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Women medical assistants who worked full-time made 82 cents to the dollar men earned in 2023.

That’s $166 out of a weekly paycheck, which means she got paid $8,632 less doing the same job in 2023.

Wage gap calculated from 2023 median weekly earnings of full-time salary workers in the United States as per the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Unfair and Illegal

Over 60 years after President Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act, on average women are still paid less than their male counterparts for doing comparable jobs in the U.S. — that’s called the pay gap. It means that each time the average woman starts a new job, she’s likely to start from a lower base salary than her male counterparts.

Just as interest compounds, so does the pay gap. As a woman moves from job to job during her career, the pay gap between her and her male colleagues is likely to become wider and wider.

In 2023, finance specialists and legal occupations suffered the largest gender pay gaps. Out of 595 occupations, there was one where women earned more than men: producers and directors.

64 more years

Unequal pay isn’t just unfair, it’s illegal. But unless men and women who have the same job discuss what they’re getting paid, unequal pay can go unaddressed indefinitely. At the current pace, it will take until 2088 for women and men’s earnings to reach pay parity. Let’s make it happen sooner.

Women make up nearly half of the labor force and mothers are the primary or co-breadwinners in the majority of families. When women aren’t paid fairly, families suffer and the American economy suffers.

Narrow the Gap

Insist on equal pay for equal work in your and your loved ones’ workplaces. Here’s what you can do.

  • Get educated about Equal Pay and Compensation Discrimination.
  • Raise awareness about the pay gap. To start, share a page from this site.
  • Talk to employees and employers you know about the pay gap, salary negotiation techniques, and equal pay laws.
  • Change the numbers by citing the numbers. Boatloads of data just like this is freely available from the U.S. Department of Labor and beyond.

Find out more

The Institute for Women’s Policy Research’s fact sheet The Gender Wage Gap by Occupation, Race, and Ethnicity 2020 (PDF, 12 pages)

Catalyst.org’s research report The Myth of the Ideal Worker: Does Doing All The Right Things Really Get Women Ahead? (PDF, 21 pages)

Women Don’t Ask: The High Cost of Avoiding Negotiation--and Positive Strategies for Change by Linda Babcock and Sara Laschever (Book, 248 pages)

Hiring manager at a multinational tech company: "I regularly hire women for 65% to 75% of what men make. I am sick of it. Here is why it happens and how you can avoid it."

Have the Talk

"Women work fewer hours than men so it follows they earn less."

The data set presented here only counts the salaries of full-time workers.

"Women choose lower-paying jobs so that’s why there’s a pay gap."

This data compares the salaries of women and men in the same jobs, from janitors to executives.

"Women don’t negotiate their salary as aggressively as men so it’s their fault there’s a pay gap."

Better negotiation techniques can help close the wage gap, but the problem is multi-faceted and systemic.

"Women choose to stay home with their kids so they have less professional experience than men and thus should earn less."

Studies show the pay gap exists whether or not women have children.

"In a lot of jobs, there’s no pay gap—and sometimes, women earn more than men."

Pay disparity does not exist in every occupation, but across all occupations, women consistently earn less at the same jobs. Of the 158 pay gaps presented here, women earned the same or more than men in 3 occupations.

See the whole list of occupations