On Equal Pay Day, women are far from achieving pay equity

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Equal Pay Day is today, a symbolic date that represents how far into the year women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. But the gender pay gap is getting worse — especially for young professionals.

The National Committee on Pay Equity (NCPE) established the day in 1996 as part of a public awareness effort. According to data from the U.S. Department of Labor, progress toward closing the gap was greatest during the 1980s, but has since slowed in subsequent decades.

Last year, women earned 77.9 cents for every dollar earned by men, which is only a slight move up from 2016 — when women earned 76.3 cents for every dollar earned by men, according to a new report from PayScale, which provides compensation data.

In 2015, women under 40 earned an average 81 cents for each dollar earned by men. That wage gap improved slightly in 2016, with women making 82 cents. However, last year the gender wage gap increased, and women made 79 cents for each dollar men earned. At the same time, the gender wage gap for workers over 40 didn’t experience any meaningful improvement, according to a separate report from HR analytics firm Visier.

Female salaries are dropping relative to men while their work continues to improve over those of their male colleagues, according to Josie Sutcliffe, a vice president at Visier. For this report, Sutcliffe targeted large U.S.-based employers, which included more than 60 companies representing 1.5 million U.S. employees.

Last month, Starbucks (SBUX) announced that all employees are earning equal pay for equal work. Over the past few years, companies like Salesforce (CRM), Apple (AAPL) Adobe (ADBE) and Intel (INTC) said they have also closed the gender pay gap.

But these companies are anomalies and do not represent the overall trajectory of corporate America. Although the Securities and Exchange Commission requires publicly traded companies to share how much the median worker makes relative to the CEO (also known as the pay ratio), the U.S. doesn’t mandate companies to disclose gender pay gap.

Roadblocks along the corporate ladder

The state of female workers at every rank doesn’t look rosy, but the biggest issue is what Sutcliffe calls ‘the manager divide.’ Women are underrepresented in manager positions, which contributes significantly to the gender wage gap.

“There’s more to it than equal pay for equal work. Women, especially those in key motherhood years, get less and less opportunity to hold manager positions. And that directly correlates to the overall pay gap between men and women,” said Sutcliffe. “Women should have access to those manager roles and companies should think about their intentional or unintentional bias when they decide to promote managers.”