Little Changes: The Gendered Pay Gap Persists
March 12 is Equal Pay Day in 2024. It represents how far into this calendar year women in the U.S. had to work to earn what men earned in 2023. Women across occupations earned 83 cents for each dollar earned by men, a Payscale report found. Women of color face even larger disparities in pay, Forbes reports.
In architecture, full-time female architects received just 83.2 percent of their male colleagues’ earnings, the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics reported in 2022. The same report shows female civil engineers earning 86.5 percent; female construction managers earning 91.3 percent; and female landscape architects earning 96 percent of what their male colleagues did.
While the gender disparity in pay started to narrow with the passage of the 1963 Equal Pay Act, little progress has been made in the last two decades. Today women earn just three cents more for each dollar earned by men than the 80 cents per dollar they were paid in 2002, the Pew Research Center found.
The American Institute of Architects (AIA) did not collect compensation data by gender for its 2023 AIA Compensation & Benefits Report. However, the AIA’s report does note that 66 percent of large firms, 39 percent of midsize firms, and 20 percent of small firms surveyed reported assessing salary by gender. Let’s hope these firms used the data they collected to implement pay equity, and that more firms will join them in conducting these salary assessments in the coming months.
Here are actions people can take to increase pay equality, whether or not they control the company purse strings:
Photograph by Anthony Angel, 1953.
Employees can share salary information with co-workers (see the Department of Labor’s map showing pay transparency protections by state) to identify and call out disparities. Employers can address gender bias by modifying procedures for pay, hiring, and promotion decisions.
Employers can set salary bands, ignore applicants’ salary histories, and stop negotiating salaries. Women applying for positions requiring negotiating salaries can see the New York Times’s guide for women researching and negotiating salaries.
Everyone can address inequities in unpaid work both at home and in the office. Inequities in the unpaid workload at home reinforce the lower wages for paid work for women.
This March, in observance of Women’s History Month, let’s take steps to make more equitable workplaces. That would be something to celebrate.
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