What is the gender wage gap in your metropolitan area?
Find out with our pay gap calculator
BY RICHARD FRY, KILEY HURST, CHRIS BARONAVSKI, ALISSA SCHELLER AND TRAVIS MITCHELL
In 2019 women in the United States earned 82% of what men earned, according to a Pew Research Center analysis of median annual earnings of full-time, year-round workers. The gender wage gap varies by age and metropolitan area, and in most places, has narrowed since 2000. See how women’s wages compare with men’s in your metro area.
Men in the United States have long earned more than women, on average, but this gender wage gap has slowly narrowed over time. This interactive empowers readers to investigate the size of the gap in metropolitan areas and how it’s changed since 2000.
Data from 2000 is derived from the 2000 decennial census; data from 2019 comes from the American Community Survey and is based on the 2015-2019 5-year ACS microdata sample. Both are provided by the Integrated Public Use Microdata Series (IPUMS) from the University of Minnesota. IPUMS assigns uniform codes, to the extent possible, to data collected in the ACS. The 2000 figures are based on the 5% sample.
The 2019 ACS data is the most recent available. The collection of the 2020 data was severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic.
Based on the 2010 census, the U.S. Office of Management and Budget delineated 384 metropolitan statistical areas. The IPUMS ACS provides information on 260 metros. As explained in the documentation for MET2013, there is an imprecise correspondence between the metro boundaries in the ACS data and the official metro area boundaries. This analysis uses information for only 250 metros because 10 metros had an insufficient number of full-time, year-round working women living in them to provide accurate estimates; 27 metros had data for 2019 but comparable estimates are not available in the 2000 Census.
A “full-time, year-round worker” worked at least 50 weeks in the year prior to the interview date and usually worked at least 35 hours per week. The analysis excluded self-employed workers.
Recent Pew Research Center analyses of the gender pay gap examine the median hourly wage of both full- and part-time workers using the Current Population Survey (CPS). The CPS does not provide information on individual metropolitan areas. The CPS and ACS provide similar estimates of the gender pay gap for the U.S. Using the CPS, the Census Bureau estimates that the gender earnings gap for full-time, year-round workers of all ages was 82% for 2019, matching that derived from the ACS. The percentage point change in the gender wage gap between 2000 and 2019 was computed from unrounded percentages.
