Business The gender pay gap is getting wider, reversing progress

Men's wages went up last year; women's incomes didn't budge, per new data out Tuesday morning.

Why it matters: It's a worrying sign that the slow march toward pay equity for women is stumbling.
Zoom in: The median woman working full time in 2024 earned 81% of what the median man earned — a drop of 2 percentage points from the year before and the second consecutive annual decline.

• The pay gap is now back to where it was in 2017, when the burgeoning #MeToo movement drew wide attention to sex discrimination.

By the numbers: Men got raises this year; women did not.

• The median income for men, working full-time, was $71,090 in 2024, an increase of 3.7%.
• Women earned $57,520, essentially flat from 2023.

Between the lines: Wages for workers without a high-school degree were up 5.5% last year — and that may be driving the gap, Katherine Gallagher Robbins, a senior fellow at the National Partnership for Women & Families, tells Axios.

• Men account for 69% full-time, year-round workers aged 25 and older without a high school degree.
• "It's great to see men's wages rising, it's critical to make sure women don't fall farther behind, especially as the cost of living has increased," Robbins says.

The big picture: The wage gap doesn't necessarily mean women earn less than men for the same types of jobs.

• Instead, it is a useful indicator of broad inequality between men and women in the labor market.

Zoom out: Women make up the majority of low-wage workers in the U.S., partly because many are juggling paid work with caring for children. Jobs that can accommodate those schedules tend to pay less.

• Women are more likely to take career breaks, slowing down wage growth. Plus, jobs typically done by women often pay less than those done by a man. For example, housekeepers typically don't make us much as janitors.

What to watch: There are signs that the labor market for women is worse this year — particularly for Black women who are seeing a spike in unemployment, in the wake of federal layoffs and the DEI crackdown.

• Hundreds of thousands of mothers also left the workforce in the first half of the year.
• "At a time when women, including many mothers, are leaving the labor force at record rates, it is a five-alarm fire to see that the gender wage gap is widening for an unprecedented second year in a row," said Emily Martin, chief program officer at the liberal National Women's Law Center.

Source(Archive)

 

[>IMPLYING]

Life is wonderful.

What's annoying is that the impetus to get women into work decades ago was an annoying conglomerate of ideologies that, whilst opposing one another principally, unintentionally worked with one another to achieve the same goal for different ends; this is probably why it happened so quick relatively speaking and why it stuck.

Liberal economists/Keynesians: "More workers -> More people making an income -> Income = more tax revenue + more consumer spending ergo greater perception of local demand -> production is scaled up domestically to meet increase -> better economy."

Corporations: "Limited workers pool has to be competed for through offering higher wages or bonuses -> Inflated worker pool means less need to compete -> no need to compete means no need to offer extra incentive thus lower overheads -> greater profit margins."

2nd Wave Feminism: "Reliance on men for income keeps women from achieving true independence, individuality, social mobility, and ultimately hinders women from being truly happy."/Marxism: "Marriage is a bourgeois institution designed to keep women from participating in society, earning a wage, and thus unable to develop class consciousness and demand social change."
(I put a slash between them because they more or less share the shame foundation: look into the writer of The Feminine Mystique – 3rd wave is much more Marxist ala "any status quo that pertains to women is intentional to keep them oppressed, even the assertion that only women can get pregnant" and so on.)

You had a combination of pragmatism/economic theory alongside abstract concepts/Marxist theory creating this hell spawn.
Considering the time period it fell in (post-WW2, civil rights movement, threat of USSR) any socially conservative counterarguments were strangled in the crib.

I am amazed that something so thoroughly proven false like the "gender wage gap" is still getting thrown around in Current Year.

What's bizarre is that it was emphasised to be bullshit back in 2007, but it still rose to prominence against post 2010 for reasons I don't remember.

On this same page, there's also this paragraph.

Besides the fact it's ignoring the elephant in the room here (Black and Latina women work less than men do, and comparing them to white men is just creating an bigger disparity for the sake of having one) going to the source reveals:

They still push the idea women are being intentionally paid less than men for the same work.


In the end it really does just come back to Marxist theory (disrupting/subverting status quo allows a more "equal" idea to take its place + more "worker" power (unions)) and free shit (expanding paid leave + "more high paying jobs".)

 

[Dante Alighieri]

If women want to make as much as men then they should go do the jobs men do that make that much. But they won't, because men doing those jobs have a pretty big chance at dying on the job.