Equal pay is a bread-and-butter issue for working families. Nearly 72 percent of mothers with children younger than 18 work for; pay. Two-earner families are today's norm among married couples, and a growing number of single women provide most or all of their families' support. Altogether, 62 percent of all working women responding to the AFL-CIO's Ask a Working Woman Survey 2004 said they provide half or more of their families' incomes.

Little wonder, then, that 90 percent of working women in the Ask a Working Woman Survey 2004 say stronger equal pay laws are "important," with 61 percent saying stronger laws are "very important."

To better understand the wage gap for women and people of color in the United States and to better measure the price that wage inequality exacts from families and individual workers, the AFL-CIO and the Institute for Women's Policy Research (IWPR) jointly undertook a national study to analyze income data in 1998.

Working Families Pay a Steep Price for Unequal Pay

According to the study:

• America's working families lose a staggering $200 billion of income annually to the wage gap—an average loss of more than $4,000 each for working women's families every year because of unequal pay, even after accounting for differences in education, age, location and the number of hours worked.
• If married women were paid the same as comparable men, their family incomes would rise by nearly 6 percent, and their families' poverty rates would fall from 2.1 percent to 0.8 percent.
• If single working mothers earned as much as comparable men, their family incomes would increase by nearly 17 percent, and their poverty rates would be cut in half, from 25.3 percent to 12.6 percent.
• If single women earned as much as comparable men, their incomes would rise by 13.4 percent, and their poverty rates would be reduced from 6.3 percent to 1 percent.

Back to the Top

Unequal Pay Hurts Men, Too

As the percentage of women in an occupation rises, wages tend to fall. Workers who do what traditionally has been viewed as "women's work"—clerical workers, cashiers, librarians, child care workers and others in jobs in which 70 percent or more of the workers are women—typically earn less than workers in jobs that are predominately male or are integrated by gender.

• Both women and men pay a steep price for unequal pay when they do "women's work": The 25.6 million women who work in these jobs lose an average of $3,446 each per year; the 4 million men who work in predominately female occupations lose an average of $6,259 each per year—for a whopping $114 billion loss for men and women in predominately female jobs.
• At the state level, women who work in female-dominated jobs could earn from $2,112 more per year in Missouri to $4,707 more in Delaware if they had equal pay.
• For men in female-dominated jobs, state average increases would range from $3,533 annually in the District of Columbia to $8,958 in Delaware if pay inequality was eliminated. Minority men would see increases ranging from $1,918 in Colorado to $7,996 in Alaska.

Unions Mean Big Pay Gains, Smaller Pay Gaps

Union representation is a proven and powerful tool for raising workers' wages, particularly for those most subject to labor market discrimination: women and minorities.

(To order a copy of the full report, Equal Pay for Working Families: National and State Data on the Pay Gap and Its Costs, call 202-637-5042.)

Back to the Top