Today is Equal Pay Day, a reminder that there is still a significant pay gap between men and women in our country. The date represents how far into 2025 women would have to work on top of the hours they worked in 2024 simply to match what men were paid in 2024. On an hourly basis, women were paid 18.0% less on average than men in 2024, after controlling for race and ethnicity, education, age, marital status, and state.

In our 2024 blog, we documented the lack of progress in narrowing this gender wage gap for the majority of the past three decades. We show that despite a decline in the pay gap between 1979 and 1994—due as much to men’s slower growing wages as to notable increases in women’s wages—it has remained mostly flat up until 2022. Since then, our data library shows slight improvement toward closing the gender wage gap, from 20.0% in 2022 to 18.9% in 2023 and 18.0% in 2024, the lowest it has ever been. These gains are promising and likely driven by a strong labor market recovery from the COVID-19 recession that lifted wages more at the lower end of the overall wage distribution. If this strong recovery is threatened—as it has been by recent Trump administration actions—these gains could be short-lived.

Women are paid less than men across the wage distribution

Women are paid less than men due to occupational segregation, devaluation of women’s work, societal norms, and discrimination, many of which take root well before women entered the labor market. Despite experiencing exceptionally fast wage growth relative to men over the past four decades, as we note in our State of Working America Wages report, women are still paid less than men at all parts of the wage distribution (Figure A).

The wage gap is smallest among lower-wage workers, in part because the minimum wage creates a wage floor. At the 10th percentile, women are paid $1.29 (or 8.7%) less an hour than men, while at the middle the wage gap is $4.00 an hour (or 14.9%). These low- and middle-wage gaps translate into annual earnings gaps of nearly $2,700 and over $8,300, respectively, for a full-time worker. The 90th percentile is the highest wage category we can reliably compare due to issues with topcoding in the data, which make it difficult to measure wages at the top of the distribution, particularly for men. Women are underrepresented among the highest wage jobs because of occupational segregation, excessive hours, and discrimination. Women at the 90th percentile of their wage distribution are paid $12.63 (or 18.6%) less an hour than men at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution. This difference would translate into an annual earnings gap of over $26,000 for a full-time worker.

Women are paid less than men at every education level

Although women have seen gains in educational attainment over the last five decades, they still face a significant wage gap. Among workers, women outnumber men in the college-educated labor force and are more likely to obtain a graduate degree than men. Even so, women are paid less than men at every education level, as shown in Figure B.

Among workers who have only a high school diploma, women are paid 20.1% less than men. Among workers who have a college degree, women are paid 24.2% less than men. That gap of $12.12 on an hourly basis translates to roughly $25,200 lower annual earnings for a full-time worker. Women with an advanced degree also experience a significant wage gap of $15.66 on an hourly basis, or over $32,500 annually, in 2024.

What’s very clear from the data is that women with advanced degrees are paid less per hour, on average, than men with only college degrees. Men with a college degree only are paid $50.01 per hour on average compared with $49.45 for women with an advanced degree. 

Black and Hispanic women experience the largest wage gaps

If the overall gender pay gap isn’t enough cause for alarm, the wage gaps for Black and Hispanic women relative to white men are even larger due to compounded discrimination and occupational segregation based on both gender and race/ethnicity. In Figure C, we compare middle wages—or the 50th percentile of each group’s wage distribution—for Asian American/Pacific Islander (AAPI), Black, Hispanic, and white women with that of white men.1

White women and AAPI women are respectively paid 82.9% and 93.1% of the amount non-Hispanic white men are paid. Black women are paid only 69.6% of white men’s wages at the middle, a gap of $9.09 on an hourly basis, which translates to roughly $18,900 lower annual earnings for a full-time worker. For Hispanic women, the gap is even larger: Hispanic women are paid only 65.3% of white men’s wages, an hourly wage gap of $10.36. For a full-time worker, that gap is over $21,500 a year.

Even when controlling for age, education, marital status, and state, Black and Hispanic women are paid 24.7% and 27.4% less than their white male counterparts, respectively. In other words, very little of the observed difference in pay is explained by differences in education, experience, or regional economic conditions.

Challenges to closing the gender pay gap

An array of policy solutions is required to not only close pay gap by gender but also 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 (EEOC) and other agencies charged with enforcing 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. Because these policies provide disproportionate gains to workers the lower they are in the wage distribution, they will work powerfully to close gender and racial wage gaps.

Recent actions by the Trump administration will harm women and workers of color across the country, and in doing so will worsen wage gaps across gender and race/ethnicity. The banning of words like “gender,” “race,” “equity,” and “discrimination,” and attacks on the EEOC will weaken our ability to track pay equity and enforce nondiscrimination laws. There have also been ongoing threats to the availability and continued collection of key data throughout federal agencies. If agencies that collect data on wages and incomes by demographic characteristics pullback, it would be a disaster for anybody—policymakers, researchers, employers, or workers—who wants basic facts about how well the economy is performing for different workers and different sectors.

Further, in just two months, the administration has taken actions which will weaken the demand for employment and reduce the wage growth that we have seen over the pandemic business cycle. They include assaults on the public sector, eliminating grants and contracts, deportations, proposed cuts to SNAP and Medicaid, and broad-based tariffs (see our State of Working America Wages report for more detail). These actions—and the chaotic and often lawless way they have been implemented—will drag heavily on economic growth, and this will in turn cause irreparable harm to working people and families across the country. If these actions are not reversed soon, the labor market gains made over the pandemic business cycle could be squandered.

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1. 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.