COLUMBUS – Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, marking how far into the year women must work to earn what men were paid in 2021.
While there appears to be progress in narrowing the gap, policy analysts suspect it’s a statistical illusion.
Women working full-time year-round earned 83 cents for every dollar paid to men, about a penny more than in 2020, but advocates say the data fails to take into account the low-wage women pushed out of the workforce during the pandemic.
“It makes it seem as if everyone’s wages have gone up, when in reality it’s the loss of women in these sectors, the loss of women because of having to leave for caregiving reasons that has created that narrowing of the wage gap,” Erin Ryan managing director of the the Ohio Women’s Public Policy Network, said.
There are more than one million fewer women in the labor force than in early 2020, Ryan said, and a record 166,000 Ohioans quit their jobs in December, according to the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey.
At 79 cents on the dollar, Ohio’s gender wage gap is slightly worse than the national average and there are racial and ethnic disparities as well: Black women in Ohio make 64 cents for every dollar paid to white men and for Latina women in Ohio it’s 61 cents, Ryan said.
Inequities in pay are contributing to the wealth gap, which affects the long-term economic security of families and communities, she said.
“We really look at the data of cents on the dollar that women are missing, but it adds up over time. And this has an impact over their lifetime in their ability to excel in their workforce, to pay for basic necessities, to build retirement savings,” Ryan said.
Ryan says measures that would create new requirements for employers to ensure women and men are paid equally in Ohio have consistently failed.
“These bills are introduced session after session after session; they have wide support from worker-friendly groups, women’s groups, and they don’t move forward regardless of the fact that they would make a really foundational difference in the lives of women and families who are held back by not having equal pay,” she said.
Nationally in 2019, full-time working women earned roughly $10,000 a year less than men.