Four Cents Closer to Parity
Welcome to What Could Go Right?, where we are enjoying a surprising palate cleanser: why Senator Bernie Sanders is one of the best-dressed guys in Congress. (Here's the full, bipartisan list.)
What Could Go Right? is a free weekly newsletter from The Progress Network written by our executive director, Emma Varvaloucas. In addition to this newsletter, which collects substantive progress news from around the world, The Progress Network is also home to the anti-apocalypse conversational podcast also called What Could Go Right?.
In the past two decades, the gender pay gap in the United States has narrowed by four cents. New data from the Pew Research Center shows that in 2024, women earned an average of 85 cents for every dollar that men earned. In 2003, it was 81 cents.
Four cents over 20 years sounds unimpressive, I know, but society-wide changes take time. Meanwhile, the gap for young workers has crept up to near-parity. Women between 25 and 34 now earn, on average, 95 percent of what men do.?
While the gender pay gap widens over the span of a woman’s work life, opening particularly at the prime family-raising years of 35 to 44, there is some correlation between the gap earlier in women’s careers and later. There is no guarantee that this specific cohort, who is now 25 to 34—a mix of Gen Zers and millennials—will see a smaller gap than 15 cents at the end of their work life. But it is reasonable to expect progress to continue when measured across a few generations.
What would be needed to ensure that happens, or even to speed up the process?
The gender pay gap no longer persists, as it once did, due to differences in educational attainment and experience—in the US, more women than men now hold degrees. It persists, as this Our World in Data article takes great pains to explain, because women choose both occupations and jobs that give them more flexibility to take on the at-home work that comes with raising a family. The prioritization of family over work, as well as harder-to-quantify factors like employer bias, depresses their earnings over time, and also makes them less likely to reach the highest bracket of income earners.
This state of affairs has created a fair amount of resistance against taking the gender pay gap seriously. If much of the gap is due to personal choice, the thinking goes, does its existence necessarily imply unfairness? And does closing it entirely thus make sense as a societal goal?
I would find that line of questioning?more sensical?if we lived in a world in which women were not assumed to be the primary caretaker of their house and home by default. If the expectation landed evenly across both parents, perhaps the gap could be chalked up to simple preference. But it’s clear, per Pew Research Center data, that more mothers than fathers feel “a great deal of pressure to focus on their responsibilities at home,” even as both parents feel similarly pressured to support their families financially.
Another rejoinder to the personal choice argument is that women would not be making the choice to step back from their career if childcare in the US weren’t prohibitively expensive. Cheaper childcare would certainly help shrink the gap, but it isn’t a silver bullet. Data from Denmark, where childcare is subsidized by the government, shows that women who have children still make less money over the course of their career than both childless women and all men, with and without children.
That means that closing the gender pay gap further is in large part a matter of changing social norms and culture. First, interrogating the idea that it should automatically be the woman’s responsibility to raise children and take on household work, when men are just as capable. ((If they weren’t, wouldn’t the rising number of single-father households be a societal concern?) And second, advancing family-friendly workplace policies like flexible schedules.
What are your thoughts on the gender pay gap? Email [email protected] and let us know.
—Emma Varvaloucas
P.S.: In February, I wrote about the newly developed ability to protect the planet from an asteroid impact through a program called DART, which could knock an asteroid off course. Author of How to Kill an Asteroid Robin George Andrews took to X to explain why that might not be a viable option in the specific case of asteroid 2024 YR4 (although it is no longer forecasted to hit Earth).
P.P.S.: Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must pay the $2 billion it owes to foreign aid contractors for work already done. Some see the Court’s defiance of the Trump administration as a tentatively positive sign that it won’t play partisan politics; others believe the technicality that the order rested upon will have little bearing on future cases. Last week, the Supreme Court ruled that the government must pay the $2 billion it owes to foreign aid contractors for work already done. Some see the Court’s defiance of the Trump administration as a tentatively positive sign that it won’t play partisan politics; others believe the technicality that the order rested upon will have little bearing on future cases. As for the fate of USAID, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has announced that 83 percent of its programs have been cut, although which ones are unknown. The rest will be moved under the purview of the Department of State.
What Could Go Right? S7 E2: Tariffs, Trade, and TikTok with Noah Smith
Will the U.S. no longer be an economic superpower in the future? How dangerous is TikTok for Americans? And do tariffs necessarily lead to increased domestic manufacturing? In the midst of tariffs and counter-tariffs and lots of economic uncertainty, Zachary and Emma speak with Noah Smith, economist and writer of the Noahpinion?Substack. They discuss President Trump’s economic maneuvers, our fragmented media ecosystem, and how much of a threat China really is. |?Listen now
By the Numbers
17: The number of US states that require lost and stolen guns to be reported, up from 11 in 2017. These laws help in cases of firearms trafficking and straw purchasing—when someone buys a gun on behalf of someone who cannot legally purchase one.
18: The gigawatts of large-scale battery capacity forecasted to be plugged into the US grid in 2025. If that expectation bears out, it will be more than the US had installed altogether as of 2023.
77: The percent of Americans who view themselves as digitally flourishing in at least three of five key areas defined by the Human Flourishing Lab: authentic self-disclosure, community connectedness, self-control, civil?participation, and positive social comparison online.
Quick Hits
???Parents in England, Wales, and Scotland will soon be allowed to take up to two weeks of bereavement leave after suffering a miscarriage. The bill is part of a broader employment rights package from the Labour Party.
?????After Arizona voters decided to add protections for abortion to their state constitution in November 2024, the state’s 15-week ban on abortion was temporarily paused. It has now been permanently blocked by a court. Currently, abortion is totally banned in 12 US states.
???Biomedical engineers at Johns Hopkins have created a prosthetic hand that can grip everyday objects, from dish sponges to metal water bottles, with near-human precision. The hand includes a sensor system that tells it how to comport its grip to different materials. And at UC San Francisco, researchers have built a robotic arm that can perform tasks for a fully paralyzed stroke patient via a brain implant.
???Researchers in Israel have discovered a new part of the immune system. Present in every cell of the human body, the proteasome is usually focused on breaking down old proteins. But when a cell is invaded by bacteria, the proteasome gets busy transforming these proteins into bacteria-killing chemicals.
???More evidence that the ozone layer is healing due to the global effort to reduce the use of ozone-eating chemicals, once common in household appliances, has emerged. We may see a year when the ozone layer stays entirely intact as early as the next decade, and eventually the ozone hole will disappear for good.
???The Trump administration’s pullout from the AIDS relief program PEPFAR threatened the planned distribution of the new injection lenacapavir, which is remarkably effective at preventing HIV, to poorer countries like South Africa. However, The Global Fund for HIV, TB and Malaria has announced that it will fund the rollout regardless of US participation.
???What we’re watching:?Melania Trump has thrown her support behind the TAKE IT DOWN Act, which would require?tech and social media companies to remove child sexual abuse materials and non-consensual intimate images within 48 hours of notification by a victim.
???Editor’s?pick:?We couldn’t pick just one this week, especially since the following three essays are all interrelated. Francis Fukuyama makes the argument that President Trump is “repatrimonializing” America. Noah Smith argues that there is no real-world MAGA movement. And M.E. Rothwell explains why the network structure of our modern information environment matters.
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