerations for LGBTQ Youth: Terminology,” webpage, undated. As of December 15, 20123: https://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/terminology/sexual-and-gender-identity-terms.htm

  • Choi, Jung Hyun, Unmasking the Real Gender Homeownership Gap, Urban Institute, March 28, 2023.

  • Crenshaw, Kimberle, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum, Vol. 1989, No. 1, 1989.

  • Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, “Q2 2023, Housing and Homeownership: Homeownership Rate,” FRED, webpage, 2023. As of December 15, 2023: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/release/tables?rid=296&eid=784188#snid=784198

  • Flood, Sarah, Miriam King, Renae Rodgers, Steven Ruggles, J. Robert Warren, and Michael Westberry, Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey: Version 10.0 [dataset]. Minneapolis, MN: IPUMS, 2022.

  • Glauber, Rebecca, “Race and Gender in Families and at Work: The Fatherhood Wage Premium,” Gender & Society, Vol. 22, No. 1, 2008.

  • Gough, Margaret, and Mary Noonan, “A Review of the Motherhood Wage Penalty in the United States,” Sociology Compass, Vol. 7, No. 4, 2013.

  • Human Rights Campaign Foundation, “The Wage Gap Among LGBTQ+ Workers in the United States,” undated. As of September 20, 2023: https://www.hrc.org/resources/the-wage-gap-among-lgbtq-workers-in-the-united-states

  • IPUMS CPS, “EARNWEEK,” webpage, undated-a. As of December 15, 2023: https://cps.ipums.org/cps-action/variables/EARNWEEK#description_section

  • IPUMS CPS, “HISPAN: Codes,” webpage, undated-b. As of December 15, 2023: https://cps.ipums.org/cps-action/variables/hispan#codes_section

  • IPUMS USA, “Frequently Asked Question (FAQ),” webpage, undated-a. As of December 15, 2023: https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/faq

  • IPUMS USA, “Sex: Codes and Frequencies,” webpage, undated-b. As of December 15, 2023: https://usa.ipums.org/usa-action/variables/SEX#codes_section

  • Lopez, Mark Hugo, Jens Manuel Krogstad, and Jeffrey S. Passel, “Who Is Hispanic?” Pew Research Center, September 5, 2023.

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  • U.S. Government Accountability Office, Women in the Workforce: The Gender Pay Gap Is Greater for Certain Racial and Ethnic Groups and Varies by Education Level, GAO-23-106041, December 2022.

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  • Yin, Michelle, Dahlia Shaewitz, and Mahlet Megra, An Uneven Playing Field: The Lack of Equal Pay for People with Disabilities, American Institutes for Research, December 2014.