Most working women won’t see equal pay before they retire |

The fight for equal pay was supposed to be won by now. But generations after Eleanor Roosevelt championed the cause, women are still waiting for their paychecks to catch up. A Bankrate analysis of government data shows, in fact, that pay equality remains a dream that most women won’t reach before they retire. 

Progress is “painfully slow,” said Nicole Smith, chief economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce, who has spent years researching the gender pay gap. “We have the ability to do better.”

Women who are in the workforce full time currently make about 81 cents for every dollar a man makes. If historical trends continue, they won’t close that gap until 2059, according to a new Bankrate analysis. But even that projection looks fragile when viewed through a more recent lens. Between 2022 and 2024, the gender wage gap widened for the first time in two decades, raising concerns among economists that progress is beginning to unravel.

The situation is even more dire for Black and Hispanic women, who face even greater pay gaps. They may never see pay equality in their lifetimes. 

Economists point to a mix of forces that have kept the wage gap stagnant in recent years: women’s overrepresentation in lower-wage jobs, barriers to career advancement, gender bias, limited family-friendly work policies and cultural expectations around caregiving. 

And for many of these reasons, women are less likely to successfully press for pay increases — 36 percent of women in the U.S. said they never successfully negotiated a pay raise, compared to 28 percent of men, a Bankrate survey finds.

Until we remove the barriers and build a system that actually welcomes women and parents into the workforce, progress will be really hard.

— Jasmine Tucker
Vice President for Research at the National Women’s Law Center

When we might see equal pay, in one chart

Bankrate tracked government wage statistics reported to the U.S. Census from 1960 to 2024. We found that the wage gap – the difference between median full-time pay for men and women – has progressed unevenly over the years, though it has steadily narrowed over the past few decades. 

If the wage gap continues at the pace it has since 1960, women are on track to shave off another 8 cents from the pay gap over the next 10 years, earning 89 cents for every dollar men earn. A decade after that, the gap is projected to narrow further to 93 cents for every dollar. 

More than three decades from now, well after many full-time working women have retired, Bankrate’s projection shows that equal pay will finally arrive in America. Until then, women will have fewer opportunities to build long-term financial security.

Bankrate’s projections give a baseline expectation for pay parity assuming a constant rate of change over time. A variety of factors could shift that expectation, including the health of the economy, shifts in government policies and societal expectations that employers value women equally. 

“We can’t always assume steady progress, especially for women of color, who are not only facing sexism, but also racism.” Tucker said.

A long – and uneven – road to equality

The fight for equal pay began as a demand for fairness and evolved into a decades-long test of progress.

The Equal Pay Act of 1963 marked a significant turning point, confronting a workforce that had long undervalued women’s labor by prohibiting wage discrimination based on sex. Women protested, organized and pressed for better pay. Over time, they entered the workplace in greater numbers, challenged stereotypes, pursued higher education and gradually narrowed the pay gap. 

In recent decades, women have made undeniable gains. They now earn the majority of college degrees and hold nearly half of all management jobs, up from less than a third in 1980, according to the Pew Research Center. 

Yet the progress has been uneven: faster for some, slower for others. Women of color, in particular, continue to face overlapping barriers of gender, race and opportunity that keep pay parity generations away. 

I feel like it’s a hard time for me as a woman to find a job, not just because I’m a woman but because I’m a Black woman.

— Shakyla Mosley, 31, of Portland, Oregon

Mosley’s experience isn’t uncommon. According to Smith, there’s unconscious bias in pay decisions that disadvantage women, particularly women of color, often in ways that are subtle and hard to spot.

“People hiring you, who are very progressive and very happy to have you on the job, still pay you [women] less,” Smith said. “Because they think, ‘Let me just wait to see what this Black woman or Hispanic woman will demonstrate. Let’s let her prove herself.’”

The forces behind unequal pay

Often, though not always, women earn less because they do different work, work under different expectations or both. 

They’re often overrepresented in caregiving and service-oriented roles that pay less, while men dominate higher-paying technical and managerial positions, Smith said. Recent research from Columbia Business School suggests that women’s preference for meaningful and flexible work partly explains why more women enter lower-paying fields. The study found both men and women valued income and an interesting job, but women placed a higher premium on flexibility. 

Those preferences are typically formed long before men and women enter the workforce. Bankrate’s analysis shows that women are earning more college degrees overall, but mostly in lower-paying bachelor’s degrees, while men continue to dominate higher-paying ones.

In a nutshell, we tend to take the road most travelled. From an early age, socialization, educational tracking and stereotypes about ‘male’ jobs and ‘female’ jobs influence the fields individuals enter.

— Nicole Smith
Chief Economist at Georgetown University’s Center on Education and the Workforce

Even within the same fields, women are more likely than men to move into lower-paying roles, according to a wide body of research. This leads to broader wage differences between men and women in the same industry. 

Gender segregation in jobs and industries broadly reflects how gender roles and the division of labor still shape the workforce today. Cultural norms about who shoulders caregiving duties push many women to step back from their careers. Women begin their careers earning closer to men, but they lose ground as they age, get married and have children, according to a Bankrate analysis of the motherhood penalty. 

“There’s a high amount of correlation between women of childbearing age and exiting the labor market because cultural norms disproportionately place the burden of child rearing on women,” Smith said.

Rising child care costs don’t help. That expense forces many women to choose between advancing their careers or taking a step back to manage caregiving demands. Some leave the workforce altogether, while others move into lower-paying, more flexible jobs to make it work. 

Access to education continues to be another barrier for many women of color. Fewer Black and Hispanic women hold college degrees than their white and Asian counterparts, though Census Bureau data shows even those with higher education levels continue to face pay gaps. 

“Even when you end up working in that occupation with the same level [as a man], you still probably will get a little bit less,” Smith said.

How pay inequity can show up at work

It shows up not just in paychecks, but in how women experience the workplace. Women are more than twice as likely as men to experience workplace discrimination because of their gender, according to a 2023 Pew Research Center poll. 

For women of color, racial discrimination compounds the problem. Roughly 40 percent of Black workers and 20 percent of Hispanic workers said they have experienced discrimination or been treated unfairly by an employer in hiring, pay or promotions because of their race or ethnicity, compared to eight percent of white workers, according to the same poll. 

Gender discrimination in the workplace, which fuels wage inequality, tends to show itself quietly in passed-over opportunities, unclear pay decisions and subtle cues that women’s work is worth less. Too often, it leaves them with too many unanswered questions and doubts about their own value.

For some, like Heather Wallander, it wasn’t so subtle. When Wallander, 39, spoke to her manager over what seemed like an informal demotion, she didn’t expect it to evolve into a three-year gender discrimination dispute that she said effectively ended her career.

At the start of 2022, she was leading a team of sales engineers at a tech company called Okta in Los Angeles and felt at the height of her career. But a few months into that year, she said there were shifts in the way her employer was treating her. 

In a complaint filed by Wallander with the California Civil Rights Department, she alleges that around September 2022 her boss attempted to reassign her to a lower-visibility, less-technical team with fewer responsibilities. It was reversed within a week after she sent an email explaining why the move didn’t make sense from a business standpoint, according to a copy of the complaint Wallander shared with Bankrate.

Soon after, she alleges in the complaint that a male colleague in a similar role – with a weaker performance record, in her view – was promoted and given responsibility for a larger team. When she was later passed over for a promotion her peers received, her manager told her it was because she was “high-strung,” according to the complaint.

She eventually resigned and hasn’t worked for another company since. Her case remains ongoing with the California Civil Rights Department. 

When the discrimination started, it caught me by surprise. I just knew something was off, and I was being treated differently.

— Heather Wallander

An Okta spokesperson said they “cannot comment on pending legal proceedings,” but that they “take any allegations of discrimination seriously, and are committed to maintaining a culture where everyone feels valued, respected, and included, with zero tolerance for discrimination or retaliation.”

Headwinds slowing gender pay equity

The wage gap isn’t guaranteed to narrow over time. It has widened, in fact, over the past two years. As of 2024, the latest data available, women ages 15 and older working full-time, year-round earned 81 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned. That’s down from 83 cents in 2023 and 84 cents in 2022. 

The recent widening of the pay gap was enough to add another year to our projection, pushing gender pay equality to 2059 from 2058.

“This is the first time in 20 years we’ve seen two consecutive years of the wage gap widening,” Tucker said. “That’s a big deal.”

Tucker said the COVID-19 recession may be partly to blame. Working women experienced the worst effects of the COVID-19 recession, unlike in previous downturns, which typically hit working men harder. 

Many women reduced their hours, left the labor force to care for children or lost jobs in industries where they’re overrepresented, such as retail and hospitality. As a result, they dropped out of the full-time, year-round data, leaving higher-paid women with more stable remote jobs to skew the numbers temporarily closer to parity.

Now, with more women reentering the workforce, the pay gap has widened again. “We don’t know if they returned to the same level of job they left — or to something lower,” Tucker said. 

Closing the gender pay gap, economists said, can’t happen in a vacuum. Policymakers and businesses also need to address the barriers that limit women’s full participation and advancement in the workforce: expensive child care, lack of paid family leave or transparent pay, persistent racial and gender bias and the overrepresentation of women in low-wage work.

Working women have options, too:  “If the system won’t pay us fairly, we have to out-earn, out-invest and out-strategize the pay gap,” writes my colleague Hanna Horvath, a certified financial planner who lays out five specific strategies for doing so.

“If we just leave it to chance, I’m not optimistic,” Tucker said. 

Bankrate reporter Katie Kelton contributed to this story. 

• Methodology
  

  Bankrate’s gender pay gap index tracks how many years it will take for the overall gender pay gap to close, as well as pay gaps for Black women, Hispanic women, Asian women and white, non-Hispanic women using historical data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

  To estimate when the gaps may close, Bankrate used a linear regression to model the trends in the gaps over time. The model assumes the pay gap will keep changing at the same yearly pace it has from 1960 through 2024. When referencing retirement in this analysis, we assumed the average retirement age, which is 62.

  The analysis tracks the overall gender pay gap from 1960-2024 and compares gaps by race and ethnicity against white, non-Hispanic men, using data from 1987-2023 for Black, Hispanic, and white women, and from 1988-2023 for Asian women.

  All figures from the U.S. Census Bureau reflect annual median earnings for full-time year-round working women, adjusted for inflation, ages 15 and older. The Census Bureau defines full time as people who worked 35 hours or more per week for 50 to 52 weeks. The methodology for the U.S. Census Bureau data has changed twice since 1960 (2013 and 2018). Bankrate’s projections are illustrative and may not reflect future trends.