The gender wage gap for weekly full-time workers in the United States narrowed slightly between 2015 and 2016. In 2016, the ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly full-time earnings was 81.9 percent, an increase of 0.8 percentage points since 2015, when the ratio was 81.1 percent, leaving a wage gap of 18.1 percentage points down from 19.9 percentage points in 2015. Women’s median weekly earnings for full-time work were $749 in 2016 compared with $915 for men. Adjusting for inflation, women’s earnings increased by 1.9 percent, while men’s earnings increased by 1.0 percent since 2015.
About the author
Ariane Hegewisch is Program Director of Employment and Earnings at IWPR and Scholar in Residence at American University; prior to that she spent two years at IWPR as a scholar-in-residence. She came to IWPR from the Center for WorkLife Law at UC Hastings. She is responsible for IWPR’s research on workplace discrimination and is a specialist in comparative human resource management, with a focus on policies and legislative approaches to facilitate greater work life reconciliation and gender equality, in the US and internationally. Prior to coming to the USA she taught comparative European human resource management at Cranfield School of Management in the UK where she was a founding researcher of the Cranet Survey of International HRM, the largest independent survey of human resource management policies and practices, covering 25 countries worldwide. She started her career in local economic development, developing strategies for greater gender equality in employment and training in local government in the UK. She has published many papers and articles and co-edited several books, including ‘Women, work and inequality: The challenge of equal pay in a deregulated labour market”. She is German and has a BSc in Economics from the London School of Economics and an MPhil in Development Studies from the IDS, Sussex.
Emma Williams-Baron was a Policy and Data Analyst at IWPR and Assistant Editor for the Journal of Women, Politics & Policy, focusing on job quality, pay equity across the life course, work-life policy, and intersectional analysis. She began at IWPR as a Mariam K. Chamberlain Fellow in 2015.
Previously, she was a research assistant investigating gendered violence with Dr. Alexandra Hrycak, and a legislative intern at the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women.
As an undergraduate student, Emma presented a senior thesis titled Girls and Boys Who Work: Effects of Gendered Adolescent Work Experiences on Career, Education, Family, and Work-Life Balance Aspirations and Expectations. Since joining IWPR, Emma has given several presentations at national and international conference including sharing findings from her study of youth work experience and attitudes toward career and family at the 2016 Work and Family Researchers Network Conference and presenting conclusions from her work with Dr. Hrycak at the 2016 Association for the Study of Nationalities 21st Annual World Convention.
Emma is a 2015 graduate of Reed College with a B.A. in sociology.
