International Women’s Day 2022: The US states with the highest and lowest gender pay gap

In Washington DC, Utah, and Wyoming, wage gap is above $15,000

The states with the highest and lowest gender pay gap (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

On average, women in the US earned 83 cents to every dollar that men earned in 2020.

While the pay gap has remained relatively consistent over the last 15 years, according to Pew Research, there are some states, such as Wyoming, where the divide is more obvious, and where the gender wage disparity is higher than $15,000.

Ahead of International Women’s Day, the Census Bureau’s website has created an interactive map where users are able to break down by US state and territory which areas of the country have the highest and lowest pay disparities among men and women - and determine the disparity in their own state.

According to Census Bureau, which used data from 2019 regarding median earnings for men and women who worked full-time, year round over the 12 month-period, the average wage gap, which exists both within and across occupations in the US, was $10,150, with the median earnings for men $53,544, while women earned a median income of $43,394.

In the US, two states and the District of Columbia all have a wage gap above $15,000, with men making more than $21,676 more than women in Wyoming, $17,303 more in Utah and $16,032 more in the country’s capital.

In a number of states, the discrepancy was found to be in the $12,500 to $14,999 range, with the map showing Washington, North Dakota, Oklahoma, Illinois, Louisiana, Alabama, New Jersey and Massachusetts all fall in this category. The state with the highest discrepancy in the category was identified as Louisiana, where men made a median of $14,926 more in the same year of work.

The majority of US states were found to have a discrepancy of $10,000 to $12,499. According to the map, these states include Oregon, Idaho, Montana, New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Michigan, Indiana, Kentucky, Ohio, Virginia, West Virginia, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Maine, Connecticut, South Carolina, and Alaska.

The states in the country where the gender pay gap was lowest, or ranged from $4,500 to $9,999, included Hawaii, California, Nevada, Arizona, Arkansas, Mississippi, Tennessee, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Wisconsin, New York, Maryland, Delaware, Rhode Island and Vermont. Of these states, the disparity was lowest in Vermont, where the wage gap was $4,600.

The map only includes one place where median earnings between men and women were not statistically different, according to the Census Bureau, which notes that this only applied to Puerto Rico, where men earned $22,804 and women earned $23,478.

According to economist Evelyn Murphy, president of The Wage Project, this gap adds up over a lifetime of work, with a woman who has graduated from high school earning $700,000 less over their lifetime, while a college graduate will earn $1.2m less.

The eventual closing of the gender gap also faced a setback as a result of the Covid pandemic, with the World Economic Forum’s 2021 Global Gender Gap Report finding, after analysing data from 156 countries, that the time it will take for the wage gap to close globally grew by 36 years during the first 12 months of the pandemic.

The Census Bureau map shows that the fight for equality in the workplace is far from over, and why men and women must continue to advocate for a more equitable future.