It takes a lot statistical and demographic anomalies for women to out-earn men.
Women are paid more than men in six municipalities and one county, according to an analysis of 2,700 locations with more than 10,000 workers by The Pew Charitable Trusts, a nonprofit with a goal to improve public policy. Women out-earn men in Lake Worth, Fla.; Plainfield and Trenton, N.J.; Inglewood, Calif.; Hempstead, N.Y.; Chamblee, Ga. and Prince George’s County, Md.
“Pay may be relatively higher for young millennial women who have landed jobs in big cities and found affordable housing in commuter suburbs such as these,” Tim Henderson, who covers demographics for Stateline, wrote. “And the communities’ high numbers of single male laborers, many of whom are immigrants working without documentation, can also hold down male income.”
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These statistics may be skewed, Henderson added. Many of the women in these locations are living with low-wage male workers, many of whom are undocumented immigrants, which lowers the median wage for men. Those male workers are, as a result, likely being paid less than the minimum wage, which provides a more gloomy reason why women would out-earn men in these areas.
He did note positive trends: “Women in Chamblee, for instance, earn more than women in the Atlanta area as a whole, and out-earn men in some lucrative, male-dominated fields, such as computers and engineering, with the help of female business entrepreneurs sensitive to the need for flexibility to attend to family responsibilities.” (Nationally, women earn 83% that of men.)
Female personal financial advisers make little more than half (56.4%) of men in the same job, compared with 83% overall, according to a recent analysis by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research, a Washington, D.C.-based research organization. (Critically, that does not account for women who are missing from senior roles in Silicon Valley.)
There are 4.6 million women who work in occupations with poverty-level wages, nearly three times as many as the 1.5 million men who do, the organization concluded. In addition, it found racial disparities compounding gender inequality in the labor market: Black and Hispanic women are more than twice as likely to work in service occupations as white women.
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Another depressing estimate: It will take another 88 years for the gender gap to close across the 106 countries covered in the World Economic Forum‘s Global Gender Gap Index. The most challenging gender wage gaps remain in the economic and health spheres, where it will not be closed for another 217 years, the report found.
And women employed in male-dominated workplaces are more likely to say their gender has made it harder for them to get ahead at work and report gender discrimination at significantly higher rates, a separate survey released by the Pew Research Center, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank, concluded. The survey was conducted last year before the #MeToo movement took off.