The State of Gender Pay Equity - Part 3 of 4

In part 3 our Gender Pay Equity series, we examine pay equity gaps by ethnicity. (In case you missed them, check out Part 1 and Part 2 of our series.)

There are some interesting trends among gender pay equity gaps when looking at different racial groups.  First, let’s examine what income looks like with the most current data, from 2021.

Median weekly wage and salary income by Major Ethnicity/Racial Group, 2021.

A few interesting callouts here.  First, Black women have the smallest gap when looking at the 4 main groups.  They are almost at parity compared to Black men.  One should not call that good news, however, since both Black men and women make well less than the average of all ethnicities.  Hispanic women (and men) are in a similar situation, with the lowest incomes overall, but with a smaller gap between genders.

For Asian women, it’s a different situation.  They are the highest paid among the major racial groups, and they are the only female group that makes more money than white men, which they just eclipsed as of 2020.   But, compared to Asian men, they have the largest pay equity gap of any of the racial groups, making just 78 cents on the dollar.  It is quite the paradox that the highest paid group among women is also the least equitable.

That’s 2021.  Let’s look at how things changed over time.

As we see in the chart above, which compares genders within ethnicity (e.g. white women vs white men), the pay equity gap has improved over time for all groups except Asian women (note that BLS started reporting Asian wage and salary data separately in 2000, so the time series is shorter).  Starting with Asian women, given the shorter time series, there is basically no improvement in pay equity gap in 2 decades.  It fluctuates up and down but there is no meaningful improvement over time. 

We see a similar trend in the other racial groups as well.  Most of the pay equity improvement occurred in the 80’s and 90’s.  For Black women, the gap plateaued around 2009.  For White women, it plateaued in 2005, and for Hispanic women, the gap hasn’t shown any meaningful improvement since 1990. (Wow!)

So why has pay equity stalled?  In part 4, we will dig deeper into this question.