Wage inequality greater for La. women than in other states
18th April 2016 · 0 Comments
By Della Hasselle
Contributing Writer
When a woman goes to work in Louisiana, she probably makes less money than a man does – by a significant amount.
A new study released this month by the National Women’s Law Center compared earnings of men and women in all the states side-by-side, and found Louisiana ranks dead last for income equality between
the two population groups.
In the Crescent City,
a woman’s average earnings are slightly more than $31,500. That’s more than $16,700 less than what a man makes on average in the same year.
Adding those losses up over the course of a 40-year career, women in Louisiana face losing more than $670,000 – more than twice what they could lose over that same time period in other states, simply because employers do not pay them as much as men.
The issue isn’t just a problem in Louisiana, or any of the other seven states where women are likely to make as much as half a million dollars less than men throughout their career.
This “lifetime wage gap” exists across the country, the National Women’s Law Center found. In every state, women’s career losses based on today’s wage gap would amount to what would be about one-quarter of a million dollars or more.
When averaging the losses throughout the United States, women earn about 79 cents for every dollar that men do. Over time, this can equal a pronounced wage gap totaling more than $430,000 over the course of a 40-year career.
“Women shouldn’t have to work nearly 51 years to make what a man makes in 40 years,” said Emily Martin, NWLC General Counsel and Vice President for Workplace Justice. “The wage gap hasn’t budged in nearly a decade, and as a result women are losing hundreds of thousands of dollars during their work years. And for many women of color, the cost of the lifetime wage gap will exceed a million dollars. We literally can’t afford to ignore this.”
The statistics are bleak everywhere for women, but particularly so in Louisiana, where mothers are primary or sole breadwinners in nearly 40 percent of families, according to the Pew Research Center.
That’s because 20 percent of women in Louisiana live in poverty already, compared to the national average of 14.7 percent. Moreover, 19.9 percent of women in Louisiana are uninsured. The national average is 13 percent.
When factoring in the fact that women in Louisiana make $0.65 for every dollar paid to men, the wage gap can have serious consequences on the health and wellbeing of those families.
The National Partnership for Women & Families agrees. In a 2015 report, that organization found that the wage gap wasn’t just bad for families, but also bad for the state, as eliminating the gap could afford women 14 more months of mortgage payments, 21 more months of rent, 137 more weeks of food for their families and more than 8,100 additional gallons of gas.
“On average, Louisiana women who are employed full time lose a combined total of nearly 11 billion dollars every year due to the wage gap. Families, businesses and the economy suffer as a result,” the National Partnership report found. “These lost wages mean families have less money to spend on goods and services that help drive economic growth.”
The problem is exacerbated for minority women. The National Women’s Law Center study found that African-American women in Louisiana make an average of $26,400 a year – an amount that’s more than $28,000 a year less than white, non-Hispanic men. Over a 40-year period, that means Black women could earn about $1.1 million less than men who do the same or similar jobs.
Native American women and Latinas also risk making $1.1 million less than white, non-Hispanic men over that same 40-year period. For Asian-American women, the number is closer to $780,000.
When comparing the data nationally, the lifetime wage gap amounts to more than $1 million for Asian American women in one state, for African American women in six states, for Native American women in 13 states, and for Latinas in 23 states.
Out of the whole country, the worst examples of income inequality could be seen for Latinas in Washington, D.C., where the lifetime wage gap amounts to nearly $1.8 million over a 40-year time span.
Generally speaking, women were subjected to the least amount of income inequality in Florida, where they make about 85 cents for every dollar that men do, and the lifetime wage gap amounted to less than $250,000.
Aside from Louisiana, states where women’s career losses amount to more than half a million dollars are Michigan, New Hampshire, North Dakota, Utah, West Virginia and Wyoming.
Researchers calculated the cost of the wage gap by using the latest data showing the difference between women and men’s median annual earnings for full-time, year-round workers. Those numbers were multiplied by 40 years to find the “lifetime wage gap,” or the wage gap over a 40-year career.
The national wage gap was calculated based on the 2015 Current Population Survey, Annual Social and Economic Supplement. State figures were based on five-year annual average American Community Survey data from 2010 to 2014; these figures were not adjusted for inflation, according to the National Women’s Law Center.
This article originally published in the April 18, 2016 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
