TULSA, Okla. — Women, as a whole, earn, on average, 83 cents for every dollar a man makes.
Bankrate financial analyst Alex Gailey took a deeper dive into the numbers to see what causes disparities between what men and women earn to provide a clearer picture of women's earnings.
How race impacts women's earnings:
- Asian women: 94 cents for each dollar a man makes
- White women: 80 cents
- Black women: 67 cents
- Hispanic women: 58 cents
Gailey told 2 News several factors account for gender pay disparity.
"Over the last two decades, the gender pay gap has been in a bit of a holding pattern, so we've only seen the gender pay gap between 2011 and 2003 close by about 6% points," Gailey said. "That isn't as quickly as maybe we would have thought or had hoped for at this point. It's 2025."
She points to several factors holding down women's earning power. "It's something that, unfortunately, is out of women's control in a lot of instances."
She points to:
- occupational segregation
- gender bias and hiring and promotion.
- societal expectations of what jobs women versus men think are realistic for them
"It is surprising that the gender pay gap has not narrowed as quickly as we would have expected given how much we've seen a rise in women entering the college-educated workforce and and just getting more educated in general," She said. "A lot of research that has shown that women are attaining higher education levels at a faster rate over the last few decades. They've also taken over the majority of the college-educated workforce over the last few years, and so women are making progress from an educational standpoint."
However, she points out it did not translate into pay equity with men, or closing the pay gap.
The research shows how the pay gap leaves women as a whole earning on average half a million less than men over a 40-year work life.
"The losses for black and Hispanic women over 40-year career is roughly a million and 1.3 million respectively," she said when compared to non-hispanic white men.
Since women typically earn less over their work life, Gailey urges them to pay down any financial debts as quickly as possible and make saving a priority, even if it's just a little from each paycheck, to stretch their lifetime earnings a little further.
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