“It will be 257 years before men and women have pay equality.” - World Economic Forum, 2020 Global Gender Pay Gap Report
Hello! Thank you for being here.
The Pay Gap Report is a monthly newsletter dedicated to news and analysis on pay gaps and wage transparency efforts in the U.S. and around the globe. It’s published on the first Saturday of the month.
What are pay gaps? Are they real?
The broadest definition of a pay gap is the difference in pay between two sectors of a population. The gender pay gap—the difference in earnings between women and men—is the most widely documented such form of wage disparity.
The gender pay gap alone is responsible for a grim cache of statistics and forecasts. This one is a doozy: At the current rate of change, according to projections from the World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Gender Pay Gap Report, it will take 257 years to eliminate the global gender pay gap.
Here are more figures, insights and projections. Please note, this list is not meant to be exhaustive.
The gender pay gap in the U.S. has not closed significantly in the past two decades, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis.
Women earned an average of 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median hourly earnings of full- and part-time workers.
Women of color continue to experience the widest gaps in pay, regardless of age, educational level or job. Black and Latina women encounter the most severe pay disparities.
In the U.S., Latina women experience the largest pay gaps, earning around 57 cents for every $1 earned by white men in 2020, according to a report from Justice for Migrant Women.
Despite having some of the highest labor force participation rates, Black women earned just 64 cents for every $1 earned by white men in 2020, according to an analysis from The Center for American Progress.
Latinas stand to lose more than one million dollars over the course of a lifetime to pay inequities. Black women lose an estimated $964,400. Native American women lose $986,240. Women of Asian American Pacific Islander descent lose $400,000 (with “significant differences among sub-populations”), according to an analysis by The National Women’s Law Center.
In the U.S., the gender pay gap widens with age. A recent analysis of the unemployment insurance wage records for the third quarter of 2020 (the most recent national data) by the U.S. Census Bureau found that women in the U.S. earned 30 percent less than men—and that this pay gap increased with age.
In the U.S., Black and Latina women will achieve parity with white men in the years 2133 and 2220, respectively, according to an analysis from The Institute for Women’s Policy Research.
Beyond gender-based pay disparities, researchers in the U.S. point to a widening racial pay gap between white workers and workers of color.
LGBTQ+ workers earn 22 percent less than their heterosexual cisgender counterparts, according to research published in the Social Science Research Network.
From these figures we can draw some obvious conclusions:
Pay gaps are stubborn, ubiquitous and intersectional, meaning they are tied to overlapping social categories and factors such as race, class, and gender.
Pay gaps are a structural feature of global economies.
Pay gaps lead to income and wealth inequalities, factors that shape every dimension of a person’s life.
The Pay Gap Report is premised on the idea that pay gaps are very real, and that we need to talk more about pay inequality if we wish to speed up progress.
Why should I subscribe?
In a nod to my days as a professional listicle-maker for various news outlets, here are 5 reasons why you should subscribe to The Pay Gap Report:
Why did you decide to write a newsletter about pay gaps?
It’s kind of a long story.
In 2018, I was hired as a restaurant critic at the Los Angeles Times, a coveted role whose job duties and responsibilities were to be split between two equal “co-critics” (think Siskel & Ebert, or Ebert & Roeper, if you prefer). Shortly after accepting the position, I learned I was earning $55,000 less a year than my co-critic, despite more than 15 years of professional writing and reporting experience.
At the time I was hired, I was told a salary review would come after one year on the job. The year came and went without a review. By then, an undercurrent of fear and hostility pervaded my department (eventually, reports about its “toxic” work culture would surface). My editors assigned me more work—and work of a more complex nature—than my co-critic. I felt like I was put on a bullet train to burnout.
In June of 2020, I filed an equal pay claim through my newsroom guild, whose union contract promised equal pay among members. On July 23, 2023, I attended a stressfull grievance hearing to make the case for why I deserved equal pay. On November 14, 2020, the Los Angeles Times officially denied my equal pay claim in a short legal memo, stating that I was earning less than my co-critic because I had significantly less experience and lacked a “prestigious” food media award. I tweeted about my failure to achieve equity on November 15, 2020. To date, that tweet has garnered more than five million impressions.
In the days and weeks that followed, I received more than two hundred emails and direct messages from people, many sharing similar experiences with pay inequality, including colleagues from the Los Angeles Times and the BBC. My story struck a nerve because pay gaps are common and painful. Following a long and challenging internal battle, I left the paper in March of 2021.
In the end, for me, it came down to this: voicing opposition to pay discrimination is the very least we can do as journalists, parents, citizens, and human beings who striving to leave the world a little better for the next generation. Often, when the balance of power is steadfastly not in your favor, and nobody is coming to save you, speaking out is the only thing you can do.
My experience at the Los Angeles Times shook me to my core. It was a potent reminder that pay gaps are pervasive across job sectors and pay grades—even white-collar spaces advertised as “the dream job”—and that pay inequality shapes our lives, both inside and out.
The Pay Gap Report seeks to make pay gaps more visible, and to examine the way pay inequality shapes our lives. In doing so, I hope this newsletter becomes a meaningful resource for those of you struggling to achieve workplace equity.
About me
I’m a writer and journalist based in Los Angeles, where I live with my husband, our four-year-old daughter, and an anxious three-legged dog named Jackson. My work has appeared in the New York Times, Playboy and Frieze. Previously, I was a reporter at the Arizona Republic, and a restaurant critic at the Phoenix New Times and the Los Angeles Times—memorably, I left the latter after failing to achieve equalilty in treatment and pay. Along with this newsletter, I publish the forthcoming food and culture newsletter Extra Juicy. When not reading or writing, most likely I am baking pies or thinking about tacos.
