Equal Pay Day, which is the day that marks how far into 2018 a woman will have to work to earn what her male colleagues earned in 2017, is on April 10 this year.
What you need to know about Equal Pay DayThe day calls to attention the gender pay gap -- women make about 80 percent of what men in the workforce earn, according to the American Association of University Women. When comparing the income of all women to all men, women earned 78 cents to every dollar men earned, according to a recent report by PayScale.
Full-time, weekly working women earned 81.8 percent of what men earned, according to The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).
However, when controlling for similar jobs, PayScale found that women earn 98 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. PayScale attributes the overall gender pay gap to the opportunities for promotions, or lack thereof, women experience in the workplace.
The IWPR also attributes the gender wage gap to differences in pay between occupations. They point to the fact that only six of the 20 most common occupations overlap for men and women.
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While all women are impacted by the gender pay gap, some industries do a better job of closing the gender pay gap.
In the tech industry -- which has been under scrutiny for gender equity issues -- women were paid 99.5 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned, the smallest pay gap by industry found in the study.
However, when the control for the same title is removed, women earned 84.7 cents compared to men in the tech industry, moving it to the middle of the industries examined.
The same thing happened for women in engineering and science, who earned 99.2 cents per dollar when controlled, but only 83.3 cents per a man’s dollar in the industry overall.
Women in real estate and rental/leasing earned 88.6 cents to a man’s dollar in the industry overall and 97.6 cents to a dollar when controlled by job title.
People working as a "personal financial advisor" experienced the largest gender wage pay gap, the IWPR found. In general, the IWPR study found occupations with the highest salaries had the largest gender gaps and the lowest paid occupations had the lowest gaps.
