Women workers in Louisiana will lose $671,840 over the course of their careers because of gender inequality in the workplace.
Bloomberg reports that according to an analysis from the National Women’s Law Center, a nonprofit advocacy group, the average U.S. woman suffers $430,000 in lost wages over the course of her career.
The gender pay-gap issue has come to the forefront following recent criticism from President Barack Obama, who noted women earn 79 cents for every dollar a man makes, as well as demands by actresses and top women’s soccer players for equal pay.
By state, female workers in Louisiana face the highest discrepancy—$671,840—while those in Florida are the least worse-off with losses of $248,120, according to the analysis. On average across the country, the wage gap “hasn’t budged for nearly a decade,” according to a statement from NWLC. The study was released ahead of Equal Pay Day, which is Tuesday.
Some states have intervened: California lawmakers last year approved legislation mandating that women and men earn the same amount for similar work.
“We’re in a moment where women are making up an increasing part of the workforce and there’s a firm recognition that their salaries matter to themselves, but also to their families’ economic security,” Fatima Goss Graves, a senior vice president at NWLC, tells Bloomberg. “We’ve seen very prominent figures call attention to the wage gap and that’s so critical because it highlights no industry is immune to it.”
For the working women in America, race is also a factor in pay disparity, and to a lesser extent where they live. The gap is widest for African-American and Latino women in the nation’s capital, Washington D.C., where the gap is $1.6 million to $1.8 million over a four-decade career, compared with a white, non-Hispanic male wage-earner.
“They are dealing with the double barriers of race and gender discrimination,” Graves says. ”And some of it is the concentration of women of color in some of the lowest-paid fields. They still make up a tiny percentage of workers in some of the higher-paid fields.”
