On the fifth anniversary of the signing of the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act—a bill that reinstated women’s ability to contest unlawful pay discrimination and was the first bill signed into law by President Obama—analysis from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) finds that the poverty rate for working women would be cut in half if women were paid the same as comparable men, and that greater pay transparency would increase women’s pay.

According to a regression analysis of federal data by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR), the poverty rate for working women would be cut in half if women were paid the same as comparable men. The analysis—prepared by IWPR for use in The Shriver Report’s A Woman’s Nation Pushes Back from the Brink, produced in partnership with the Center for American Progress—also estimates that the U.S. economy would have produced income of $447.6 billion more if women received equal pay, which represents 2.9 percent of 2012 gross domestic product (GDP).