Why male nurses earn $250 more per week than female nurses.

By Venessa Wong

Equal Pay Day research finds women earn less than men even in female-dominated fields like nursing, teaching and HR

Women in the U.S. continued to earn less than their male counterparts in 2023, and not simply because they disproportionately work in lower-paying professions, They earned less than men in every occupation, including those dominated by women.

Women's weekly earnings in 2023 were lower than men's in all 20 of the most common occupations for full-time female workers, including teaching, nursing, financial management and administrative assistants, according to a new report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research, a think tank focused on women's economic issues.

The median weekly earnings for women in these 20 roles was $176 less per week than for men in those jobs. (Nearly all of the 20 most common jobs for women were also majority-female occupations.) In fact, the wage gap was consistent across the labor market regardless of a field's gender makeup.

"I've been a nurse for 30 years," said Sonia Lawrence, a registered nurse and president of the NYC Health + Hospitals/Mayorals Executive Council at the New York State Nurses Association, a labor union. "I can tell you as a woman of color that there is nowhere we can go that is completely free from gender and racial discrimination, so of course it is a part of our profession, too."

The IWPR report echoed a 2022 Labor Department report that found, even within female-dominated jobs, that "women are paid less on average than men in the same job." Overall, in a comparison of more than 300 occupations, "there are none where women have an earnings advantage over men, but hundreds where men have significantly higher earnings than women," the department said.

The IWPR reported similar findings 10 years ago, and there has been little progress over the last three decades on narrowing the gender wage gap, according to the Economic Policy Institute, a progressive think tank.

These persistent wage disparities have roots in gender discrimination, racial discrimination and other systemic problems, the Labor Department has previously acknowledged. "Where women work, it is undervalued and underpaid, almost no matter where they work" in the U.S., said Deborah Vagins, the national campaign director at Equal Rights Advocates, a nonprofit focused on women's rights.

Over time, women retire with 44% less saved, on average, than men, and their relatively lower lifetime earnings also translate to lower Social Security benefits. "The wage gap contributes both to your quality of life while working and after working," Vagins said, and it also affects a woman's ability to build intergenerational wealth for her family.

The United States has a wider gender wage gap than nearly all E.U. countries, as well as the U.K., Costa Rica, Colombia, Argentina, Chile and Brazil, according to data from the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. As adults, American women are more likely to live in poverty than American men at every age, according to the Center for American Progress, a left-leaning think tank.

Among full-time employees, the overall gender wage gap last year was 16.4%, a median difference of nearly $200 per week, according to the IWPR report, which looked at weekly earnings figures from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. When accounting for both full-time and part-time workers - women are more likely to work part-time - the wage gap increased to 21.9%. Black and Latina women had the largest pay gaps compared with white men.

Equal Pay Day, which falls on March 12 this year, was started in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity and "symbolizes how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year."

In the most common full-time occupation for women, elementary and middle school teacher, there was a 10.9% earnings gap between women and men, amounting to $150 per week, the IWPR found. The second most common occupation for women, registered nurse, had a 15% wage difference, or nearly $250 per week. And the third most common, manager, had an 18.6% gap, or about $350 per week.

In an analysis shared with MarketWatch by the Labor Department's Women's Bureau, there were six occupations in which women made up at least three-quarters of full-time workers and earned on average at least 20% less than men in 2021: teaching assistants (21.1% less, or about $6,850 per year); human-resources assistants, excluding payroll and timekeeping (24% less, or about $14,640 annually); credit authorizers, checkers and clerks (23.5% less, or $14,460); human-resources managers (21.4% less, or $23,590); diagnostic medical sonographers (30.9%, or $32,030); and compensation, benefits and job-analysis specialists (28% less, or about $22,210 per year).

Why the pay gap persists in women-dominated jobs like teaching

The wage gap has persisted despite two key pieces of legislation that protect women from employment discrimination: the 1963 Equal Pay Act and Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act.

There is no single, clear reason for the pay disparity that these laws can address, said Ariane Hegewisch, the program director of employment and earnings at the IWPR. That's because the gender wage gap results from a confluence of factors, including the overall devaluing of work performed by women and the lack of social support for caregiving, which forces many women to pull back on paid work and miss professional opportunities. Mothers who provide unpaid care to children and adults, for example, forgo 15% of the lifetime wages they could have earned if they did not do this work, the Urban Institute estimates.

Another example: While women account for roughly three-quarters of the K-12 teaching workforce, they earn on average $2,200 less annually than male teachers with similar characteristics and qualifications, a 2023 analysis by Brookings Institution researchers found. One factor that accounts for some of this disparity is that male teachers take on more additional paid duties, such as extracurricular activities and positions such as department chair, committee leader or mentor, the researchers found. When women take on extra duties - sometimes the same ones - they are more likely to do so without compensation.

Michael Hansen, a senior fellow at Brookings and co-author of the study, told MarketWatch that throughout their careers, male teachers are 10% more likely than women to be paid for extra duties. And when male teachers work under a male principal, "their probability of receiving payment for their extra work" increases, according to the report. (While one in four teachers are male, about 44% of principals are, according to Education Week.) Women in their 20s, 30s and early 40s are less likely to take on additional work, possibly due to caregiving responsibilities at home - but when their participation in extra duties evens out with men's from their mid-40s onwards, they're still less likely to be compensated for it.

Disparities in compensation remain even among teachers who are paid for performing extra work: Male teachers earned almost twice as much as women for taking on those duties, Hansen said.

The gender gap in base pay is narrower than for extra-duty pay, Hansen said, but the researchers found a greater pay disparity in school districts where teachers are unionized. He said it is possible that despite unions' efforts to ensure fair pay, male teachers are more likely to be credited for having more experience and are therefore paid more, although the research itself did not answer why.

The National Education Association and the American Federation of Teachers, the country's two largest teachers unions, didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.

"We know that unionization significantly reduces the gender and racial wage gap," said Lawrence, the nurse and union leader. "But winning a union contract is just the first step. Union members need to stay mobilized."

In January, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission filed a lawsuit against the Houston Independent School District for paying female career and technical education staff less than their male colleagues, even though they had more experience and were doing jobs "requiring substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility and performed under similar working conditions," according to the complaint. The suit alleges that one female staffer's related experience working outside of an educational setting was not included when determining her pay, while the employer counted "virtually all types of work experience" when considering her male colleague's compensation. HISD declined to comment on the suit.

"It's unfortunate that in 2024, women are still having to fight for their rights," Jackie Anderson, the president of the Houston Federation of Teachers, told the local news station Fox 26.

Pay disparities persist in higher education as well. At Vassar College, a co-ed institution originally established as a women's college, a group of female professors are seeking back pay and damages in a lawsuit alleging they have been bringing pay disparities to administrators' attention since at least 2008. The college told the New York Times that it would hire a firm to analyze salaries and, in a letter published in the student newspaper, said that "faculty members who brought this lawsuit have a different understanding of the relevant facts and law that is at issue in this dispute."

How pay transparency, anti-discrimination protections and affordable child care could help

The Equal Pay Act and Title VII remain incredibly important - between 2017 and 2021, women filed 91% of Equal Pay Act charges received by the EEOC - but legal protections against wage discrimination need to be updated, Vagins said.

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