The Economic Impact Of The Wage Gap Growing Two Years In A Row
“We saw a widening of the wage gap that was particularly bad for Black women in 2023, and we saw that penny slide back for women overall,” says Jasmine Tucker, vice president for research at the National Women’s Law Center. “Then in 2024, we saw a similar trend where men’s wages grew by 3.7% and women’s wages were essentially flat. We’re seeing this outpacing of wage growth for men and almost no wage growth for women over the last two years, and that’s what’s contributing to the increasing wage gap.”’
These statistics may serve as a canary in the coal mine for what’s to come for the economy. “If we look at evidence from the most recent recessions, such as the Great Recession and the Covid-19 downturn, women, and in particular Black women, were hit the hardest and the longest. After the Great Recession, Black women had double-digit unemployment rates for five years, and white men never experienced similarly high rates. I think we’re going to look back at today’s statistics of women leaving the workforce and the increased unemployment rates for Black women, and say we should have known that we were heading toward an economic downturn.”
Tucker predicted that we would see a regression in the wage gap, as she told me in a previous story on Equal Pay Day 2022, “All those low-paid women workers who were forced out of the workforce during the past two years of the pandemic are going to come back to work. When they return, they might take a lower-paying job or have an employer who pays them less because they’re not fresh on their skills or whatever it is. I have a feeling that we’re going to see that wage gap widen in the future.”