It’s Equal Pay Day. The gender pay gap has hardly budged in 20 years. What gives?

Tuesday is Equal Pay Day: March 14th represents how far into the year women have had to work to catch up to what their male colleagues earned the previous year. 

In other words, women have to work nearly 15 months to earn what men make in 12 months. 

82 cents on the dollar, and less for women of color

This is usually referred to as the gender pay gap. Here are the numbers:

– Women earn about 82 cents for every dollar a man earns
– For Black women, it’s about 65 cents 
– For Latina women, it’s about 60 cents 

Those gaps widen when comparing what women of color earn to the salaries of White men. These numbers have basically not budged in 20 years. That’s particularly strange because so many other things have changed:

– More women now graduate from college than men
– More women graduate from law school than men
– Medical school graduates are roughly half women

That should be seen as progress. So why hasn’t the pay gap improved too?