Report: R.I. has greatest man-woman wage gap improvement in U.S. from 2007-15

NERDWALLET SAID RHODE ISLAND had the greatest improvement in the country in its wage gap from 2007-15 at 11 percent. / COURTESY NERDWALLET
NERDWALLET SAID RHODE ISLAND had the greatest improvement in the country in its wage gap from 2007-15 at 11 percent. / COURTESY NERDWALLET

PROVIDENCE – Rhode Island had the greatest man-woman wage gap improvement among states during the 2007-15 period, according to a study released Wednesday by NerdWallet, a personal finance website.

The Ocean State’s wage gap had the most improvement at 11 percent, with women earning 85.8 cents for every $1 men received in 2015, compared with 77.3 cents for every $1 in 2007.

Men in 2015 made an average of $51,368, while women made $44,050. In 2007, men made an average of $48,492, while women made $37,475.

As a result, Rhode Island has the fifth smallest pay gap in the country, with women earning 85.8 percent of men’s wages. New York has the smallest pay gap at an average of 88.7 percent, followed by Delaware at 88.5 percent; Florida, 86.6 percent; and North Carolina, 85.9 percent. The largest gap is in North Dakota at 71.1 percent.

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In the Providence-Warwick-Fall River metropolitan area in 2015, women earned an average of 86.6 cents for every dollar men earned; that represents a 14.7 percent improvement from 2007.

American women, on average, make 80 cents for every dollar men earn, the report said.
In addition, NerdWallet said the average American woman must save $1.25 for every $1 a man invests in retirement savings to build an equivalent nest egg.

Rhode Island again saw the earnings difference narrow the most in this area – Rhode Island women have to save for retirement at a rate of $1.17 for every $1 men put away. Oklahoma ranked at the bottom in this category as women there planning for retirement need to put away $1.37 for every $1 men save.

Oklahoma also recorded the worst wage gap slide over the eight-year time period. In Oklahoma, the gap widened from 77.5 cents for every $1 men earned in 2007 to 73.2 cents in 2015, a difference of 5.6 percent.

“Does this mean women in Oklahoma should pack their bags for Rhode Island?” NerdWallet wrote. “Research suggests the issue isn’t so much that a woman working as a bank teller in any given state makes less than her male colleague at the next window; rather, it’s that the odds are greater that he will rise to bank manager some day.”

NerdWallet said it found that Rhode Island women are making strides in certain areas of the workforce. It said that in 2015, nearly 40 percent of workers in Rhode Island’s information sectors, such as publishing, software and telecommunications providers, were women, an increase from 25 percent in 2007. It said women in that industry also made gains in wages, outgrowing men’s pay in the field by 39 percent over that period.
NerdWallet looked at U.S. Census Bureau data from 2007-15 to determine changes in annual income and wages for its study. The gap is determined by dividing the median income of women by the median income of men.

“The gap in wages may be related to the clustering of men in higher-paying positions and professions,” said NerdWallet. “A 2014 Harvard study suggests women are far more likely to take career breaks for child and elder care, which ends up limiting the number of women working in time-consuming jobs with little flexibility for family needs,” the report added.

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  1. Ironically, this story came out on the same day as the Women’s Fund of RI’s release of our latest research “The Status of Working Women in RI.” While our research confirms that the wage gap has indeed closed a bit, when we looked further into the data, we found that the apparent “progress” in closing female to male wage gap has been as a result of declining median wages for men, hardly an ideal situation for working families trying to make ends meet. The truth is that women’s median wages have modestly eroded. A further dive into the research shows that women of color still have a much larger wage gap, making only .71 on the female dollar. We are inviting participation in our community input forums to share their ideas about how our community should respond to the issues raised in the report. For more information, you can see our research posted at www.wfri.org/research.