Skip to footer

Gender pay gap: Top 5 best and worst states

The pay gap between men and women has steadily narrowed during the past few decades. Women earned 77 cents for every dollar men earned in 2011, compared with 59 cents in 1963. Here is a look at states with biggest and smallest gender pay gaps today.

4. Nevada

Julie Jacobson/AP/File
Tera Burbank (r.) and her husband, John Clark, of Las Vegas were unemployed for two years. High unemployment can drive down the gender pay gap.

Nevada’s earnings ratio – 85 percent – breaks down to $35,484 for women versus $41,803 for men.

Nevada’s two largest industries – tourism and mining – are gender-segregated industries, with mining dominated by men and tourism industries by women, according to the AAUW. But the strength of the leisure and hospitality industry in Nevada gives it a comparatively narrow pay gap.

A narrow wage gap isn’t necessarily an indication of high wages, though. States with low overall earnings and high unemployment (Nevada has the highest unemployment rate) often have narrow gender wage gaps, Ms. Hegewisch told Forbes.

“So if you don’t have good opportunities for either men or women, we often find a lower wage gap. A job is a job,” she said.

2 of 6
Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

Subscribe to insightful journalism

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.