The gender pay gap is again receiving much-needed publicity in recent years as a topic of debate between US presidential hopefuls for 2016 and information uncovered from Sony’s email hack this time last year. While the phrase “women get paid 78% of what men are paid” is touted frequently in discussion, the 78% figure is static in dimension. Do all women get paid 78% of what men are paid, or is it just a subset of the female working population?
There is a lot more to the 78% figure than meets the eye, and the intersection of race and gender is important to telling the fuller story behind the 78%, and the wider issue of gender parity in earnings.
Using DASIL’s Pay by Race & Gender visualization, we can see that race plays a significant role in the pay of a full-time working woman and reveals the nuances to the widely-cited 78% figure. Asian women working full-time in the US are (and have been) the subset of women getting paid closest to what all men are getting paid throughout history, at 86% that of men in 2013. However, Asian women were only paid 75% that of Asian men in 2013. On the other end of the spectrum, Hispanic women were disproportionately getting paid only 60% of men’s wages in 2013, the lowest of all recorded races. Hispanic males also earn the lowest in comparison to all men, at 64% of what all men earn (not shown) in 2013. As the graph indicates, the asymmetric trends for Hispanic and Black women have remained relatively constant for the past twenty years.
With regard to part-time labor, however, there is virtually complete gender parity in 2013 when focusing on average figures, with “all women” receiving 99% of what a man earns. When filtering by race, part-time working White and Asian women even get paid more than that of average men; white women receive 106% of what a man earns, and Asian women 101% in 2013. However, racial disparity still persists: both Black and Hispanic women in part-time labor received 85% of what part-time men were paid in 2013, and the closest Black and Hispanic women have been in achieving pay parity with the average man was in 1994.
As this infographic suggests, one reason for full-time and part-time pay disparity can be due to industry: black women are more likely to work in less-lucrative jobs (e.g. service, healthcare) than high-lucrative jobs (e.g. STEM, management). Relatedly, education can be a contributing factor: Hispanic and Black women are less likely to graduate than whites. Yet, even if women of color have the same education levels as their white peers, they are still paid less; there is more contributing to pay disparity than the educational attainment of women of color.
While there is clear cause for more work to be done in bridging the pay gap between men and women, recognizing the multiple dimensions of the issue will be key to creating meaningful and effective policy changes.
Explore more trends with our Pay by Gender and Race visualization here.