The pay gap between women and men widened last year, analysis finds • Oregon Capital Chronicle:
The earnings gap between men and women slightly widened last year, according to a new analysis published Thursday.
The left-leaning Economic Policy Institute calculated women last year earned 18.6% less than men per hour on average. That’s up slightly from 2024, when the wage gap narrowed slightly to 18%.
The wage analysis, which examines several federal data sets and independent research papers, controls for race, ethnicity, education, age, marital status and geography.
What doesn’t it control for?
- Occupation. Men and women cluster in different fields, and the pay differences across occupations are large.
- Hours worked (not just full-time). Full-time hides variations like 40 hrs vs 60 hrs, overtime, nights, on-call. Many higher paying jobs reward long and inflexible hours, and men, on average, work more of those hours.
- Experience and career interruptions. Time out of the workforce, often for children, leads to slower accumulation of tenure and promotion which compounds over time. (I’m not arguing that this is a bad choice, by the way.)
- Specialization and role within an occupation. Being in the same field doesn’t mean people are doing the same job, and there can be large pay spreads amongst, say, different types of attorneys.
- Risk and working conditions. Jobs with higher risk or undesirable conditions often pay more, and men are overrepresented in those jobs.
When you adjust for those conditions, then perform an apples-to-apples comparison, the pay gap between men and women is very small to negligible.