Brice Wallace
Utah again has ranked poorly in the gender pay gap, saved from the bottom by neighboring Wyoming.
A report by Business.org indicates Utah woman are paid an average of 31 percent less than their male counterparts. Put another way, women in Utah effectively stop getting paid on Sept. 7 – women would work the same amount of time as men the rest of the year and in the same roles without being paid.
The report ranked the states based on the percentage difference between women’s and men’s earnings for full-time, year-round workers. Women in Utah earn an average salary of $41,861, trailing the men’s average of $60,613. The difference is $18,752.
Gender pay gaps exist in every state. The widest is in Wyoming, at 34.6 percent (men earning an average of $61,993 versus women’s $40,574). The smallest is in the District of Columbia, at 8.1 percent ($90,868 versus $83,466).
On average, men will earn $10,381 more in 2022 than women will across the nation, with an effective stop-paid date of Oct. 29.
The national gender pay gap has seen little change over the past decade. Although the 1980s and ’90s saw a steady shrinking of the gap, progress has stagnated since 2004, and the gap has closed by only 2 percent since then.
The largest gender pay gaps were seen in securities, commodities and financial services sales agents, 44 percent; legal occupations and medical scientists, both 40 percent; personal financial advisors, 35 percent; and engineering technologists and technicians, 34 percent.
But a few job roles actually have a wage gap favoring women. Bureau of Labor Statistics numbers indicate those jobs are compliance officers, graphic designers, clinical laboratory technologists and technicians, pharmacists, and insurance claims and policy processing clerks.
Details are at https://www.business.org/hr/benefits/gender-pay-gap/.
A report released last August by Wallet-Hub ranked Utah the worst state in the nation for women’s equality. It was the fourth consecutive year for Utah to be bottom-ranked in that analysis.
WalletHub compared the 50 states across 17 key indicators of women’s equality, many of them related to business, such as the gap between the number of female and male executives, the disparity in unemployment rates for women and men, and gender differences in education and health.
WalletHub pegged the Utah women’s median weekly earnings as 25 percent less than men’s. The pay disparity is strong at high-income levels, with 18.9 percent of men but only 5.9 percent of women earning $100,000 or more per year.