By Maya Dusenbery • @mayadusenbery • 11 years ago

Chart of the Day: The gender wage gap widened last year

chart of gender wage gap over time

A new report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research shows that our progress in closing the gender wage gap has stalled–and actually backslid last year. The ratio of women’s to men’s median weekly full-time earnings was 80.9 percent in 2012, a decline of more than one percentage point from 2011. In fact, you have to go all the way back to the 1990s to see any significant, sustained improvement on the gap. “Since 2001 the annual gender earnings gap narrowed by only about one percentage point.” Dismal.

St. Paul, MN

Maya Dusenbery is executive director in charge of editorial at Feministing. She is the author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm: The Truth About How Bad Medicine and Lazy Science Leave Women Dismissed, Misdiagnosed, and Sick (HarperOne, March 2018). She has been a fellow at Mother Jones magazine and a columnist at Pacific Standard magazine. Her work has appeared in publications like Cosmopolitan.com, TheAtlantic.com, Bitch Magazine, as well as the anthology The Feminist Utopia Project. Before become a full-time journalist, she worked at the National Institute for Reproductive Health. A Minnesota native, she received her B.A. from Carleton College in 2008. After living in Brooklyn, Oakland, and Atlanta, she is currently based in the Twin Cities.

Maya Dusenbery is an executive director of Feministing and author of the forthcoming book Doing Harm on sexism in medicine.

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