Women have made remarkable strides in education during the past three decades, but these gains have yet to translate into full equity in pay — even for college-educated women who work full time. For the entire full-time workforce, a typical woman earned $34,400 compared with $44,300 for a typical man, a pay difference of $9,900.

OVERVIEW

AAUW's new state-by-state comparison looks at the college-educated population 25 and older and at the general population. Across the board, people with college degrees earn more. However, the wage gap is actually larger among college-educated workers than it is for the workforce as a whole. In other words, education improves women's earnings, but it does not ensure fair wages.

AAUW's groundbreaking report Behind the Pay Gap demonstrates, however, that the wage gap cannot be fully explained by demographic and workplace characteristics. When controlling for factors that are known to affect wages (such as occupation, job tenure, educational attainment, and others), a portion of the pay gap remains unexplained. This analysis suggests that sex discrimination remains a real problem for women in the workplace. Thus, state legislators and other policy-makers should consider sex discrimination as a source of pay differences in their communities.

The data presented in the map provide a snapshot of the pay gap between male and female workers who work full time, year round, including teachers who work 40 weeks a year or more.

METHODOLOGY

The map displays earnings, the pay gap, and rankings using the latest data (2007) from the American Community Survey, which is conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau every year. The analyses included all full-time, year-round workers, including teachers, who were defined as "year round" if they worked 40 weeks or more per year.

For each state, the following items are displayed: men's earnings, women's earnings, the ratio of women's to men's earnings, and a ranking of the state's earnings ratio. Earnings are presented for two populations: the workforce age 16 and older and the college-educated workforce age 25 and older.

Data presented in the map display earnings for the median male or female worker, meaning that the earnings are in the middle of the distribution for that population. For example, when we say that a full-time, year-round female worker in the United States in 2007 reported earnings of $50,600, it means that half of the full-time, year-round female workers earned less than this amount, and half of the full-time, year-round female workers earned more than this amount.

For the 2007 American Community Survey, workers reported earnings made in 2006. "College educated" refers to the population that holds a degree from a four-year college or more; i.e., associate degrees are not included in this definition.

The map displays rankings for all states and the District of Columbia. The highest ranking represents the smallest difference in earnings between women and men, and the lowest ranking (51) represents the largest difference in the earnings of women and men.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Data compiled and analyzed for AAUW by JSI Associates. For more information about JSI Associates, visit www.jobsearchintelligence.com.

Please Note: The data differs from data presented in the AAUW report Behind the Pay Gap, which examines the earnings of women and men who graduated from college in 1992-93 and 1999-2000 in selected years.

The analysis includes all full-time, year-round workers, including teachers who were defined as "year round" workers if they worked 40 weeks or more per year (For other workers, "Year round" is defined as working 48 weeks or more annually). Median earnings for male and female full time workers were calculated using data from the public use micro-sample (PUMS) of the American Community Survey (ACS). Because the PUMS data is a subset of the full ACS sample, these estimates do not match those published by the Census Bureau. Differences are generally small. The data also differ from published ACS estimates because the population of full-time year round workers was defined differently. The PUMS was used so that the gender wage gap between male and female college educated workers could be examined separately from the rest of the work force.