Employment and EarningsAdministrator2020-12-09T18:08:37-05:00

Trends in Employment and Earnings

Women’s status in the area of employment and earnings has improved on two indicators since the publication of IWPR’s last national report on the status of women, the 2004 Status of Women in the States, and remained unchanged or declined on two others. Women’s median annual earnings for full-time, year-round work in 2013 ($39,157) were nearly identical to their earnings for similar work in 2002 ($39,108 when adjusted to 2013 dollars). The gender earnings ratio improved during this time from 76.6 to 78.3 percent, narrowing the gender wage gap by 1.7 percentage points, and the share of women working in professional or managerial occupations grew from 33.2 to 39.9 percent. Women’s labor force participation rate, however, declined from 59.6 in 2002 to 57.0 percent in 2014.

BestWorst
1. District of Columbia51. Mississippi
2. Maryland50. West Virginia
3. Massachusetts49. Idaho
4. Connecticut48. Louisiana
5. New York47. Alabama
1412, 2016

Florida Receives D+ on Women’s Poverty and Access to Opportunity, with Wide Disparities by County

Washington, DC—A new county-level analysis of the status of women in Florida, released by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) in partnership with the Florida Women’s Funding Alliance (FWFA), finds that women in Florida have higher rates of poverty, lower educational attainment, and lower access to health insurance coverage than women in the United States overall, but the state ranks 5th in the nation on women’s business ownership. The report estimates that if working women in Florida were paid the same as comparable men—men who are of the same age, have the same level of education, work the same number of hours, and have the same urban/rural status—the poverty rate among all working women would fall by 57.3 percent.