Data reveals how the wage gap in the U.S. is changing in last years and who’s feeling it the most

There has been a lot of progress made in closing the wage gap between men and women in the United States. However, those gains haven’t been uniform among different groups of women.

According to the Pew Research Center, women aged 25 to 34 have seen their average wages go from 74 cents for every dollar a man earns in 1982, to 95 as of 2024. However, across age groups the average woman earns just 85% of what a man does today, albeit up from 65% over the same time span.

The story is different for women working full time though according to the US Census Bureau. The agency’s data show that women working full time on average were earning 81 cents for every dollar a man earns in 2024. That amount is a three-cent decrease from two years prior.

State of the wage gap

Pew points some measurable factors which can explain the wage gap and why women have made gains since the 1980s including educational attainment, occupational segregation and work experience. Over the long-term women have been making gains in these areas helping to narrow the gap.

However, while women are becoming more present in higher-paying roles that were traditionally mainly held by men, overall, women are still overrepresented in lower-paying occupations. This may help to partially explain the wage gap between the sexes.

Jasmine Tucker, vice president for research at the National Women’s Law Center, told Forbes that the increasing wage gap over the past couple of years can also be explained by the fact that men’s wages have been growing while those for women have been stagnant.

“We’re seeing this outpacing of wage growth for men and almost no wage growth for women over the last two years, and that’s what’s contributing to the increasing wage gap,” she said.

Black women have been particularly affected by this widening of the wage gap she highlighted. Tucker notes that this trend and that of women leaving the workforce could be a warning signal for what’s to come for the economy overall.

Data could be foreshadowing an economic downturn

On a whole, 338,000 women have left the workforce over the past year while over the same period 138,000 men have entered, reports Forbes. Mothers in the labor force is down by almost three percent, dropping to the lowest level in three years. Unemployment among Black women is more than one percent higher than it was at the beginning of the year, and nearly three percent higher than the national average.

“I think we’re going to look back at today’s statistics of women leaving the workforce and the increased unemployment rates for Black women, and say we should have known that we were heading toward an economic downturn,” Tucker observed.

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