Median Weekly Earnings Stats Reveal a Gender Pay Gap (Again)
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- Updated December 8, 2023 2 min read
Eyeballing weekly earnings can shed light on the economic divide between countries, but it often illuminates the gender pay gap shadowing the salaries.
One way to reflect on the economic gap between individual countries is to look at their average salaries. Sri Lanka, for instance, had median monthly earnings of $147, which is 3.4 percent of the $4,280 median in the USA.
However, when you consider salaries within the same country, new gaps pop up. Some can be justified — such as different wages across different industries. But others are unadjusted and hardly equitable — the difference between the average earnings of men and women.
In the third quarter of 2022, median weekly earnings of more than 120 million US full-time workers were $1,070. This is moderately good news as it represents a nearly 7% increase compared to the previous year.
Women earn less than men in every industry
When we further examine the latest data, we’ll discover that women had an average weekly wage of $971. This was $193 less than men’s median earnings.
Women’s average wage followed the same trend across all industries listed by the BLS — they were lower than the men’s median wage.
Some sectors showed a smaller pay gap than others. Construction, for instance, reported a $7 difference, while professional occupations revealed a striking $313 pay disparity between men’s and women’s weekly earnings.
In 2019, women’s wages were 81.5 percent of men’s, which is 1.8 percent less than today. We may say that the gap is slowly shrinking but we don’t see it closing any time soon. And the pace of it just doesn’t seem fast enough.
Management & finance occupations ranked as the highest-paying jobs
Not for nothing do we say that money makes money. Regardless of the disparity between men’s and women’s median earnings, management and finance jobs were simply the best-paid with the average weekly wage of $1,553.
Professional occupations and installation & maintenance jobs followed closely behind with usual weekly earnings of $1,426 and $1,053 respectively.
On the opposite side of the salary spectrum, we find such sectors as farming (with median weekly earnings of $652) or service occupations (median weekly earnings of $709).
Whether you’re a man working in finance or a woman freshly employed in the farming sector, we all should support equality and embrace the companies that strive to close the gender pay gap through transparency and reassessment.
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Julia is a professional writer, translator and graphic designer. She holds degrees in translation and interpretation, and has international work experience from a number of different countries in Europe as well as China and Panama. Julia formerly taught academic writing and as a graphic designer contributed to outlets such as The Business of Business. She has a passion for lifelong learning and good coffee.
