The gender pay gap describes how women earn less in the economy than men — women working full-time make about 83 cents for every dollar a man is paid, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. But 83 cents and March 14 are less accurate for more marginalized women.
Generally speaking, the number is created by taking the median salary earned by women and comparing it with the median salary earned by men. It doesn’t take into account level of education, race, age or hours worked, among other factors influencing wages. The data also often operates within the gender binary, disregarding wage disparities experienced by non-cisgender individuals in the workforce. But its simplicity has also allowed activists, politicians, and celebrities to communicate a symptom and a cause of patriarchy easily enough to keep up with today’s attention economy.
These shortcomings don't make the number devoid of purpose though. It still reflects a consistent, measurable trend that shows how women as a group receive less from an economy they put significant effort into. Even when controlling for variables such as education, there remains a difference in wage that can be attributed to gender, suggesting a level of sex-based discrimination.
You can filter the wage gap through different lenses to illuminate different parts of the story, as well. For example, Texas as a whole has a wage gap similar to the United States, but different cities in Texas paint vastly different pictures. A 2020 report by the Texas Women’s Foundation found that women in Dallas County earned $2,600 less per year than men, but women in neighboring Tarrant County earned a staggering $9,708 less. The vastly different realities between nearby places demonstrate how many factors create this final wage gap statistic.
Pew Research Center date from 2019 shows wage gap discrepancies by age in the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington area. Women from ages 16–20 make 95% of what their male counterparts make. But this number creeps down to 85% for women from ages 30–49. And, finally, for women over 50, the percentage drops to women making only 77% of what men their age make.
The level of simplicity in the original number (that women make around 83 cents on the man’s dollar) begets cracks in the narrative. And the vagueness of the number also gives fuel to armchair experts hypothesizing why this wage gap exists; these talking points are often built on sexist narratives.
Joanna Grossman teaches at the SMU Dedman School of Law and specializes in sex discrimination and workplace equality. She explains misperceptions around the pay gap, saying, “The most common narrative is that women do not have the same level of career ambition, and they don’t prioritize work over family or caregiver responsibilities.” But these assumptions don’t tell the whole story. “When you study ambition independently, we don’t necessarily find any discernible gender differences.“The assumption is that a woman with children is going to be less committed to her job because of her children, so she will be paid less.” – Joanna Grossman, SMU Dedman School of Law
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“We are kind of confusing cause and effect I think. When we talk about what women prioritize, we are ignoring the underlying realities that might force them to prioritize certain things differently. If they have children, the female partner will still do a disproportionate share of caretaking. And so sometimes when we look at something and say ‘Oh, it looks like women care more about their kids than their careers,’ what we are really observing is that they have to care more about their kids because no one else is.”
She points out that motherhood is a key variable, according to the data, though perhaps not for the reason people may think. “When you introduce motherhood, that is when you start to see these disparities.”
These inequalities are caused by both structural and cultural qualities of employment. “One [reason] is how employers treat mothers versus fathers or married men versus married women,” Grossman says. “And we know, by doing regressions on pay data, that married men end up getting a wage premium, meaning they will end up getting paid more than everyone else including unmarried men because employers have an implicit bias that married men work harder at their jobs because they have families to support so they are more committed.”
This bias works differently toward women with families. “Women with children suffer a wage penalty in the 10–15% range because of the opposite assumption, Grossman says. “The assumption is that a woman with children is going to be less committed to her job because of her children, so she will be paid less.”
You can see the gender pay gap operating in a different way for single mothers. The group may also be subjected to biases by their employers, but they experience specific obstacles.
According to a 2022 report by Texas Women’s Foundation, 60% of Texas mothers were the primary income producers for their families before the pandemic, but the global health crisis also led to an increase in women leaving the workforce. (Interestingly, the city with the largest percentage decrease in median household income in the country for single mothers from 2014 to 2019 was Austin, with a decrease of 21.9% according to a 2022 SmartAsset study.)
Those single mothers who stayed in the workforce following the pandemic face a unique set of challenges, Grossman explains. “They are more likely to have job turnover because caregiving is actually going to interfere with work if you are the only one that can stay home with a sick kid or the only one who can do daycare pickups or the only one who can respond to an emergency,” she says. “There is a greater likelihood that you are going to end up in a situation where [caregiving] does interfere with work. And people who have a lot of job turnover are always going to suffer in the long term, in terms of pay and development.”
Nonprofits in Dallas are working to support single mothers in this endeavor. ilooklikeLOVE, inc. provides empowerment programming and diaper assistance for single mothers in the area. Executive director Phillipa Williams witnessed the challenges of single motherhood firsthand, growing up in a single-mother household and later leading a single-mother household herself. She saw “the resilience and the tenacity of single mothers to take care of their households and to build thriving households.”
Williams says that the plight of single motherhood is how they are tasked with doing more but provided with significantly less. “The amount of wages available to women are considerably lower. … When you are a single mother, the wage is lower, but [your] responsibilities are double. You are trying to walk this tightrope where, ‘Society has given me less that I have to do more with.’”
When Williams started ilooklikeLOVE, inc., diaper needs were substantial in Dallas. “In the country, 1-in-3 families experienced diaper needs,” she says. “Dallas was at 49%.” Diaper need is a strong example of women’s realities under the gender wage gap.
“Mothers are having to make the choice between, ‘Do I buy diapers or do I buy food? Do I buy diapers or do I wait to pay the light bill?’ With this recent reduction of SNAP benefits being reduced again back to pre-COVID levels, now we are once again escalating that urgency to make these kinds of choices,” Williams says.
ilooklikeLOVE, inc. provides empowerment programs for single mothers such as financial literacy, where new mothers can prepare for the financial burden of motherhood with values-based budgeting — a plan that offers more customization than traditional financial planning.
Williams wants the workforce to support single mothers so that they can have a living-wage lifestyle. For example, she says, “Adequate childcare is so key to strength in the workforce. If I don’t have anywhere for that child to go, you are not going to see me in the workforce. … If I don't have anywhere in close proximity to my home, you are not going to see me consistently in the workforce.”
The availability of remote work can benefit single mothers as can accessible public transportation — an area in which Dallas does not excel. “These are the kind of things that will help single mothers move out of a poverty situation," Williams says. “There are dollars being lost in our city because young women are not able to work.”
Williams’ work with ilooklikeLOVE, inc. shows how multifaceted the gender wage gap is. The phenomenon is not a top-down issue with a singular, definable cause. Instead, the gender wage gap is the culmination of separate but intersecting forces operating under patriarchy.
"When you are a single mother, the wage is lower, but [your] responsibilities are double. You are trying to walk this tightrope." – Phillipa Williams, ilooklikeLOVE, inc.
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Grossman says employers hold power in preventing a gender wage gap within their own company. “[Employers] know how much everybody gets paid and, to the extent they are introducing or perpetuating pay biases, that is generally in their control. Sometimes they don’t know it. They don’t know there are pay biases because they don’t really study it. What employers should be doing is doing regular pay audits to look at their own pay structures and their own salary graph and figure out if they are in fact causing or perpetuating pay disparities, but most of them don’t do that.”
So, while there are a few months for women as a whole — or, more accurately, the median woman — to chip off in order to celebrate Equal Pay Day on New Year's Day, that task will still take longer for the single mother in Dallas County or the woman over 50 in Tarrant County.
Last month, in time for Equal Pay Day, U.S. Rep. Rosa. L. DeLauro, a Democrat from Connecticut, reintroduced the Paycheck Fairness Act, which has been done every year like clockwork since 1997. The legislation aims to close the gender pay gap through various measures such as protecting workers who openly discuss their salaries, preventing employers from using salary history as a screening factor in the employment process and bolstering claims of those who file sex-based discrimination with similar protections provided under the Civil Rights Act for race- and ethnicity-based wage discrimination. In all these 25 years, the bill has yet to pass.
