What is the Gender Pay Gap and is it Real?

Working women are paid less than working men. A large body of research accounts for, diagnoses, and investigates this “gender pay gap.” But this literature often becomes unwieldy for lay readers, and because pay gaps are political topics, ideological agendas often seep quickly into discussions.

This primer examines the evidence surrounding the gender pay gap, both in the literature and through our own data analyses. We will begin by explaining the different ways the gap is measured, and then go deeper into the data using hourly wages for our analyses,1 culling from extensive national and regional surveys of wages, educational attainment, and occupational employment.

A number of figures are commonly used to describe the gender wage gap. One often-cited statistic comes from the Census Bureau, which looks at annual pay of full-time workers. By that measure, women are paid 80 cents for every dollar men are paid. Another measure looks at hourly pay and does not exclude part-time workers. It finds that, relative to men, typical women are paid 83 cents on the dollar.2 Other, less-cited measures show different gaps because they examine the gap at different parts of the wage distribution, or for different demographic subgroups, or are adjusted for factors such as education level and occupation.

The presence of alternative ways to measure the gap can create a misconception that data on the gender wage gap are unreliable. However, the data on the gender wage gap are remarkably clear and (unfortunately) consistent about the scale of the gap. In simple terms, no matter how you measure it, there is a gap. And, different gaps answer different questions. By discussing the data and the rationale behind these seemingly contradictory measures of the wage gap, we hope to improve the discourse around the gender wage gap.

Read the complete report by The Economic Policy Institute (EPI)