The power of Social Media occasionally amazes me. I’ve been lucky enough to meet some new people IRL and others just via the Interwebs. I have to share this great Infographic that visually details what the Gender Wage Gap means. It’s a great conversation starter and it’s by Jessica Wallace.
The most telling parts for me:
1. It doesn’t matter if you have a high school education or doctoral degrees, women are still going to get paid less than men.
2. When the numbers are disaggregated for race, we still see a marked gap between the genders.
3. CEOs are primarily men.
4. It doesn’t matter that 50+ of the population across the country is women or that women outnumber men at universities–we still see a gender wage gap.
What does this mean? Well, we can encourage girls and young women to go into the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) fields. And, I do think that this is important; however, I also know that this encouragement in school and learning begins much earlier. I’d like to thank Jessica for sharing her infographic with me.
Dr. Janni Aragon 
So sad and unfortunately true. I thought our lifetime and generation would be different than the women before us. Thank goodness they have amazing role models like you, who fearlessly push for gender equality – thank you!
What’s particularly interesting to me, Janni, is that is starts straight away, in entry-level jobs. I’d always rationalized the wage gap by assuming that it is because of the time many women spend away from the workplace, having and raising children. I spent eight of my most potentially “productive” years out of the job market for the most part, though I provided child care for friends, tutored and taught piano. It cost me tens, perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars in lost wages, and in the meantime, I was outside of my field of training. But this infographic shows that the problem is more entrenched than that – if men are
paid more than women even at entry level, when child bearing is less of an issue, then it’s not just the huge hit we take for parenting.
By the way, I loved those eight years, and given the choice to do it again, I would probably do it the same way…. but I’m not loving the economic results!
Dear Catherine: It is so true! It can mean more than tens of thousands in lost income and then the pension is also influenced, right? This is something that we all need to think of long and hard. Sigh.