It’s been one year since the U.S. House of Representatives passed the Paycheck Fairness Act (H.R. 7)—and still the Senate has failed to take action. In the absence of meaningful action, with each passing day, women are being shortchanged and harmed by the lack of access to equal pay. The earnings gap between women and men has been a stubborn problem for decades, and it continues to erode women’s wages. Women working full time in the United States collectively earned an estimated $546.3 billion less than their male counterparts in the one year since the House passed the comprehensive equal pay legislation, according to new CAP analysis. (see Methodology and Figure 1) The same CAP analysis found that, on an individual level and in that same period, a full-time working woman earned about $9,585 less than a man on average.
However, the numbers for women overall versus men overall only tell part of the story. When broken down by race and ethnicity, the earnings gap was larger for most women of color when compared with white men. In the same one-year analysis of full-time workers, on average, Black women earned about $17,344.36 less than white men, and Latinas earned about $20,483.36 less. (see Figure 2) Compared with white men, on average, white women earned about $10,030.93 less in that one-year period, and Asian women earned about $19.43 less. This calculation for Asian women, however, may vastly underestimate the actual gap for many women due to the wide diversity across Asian subgroups. For example, separate analysis of U.S. Census data from 2018 of median annual earnings indicates that Nepali and Hmong women working full time, year-round earned 50 cents and 61 cents, respectively, for every dollar earned by a white, non-Hispanic man in 2018, while Asian women overall earned 90 cents on the dollar. These numbers are a reminder that while the gender wage gap is often talked about in terms of cents on the dollar, the cumulative impact over time is much larger than a few cents. While these earnings gaps may not be visible on the surface, they both represent and add to economic burdens facing women and their families. Without action, these earnings gaps are not projected to close anytime soon. At the current pace of change, women overall are not estimated to reach pay parity with men overall until 2059. Even starker, Black women and Latinas are not estimated to reach pay parity with white men until 2130 and 2224, respectively. Continue reading.