Women have made remarkable strides in education during the past three decades, but these gains have yet to translate into full equity in pay — even for college-educated women who work full time. A typical college-educated woman 25 years and older working full time earns $50,600 a year compared to $70,800 for college-educated male workers 25 years and older — a difference of $20,200!
There are many ways to talk about the gender pay gap. The map displays earnings, the pay gap and rankings using the latest data (2007) from the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. census every year. The analyses included all full time, year-round workers, including teachers who were defined as year round if they worked 40 weeks or more in the year. Other workers were defined as year-round if they worked 48 weeks or more weeks in the year. For each state, the earnings ration is displayed for
- the full-time, full year workforce age 16 and older, and
- the college educated full-time, full year workforce ages 25 and older.
Please Note: The data differs from data presented in the AAUW report Behind the Pay Gap, which examines the earnings of women and men who graduated from college in 1992-93 and 1999-2000 in selected years.
The analysis includes all full-time, year-round workers, including teachers who were defined as "year round" workers if they worked 40 weeks or more per year (For other workers, "Year round" is defined as working 48 weeks or more annually). Median earnings for male and female full time workers were calculated using data from the public use micro-sample (PUMS) of the American Community Survey (ACS). Because the PUMS data is a subset of the full ACS sample, these estimates do not match those published by the Census Bureau. Differences are generally small. The data also differ from published ACS estimates because the population of full-time year round workers was defined differently. The PUMS was used so that the gender wage gap between male and female college educated workers could be examined separately from the rest of the work force.
Map data explained
Map data table (PDF)
Questions? Comments? Please contact media@aauw.org or 202/785-7738.
to display state data ]