Yesterday was Equal Pay Day, the day women’s earnings finally catch up with men’s earnings for the previous year. After engaging in an argument with a friend over the merits of the equal pay argument — he maintained women had less market value in the workplace than men (due to traditionally having less education, working less hours, etc.) — I drew up a quick chart showing the history of men’s and women’s annual salaries over time, with a line added in representing the number of women obtaining Bachelor’s degrees.
The numbers are imperfect; they don’t control for occupation, industry, race, etc., but it shows how women’s skills are increasing at a disproportionate rate to their salaries. (Once you control for factors like education and experience, the wage gap gets slightly smaller, but persists.) Click to view full size:
Leave any comments below! For more info on the gender pay gap, click here.
http://www.cato.org/pubs/pas/pa038.html
Note that the shape of the trend lines are meaningless since they jump from five year intervals to one year intervals. Of course, this does not affect the pay gap but it does alter our impression of how that gap changed over time.
Hi Naomi- I agree, it is confusing.
I added the spaced vertical lines in an effort to at least point out the inconsistent time scale, but the better thing to do would’ve been to find the missing data (pre-1990 data was only available in five-year intervals in the source I used), or to take time to re-work the x-axis to accurately represent the scale.
Good to know that my shortcut didn’t go unnoticed! Thanks for the comment-
Eliza