It's 2015 and We Still Have a Gender Pay Gap

It’s been more than five decades since the passage of the Equal Pay Act, but as a new report documents, the gender pay gap is ongoing and pervasive.

Released Thursday by PayScale, a compensation data firm, Inside the Gender Pay Gap examines salary information from roughly 1.4 million full-time U.S. employees. An often cited figure is that women earn 78 cents for every dollar a man earns. But that Bureau of Labor Statistics figure, the firm notes, compares the average earnings of all men and all women. PayScale’s report also looks at the controlled pay gap, comparing women with similar qualifications working the same jobs as men, where it found a pay gap of 2.7 percent.

That pay gap “still represents a real disparity in pay, and one that can’t be explained away by choice of occupation or the experience lost due to time out to care for children,” writes PayScale’s Jen Hubley Luckwaldt.

“The gender pay gap is absolutely real,” Reuters quotes Aubrey Bach, senior editorial manager of PayScale, as saying.

“Half or more of our workforce is made of women but we are still not progressing at the same level as men,” Bach said.

Among the findings of the report are that men’s salaries continue an upward trend until the age range of 50 – 55, averaging $75,000. The upward salary trend for women, in comparison, ends between the ages of 35 and 40, and averages just $49,000.

Married men earn the highest overall salaries, averaging $67,900 for those with children, while single moms have the lowest overall salaries at $45,500 controlled for all measured compensable factors.