Today is Equal Pay Day, or in America’s case, Unequal Pay Day. Here are the top 10 states with the worst gender wage gaps, according to the U.S. Congress Joint Economic Committee:
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Women in the United States still earn approximately 79 cents for every dollar a man makes, with that gap widening for women of color and for women from the LGBTQ community. Simply being a working woman in America costs an average of $10,700 annually as compared to a working man, according to The Street.
The date, always a Tuesday in April, symbolizes how far into the next year women have to work just to earn what men earned the year before. Equal Pay Day was started in 1996 by the National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) in an effort to spotlight America’s persistent gender wage gap.
When you factor in the remaining 40 states’ wage gaps, the economic impact is staggering.
If America could succeed in closing the wage gap by the year 2025, for example, we could theoretically add up to $4.3 trillion to our annual GDP, according to a new report from the McKinsey Global Institute titled, “The power of parity: Advancing women’s equality in the United States.”
The report found that every U.S. city and state could technically add a minimum of five percent to their annual GDP in the next decade, simply by working to close gender wage gaps. That’s roughly 10 percent higher than a “business as usual” scenario, according to the report.
See how your state measures up below:
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