Occupational segregation by gender contributes to a stubborn wage gap. It has kept women making less than men, per dollar, and still limits their access to well-paid jobs that don’t necessarily require higher education. According to Closing the Skills Gap: On-Ramp Occupations to Middle-Skilled Jobs for Women Workers, an Institute for Women’s Policy Research study […]
Read MoreBy Laura Putre But employment counselors encouraged her to apply for a training program in the Cincinnati metropolitan area, started by 26 women hailing from the education, manufacturing and nonprofit worlds. The founders of the program, called Raise the Floor saw middle-skill manufacturing jobs as a way for women to move out of poverty. According to […]
Read Moreby Cara Matteson The Institute for Women’s Policy Research found that one leading cause of the gender wage gap is that women work in segregated occupations. For example, 88% of home health aides and 63% of food servers are women. In contrast, men have a near-monopoly on “middle skill” jobs, like transportation or information technology, which offer […]
Read MoreAriane Hegewisch, who co-authored “Pathways to Equity” as well as the 2014 IWPR study “Occupational Segregation and the Gender Wage Gap: A Job Half Done,” knows that in addition to being unfair in principle, those disparities represent a drag on job-creation, innovation, and growth in GDP. Occupational segregation, says Hegewisch, “slows down how much the […]
Read MoreBy Vanessa Hua Yet the gender wage gap persists, with women working full-time making only 79 cents for every dollar earned by men. Families in which women are the sole or primary source of income — that’s 40 percent of households with children under the age of 18 — are hit especially hard, with the wage gap contributing to […]
Read MoreBy Heidi Hartmann The new Act to Establish Pay Equity in Massachusetts is similar to voluntary moves by Google and other companies that have changed their hiring policies to base a salary offer on the market rate of the job, not on previous compensation. The Massachusetts law also improves pay transparency by forbidding employers from […]
Read MoreLast year, women filled 31 percent of jobs in the “securities, commodities and financial services sales agents” group tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, but they earned only 52 cents for every dollar that men made, according to a study released last month by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research in Washington. Among 119 […]
Read MoreSince 2001, the gap has only closed 2.3 percentage points. (From 76.3 cents on the dollar to 78.6 — that “79 cents” figure is rounded up.) What gives, 21st century? “A lot of the gains we saw in the ’80s and ’90s were by women catching up in terms of experience, and to some extent […]
Read Moreby Emily Crockett Second, even neutral-sounding factors like “occupation” and “education” actually work against women when it comes to income. Research by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) has found that out of the 119 occupations that we have full-time weekly earnings data for, women face at least a 5 percent wage gap in […]
Read Moreby Alexia Elejalde-Ruiz A flurry of surveys and reports have come out on the topic in recent months to mark Equal Pay Day and Women’s History Month, which was March. •A woman’s median annual salary for full-time work is $10,800 less per year than a man’s — a disparity that can add up to nearly […]
Read MoreHalf of the gender wage gap is due to women working in different occupations and sectors than men. Improving women’s access to good middle-skill jobs can help close the wage gap and improve women’s economic security.
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