NY Times Offers State-by-State Guide to the Gender Pay Gap

Ever wonder how your state stacks up against others when it comes to the gender pay gap? If you're looking for some answers, check out the New York Times' Economix blog, which now features an interactive map that shows just how the earnings difference between female and male workers breaks down, state-by-state. (The map is below and a bar graph of the same data appears at the end of this post.)


Where do full-time and salaried female workers earn the most relative to their male peers? The District of Columbia, where women earn 96.5% of what men do. At the other end of the spectrum is Louisiana, which comes in dead last; women workers there earn just 65% as much as male workers do (which is just one reason why the Ms. Foundation's strategy to raise the voices and power of women in the South remains so crucial).

The data used to create this map comes from a new report on women's earnings put out by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which we wrote about earlier this week.

We suppose this is great news for the women of Washington, DC -- but really: wouldn't it be remarkable if there were even one state in the nation where male and female earnings were exactly on par? Here's to the day when maps like this one finally have no shades of gray, and equality -- on all fronts -- really is the law of our land.