Though Louisiana women working full-time in 2014 earned more compared to their male counterparts than ever before, new data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics released today show women were still only paid 77.5% as much as men last year.
The median weekly paycheck for women in Louisiana was $623 in 2014. Men, meanwhile, brought home $804 each week, on average, for working the same job. However, the figures show the gender pay gap is slowly narrowing in Louisiana, with women’s earnings in 2014 up 4.4 percentage points from the previous year.
“In Louisiana, the ratio of women’s to men’s earnings trended upward from 1997 to 2005 before falling to a series low of 65% in 2009,” BLS notes in a press release. “Since the series low, the ratio increased in four of the last five years, reaching a series high of 77.5% in 2014.”
Louisiana has a wider gender pay gap than the U.S., in which women earned $719 per week on average, or 82.5% of their male counterparts, who earned $871 on average. Among the 50 states, median weekly earnings of women in full-time wage and salary positions in 2014
ranged from $597 in Montana to $878 in Massachusetts. Hawaii had the highest female-to-male earnings ratio among the states, 92.8%, and Wyoming had the lowest, 67.7%. Median weekly earnings for men were lowest in Arkansas, at $703, and highest in Connecticut, at $1,089.
BLS says the differences among the states reflect, in part, variation in the occupations and industries found in each state and differences in the demographic composition of each state’s labor force. In addition, earnings comparisons by gender are on a broad level and do not control for factors that can be significant in explaining earnings differences, such as job skills and responsibilities, work experience, and specialization, BLS notes.
