Country singer Margo Price sang about the struggles of pay inequality when she sang "Pay gap, pay gap, why don't you do the math?" in her 2017 song titled "Pay gap." PayScale's annual report on the state of the gender pay gap did just that: In 2020, women are making 81 cents for every dollar their male colleagues make. That's a whopping two-cent increase from the 79 cents they made in 2019. To add insult to injury, the report also says only 38% of companies have plans in place to examine and address pay inequities. In spite of the progress made since 1979, when women working full-time earned 62% of what men earned, the gender pay gap has leveled off since the early 2000s. However, as new research from Self Financial reveals, that pay gap is felt more deeply in certain parts of the United States. The Self report says Wyoming and Utah are the states with the most pronounced gender pay gaps, at 63% and 70%, respectively. Women fare better in Maryland and Vermont, where they make 88% and 91% of what men earn, respectively. The research from Self also shows that the gap varies substantially depending on the industry and occupation. Women in legal occupations earn 55% of what men earn, followed closely by health practitioners at 65%. Finance and insurance were the industries with the largest gender pay gap, with women making 59 cents on the dollar. In a Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality study, researchers point to several factors that result in occupational segregation, including cultural beliefs about male and female competence and discrimination against women or mothers. "If the goal is to reduce gender inequality in wages, we need to develop better policy that alleviates occupational segregation itself, not just within occupation pay differentials," the researchers say. See our slideshow above for the top ten large metropolitan cities with the biggest gender pay gaps, and click here for the full study. Related: |

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