These Women Are Now Earning Almost as Much as Men
That women earn 77 cents for every dollar a man makes has been chronicled and discussed at length, but a new analysis by economists at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York finds a far smaller gap among recent grads.
The country’s youngest (ages 22 to 27) female workers earn roughly 97 cents on the dollar compared to their male peers, when controlling for major and field of employment. For many majors, they actually earn more.
Any early advantage disappears, however, once workers hit mid-career, with men earning 15 percent more than women across the board. Even in majors where women earned more during the early years of their careers, men earn more by age 35.
Related: 10 Worst States for Working Mothers
Researchers point to several potential reasons for the reversal, including possible gender discrimination and women’s tendency to scale back their careers to bear and raise children.
“Because raising a family often requires more flexible schedules, those with family responsibilities who have difficulty satisfying time-sensitive work demands may face lower wages in these types of jobs,” the authors write. “In fact, in jobs where such time demands are largely absent, and more flexibility is possible, the pay gap has been found to be much smaller.”
For some women, that means leaving the workforce entirely. The percentage of women age 25 to 54 who are working has fallen to 69 percent since peaking in 1999 at 74 percent, following a 60-year climb.
Top Reads From The Fiscal Times:
Number of the Day: $132,900
The cap on Social Security payroll taxes will rise to $132,900 next year, an increase of 3.5 percent. (Earnings up to that level are subject to the Social Security tax.) The increase will affect about 11.6 million workers, Politico reports. Beneficiaries are also getting a boost, with a 2.8 percent cost-of-living increase coming in 2019.
Photo of the Day: Kanye West at the White House
This is 2018: Kanye West visited President Trump at the White House Thursday and made a rambling 10-minute statement that aired on TV news networks. West’s lunch with the president was supposed to focus on clemency, crime in his hometown of Chicago and economic investment in urban areas, but his Oval Office rant veered into the bizarre. And since this is the world we live in, we’ll also point out that West apparently became “the first person to ever publicly say 'mother-f***er' in the Oval Office.”
Trump called Kanye’s monologue “pretty impressive.”
“That was bonkers,” MSNBC’s Ali Velshi said afterward.
Again, this is 2018.
Chart of the Day: GDP Growth Before and After the Tax Bill
President Trump and the rest of the GOP are celebrating the recent burst in economic growth in the wake of the tax cuts, with the president claiming that it’s unprecedented and defies what the experts were predicting just a year ago. But Rex Nutting of MarketWatch points out that elevated growth rates over a few quarters have been seen plenty of times in recent years, and the extra growth generated by the Republican tax cuts was predicted by most economists, including those at the Congressional Budget Office, whose revised projections are shown below.
Are States Ready for the Next Downturn?
The Great Recession hit state budgets hard, but nearly half are now prepared to weather the next modest downturn. Moody’s Analytics says that 23 states have enough reserves to meet budget shortfalls in a moderate economic contraction, up from just 16 last year, Bloomberg reports. Another 10 states are close. The map below shows which states are within 1 percent of their funding needs for their rainy day funds (in green) and which states are falling short.
Chart of the Day: Evolving Price of the F-35
The 2019 National Defense Authorization Act signed in August included 77 F-35 Lightning II jets for the Defense Department, but Congress decided to bump up that number in the defense spending bill finalized this week, for a total of 93 in the next fiscal year – 16 more than requested by the Pentagon. Here’s a look from Forbes at the evolving per unit cost of the stealth jet, which is expected to eventually fall to roughly $80 million when full-rate production begins in the next few years.
