Baton Rouge ranked 4th-worst U.S. city for gender pay inequality

The median income for a woman working full-time in Baton Rouge was nearly $16,000 less than the median income for a man as of 2011, which places the city at No. 4 on a newly released ranking of the U.S. metro areas with the greatest gender pay inequality. According to Delaware-based financial news and opinion website 24/7 Wall Street, which compiled and released the rankings, women in Baton Rouge make just 69.3% of what men do on average. The website notes women fare even worse than their male counterparts in a few industries in particular. “In the construction and extraction industry, women earned just 52.4% of what men earned in 2011,” the report says. “Other fields where the pay gap between men and women in Baton Rouge was large include production, where the median income of women in 2011 was just 40.6% of the median income of men, and transportation, where women’s earnings were just 42.8% that of men’s.” The median income in Louisiana’s capital city is $51,037 for men, whereas it’s $35,362 for women, according to 2011 data, which was the most recent available for use in determining the rankings. The No. 4 ranking is actually an improvement for Baton Rouge from 24/7 Wall Street’s rankings last year, in which the city took the No. 1 spot for gender pay inequality. You can check out this year’s complete rankings here.