The Wage Gap Continues to Exist in Corporate America

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Buying Influence, Inc. is a non-profit organization seeking to influence publicly-traded corporations so that they make more socially responsible business decisions. Our primary focus is on providing gender wage gap information, and through corporate evaluations we are able to show which publicly-traded corporations do not follow fair-pay treatment women and minorities. We judge this in two ways: wage gap (also called pay equity -- receiving equal pay for equal work) and being fairly represented in the highest levels of management and on the corporate board of directors.

Quotes Regarding the Wage Gap

“On the issue of wage discrimination, the numbers are really quite astounding. In the workplace women earn about 74 cents for each dollar men make, even in studies accounting for things like similar education and experience.” -- Dr. Maria Kunstadter, Founder and CEO of Buying Influence, Inc.

“Women represent less than 2% of publicly-held corporate board seats, and minorities are barely a blip on the radar screen at less than 1%! Yes, it’s a hot issue, and yes it has an impact of the overall wage gap.” -- Linda Eakes, President, Buying Influence, Inc.

Government Reporting on the Wage Gap: " Explaining Trends in the Gender Wage Gap"

Although the wage gap between women and men’s wages has narrowed substantially since the signing of the Equal Pay Act in 1963, there still exists a significant wage gap that cannot be explained by differences between male and female workers in labor market experience and in the characteristics of jobs they hold.

After hovering at about 60 percent since the mid-1950s, the wage gap ratio of women's to men's median pay began to rise in the late 1970s and reached about 70 percent by 1990. The gender wage gap pay ratio is currently on the rise again, surpassing 75 percent in 1997.

The most recent detailed wage gap study found that in the late 1980s about one-third of the gender wage gap was explained by differences in the skills and experience that women bring to the labor market and about 28 percent was due to differences in industry, occupation, and union status among men and women. Accounting for these differences raised the female/male wage gap pay ratio in the late 1980s from about 72 percent to about 88 percent, leaving around 12 percent as an "unexplained" wage gap difference.

The wage gap is a statistical indicator often used as an index of the status of women's earnings relative to men's. The term wage gap is also used to compare the earnings of other races and ethnicities to those of white males, a group generally not subject to race- or sex-based discrimination. The wage gap is expressed as a percentage (e.g., in 2005, women earned 77% as much as men) and is calculated by dividing the median annual earnings for women by the median annual earnings for men.

Wage Gap: 2004 Median Annual Earnings by Race and Sex

NOTE: Includes full-time, year-round workers ages 15 and above. “White” and “Black” exclude those who identified as Hispanic and/or reported more than one race category. “Hispanic” includes all those who so identified themselves, regardless of race. Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Current Population Survey, 2005 Annual Social and Economic Supplement.

The Equal Pay Act and the Wage Gap

The Equal Pay Act was signed in 1963, making it illegal for employers to pay unequal wages to men and women who hold the same job and do the same work. At the time of the EPA's passage, the wage gap was this: women earned just 58 cents for every dollar earned by men. By 2005, the wage gap rate had only increased to 77 cents, an improvement of less than half a penny a year in the wage gap. Minority women fare the worst. African-American women earn just 69 cents to every dollar earned by white men, and for Hispanic women that figure drops to merely 59 cents per dollar.

The wage gap between women and men cuts across a wide spectrum of occupations. The Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that in 2005 the wage gap for female physicians and surgeons earned 60.9% of the median weekly wages of male physicians, and the wage gap for women in sales occupations earned just 63.4% of men's wages in equivalent positions.

The Wage Gap and Poverty

If working women earned the same as men (those who work the same number of hours; have the same education, age, and union status; and live in the same region of the country), their annual family incomes would rise by $4,000 and poverty rates would be cut in half.