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
1203, 2015

New Report Projects When Women in Each U.S. State Will Achieve Equal Pay; Five States Won’t See Equal Pay until the Next Century

The first release from Status of Women in the States: 2015, a project of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), finds that, if current trends in narrowing the pay gap in the states continue, the date when women in the United States will achieve equal pay is 2058, but new projections for each state find this date is much further out in the future for women in many parts of the country.