It’s Equal Pay Day. Women have lost ground for two years in a row : NPR

Women working full-time, year-round earn on average 81 cents for every dollar earned by men working full-time, year-round.

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Equal Pay Day is here again.

The annual celebration marks how far women must work in the new year to earn what men earned the previous year. This year it is March 26, one day later than in 2025.

Indeed, for the second year in a row, the wage gap between men and women has widened in the United States.

According to the most recent Census Bureau data, women working full-time, year-round now earn 81 cents for every dollar earned by men. That’s down from 83 cents a year ago and 84 cents the year before.

It’s the first consecutive widening of the pay gap since the 1960s, says Deborah Vagins, director of Equal Pay Today, a national coalition that organizes not one, but nine annual celebrations marking Equal Pay Days for different groups of women.

This year, Black Women’s Equal Pay Day will be celebrated on July 21. Equal Pay Day for Moms will take place on August 6. Latin Equal Pay Day will take place on October 8.

“We are undoing decades of hard-won progress,” Vagins says.

The wage gap has widened under Biden

While some fear that the policies currently being pursued by the Trump administration will exacerbate the wage gap, the census data used to calculate the equal pay date does not reflect this because it is from 2024, when Joe Biden was president. Data for 2025 will be released this fall.

One explanation for this growing gap, offered by the Census Bureau, is that men’s median income increased 3.7% between 2023 and 2024, while women’s remained stagnant.

The Biden administration, in fact, supported efforts toward equal pay and took steps aimed at narrowing the wage gap between federal workers and contractors. But beyond that, proponents of the proposal faced resistance from Congress.

The Equal Pay Today coalition unsuccessfully lobbied for federal pay transparency laws that would have required employers to provide salary ranges in job postings and prohibited them from researching applicants’ salary histories.

“Even a well-intentioned employer could perpetuate the effects of prior pay discrimination,” says Vagins.

A number of states have already passed such laws. Studies have found mixed results. Although pay transparency reduces inequality, it does not always lead to higher salaries for women. Vagins believes, however, that it will be difficult to close the wage gap without such laws.

A window on salary disparities closed

In fact, there are fewer tools available today to close the wage gap than ever before. During the Obama administration, Vagins worked at the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, where she helped pass a requirement for employers to submit wage data to the government, broken down by gender, ethnicity and race.

“This data collection showed [were] there are still large salary disparities between professions, and professional segregation remains extremely strong in certain areas,” she says.

Two years later, the first Trump administration ended the initiative, citing the burden it posed to employers.

Now the coalition is hoping for a change in Congress to revive its efforts.

“If you can’t measure what’s happening, you can’t fix it,” Vagins says.

The wage gap shapes life

Although no single factor explains the wage gap, occupational segregation accounts for a large part of it. There are far more women than men working in low-wage jobs in restaurants, hotels and daycares. Even within professions, there are disparities. Studies have shown that male doctors earn higher salaries than female doctors across all specialties.

Vagins says wage gaps affect women throughout their lives, resulting in less retirement savings, smaller Social Security checks, and limits on women’s ability to create generational wealth for their children and grandchildren.

“This has very, very long-term impacts,” she says.