More Proof The Gender Pay Gap Is Enormous

Want to make a lot of money? Best to be a man.
Peter Dazeley via Getty Images

There's a new report out on the gender pay gap, and things aren't looking any better for women looking to make a buck in America.

The report, from PayScale, shows that women make 74 cents to a man's dollar in this country. That's even worse than official government data, which show that women make 78 cents for every dollar that men make.

PayScale is a website where people log on and share their salaries to make comparisons -- a service that's particularly important for women, who need to know if they are being underpaid if they have any hope of correcting it. The data come from 1.4 million users who said they are full-time employees of a company. It likely skews slightly toward younger, salaried workers who are fairly heavy Internet users.

Not only do women make less each year, but they start making less at the beginning of their careers and see their salaries plateau much earlier, meaning their lifetime earnings are much, much lower than their male counterparts'.

This chart shows median salaries in an age range for both sexes. Men start out with slightly higher salaries, but not by much. They both grow similarly in the first decade of working, but then women's salaries start to flatten out in their early 30s in a way that men's don't until age 45.

PayScale/HuffPost

Most of the numbers above are uncontrolled numbers, meaning it's the pay gap when you look at straight salaries without factoring in things like job type, years of experience or college major (which is a big one!) When you control for those factors, the gap shrinks a lot -- but not entirely. The controlled pay gap is still 2.7 percent in favor of men, according to PayScale -- meaning women make a little over 97 cents for every dollar a man makes. Further, the factors one needs to control for, like whether the person is in a management position, are in themselves telling of where the systemic biases are in American workplaces.

The message here is pretty clear: time to give women a promotion and a raise.

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