Black and Hispanic women experience the largest pay gaps
Women's hourly wages as a share of white men's and their per hour wage penalties, by race and ethnicity, 2022
Gender Wage Gap as Compared to White Men | Median | Gap |
---|---|---|
White women | 82.5% | 17.5% |
Black women | 69.5% | 30.5% |
Hispanic women | 64.1% | 35.9% |
AAPI women | 93.4% | 6.6% |
Notes: Hourly wages for both men and women are represented by the average wage of the middle 20% of their respective wage distributions, that is the average of the 40th-60th percentile among men and women, respectively. See Gould and deCourcy (2023) for more details on that specification.
Source: EPI analysis of Current Population Survey Outgoing Rotation Group microdata. For more information on the data sample see EPI's State of Working America Data Library.
These pay gaps are even larger when examining average hourly wages for all workers instead of just the average for middle-wage workers because of the disproportionate share of highly paid workers who are white men, which pulls up their average. Using the average measure, Black and Hispanic women are paid 61.4% and 57.8%, respectively, of white men’s wages, an hourly wage gap of $15.11 for Black women and $16.40 for Hispanic women. Even in a regression framework—controlling for age, education, and geographic division—Black and Hispanic women are both paid about 67% of white men’s wages.
Conclusion
There is no silver bullet to solving pay equity, but a wide array of policy options can close not only the gender pay gap but also gaps by race and ethnicity. These include requiring federal reporting of pay by gender, race, and ethnicity; prohibiting employers from asking about pay history; requiring employers to post pay bands when hiring; and adequately staffing and funding the Equal Employment and Opportunity Commission and other agencies charged with enforcement of nondiscrimination laws.
We also need policies that lift wages for most workers while also reducing gender and racial/ethnic pay gaps, such as running the economy at full employment, raising the federal minimum wage, and protecting and strengthening workers’ rights to bargain collectively for higher wages and benefits.
Notes
1. See Gould and DeCourcy (2023) for the reasoning behind these metric choices.
2. This is also true for the intervening parts of the wage distribution not shown in the figure.
3. Race/ethnicity categories are mutually exclusive in this analysis. Here we denote white to mean white non-Hispanic, Black is Black non-Hispanic, Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI) are AAPI non-Hispanic, and Hispanic refers to Hispanic of any race.