Study mapping women’s pay gap puts Kansas and Missouri behind the curve

The pay gap between men and women will close in 2058 if current trends continue, says “The Status of Women in the States: 2015,” a project of the Institute for Women’s Policy Research.

The report, released Thursday, includes state-by-state data and estimates that in many states it will be many years later than that before parity is reached. In Missouri, for example, current trends wouldn’t bring parity till 2066, and it would be 2072 in Kansas.

The pay gap is larger in Kansas, where women make 77.8 cents for each dollar men make versus 79.1 cents in Missouri. And 30.4 percent of Kansas working women are in low-wage jobs, the report said, versus 27.8 percent in Missouri.

Kansas did do better than Missouri in women’s average earnings ($35,000 versus $34,000), labor force participation (61.3 to 59.9 percent) and percentage of women in professional and managerial occupations (41.7 to 38.3 percent). In fact, by the institute’s formula, Kansas got a C+ grade and Missouri a C-.

The grades range from A for Washington, D.C., to F for West Virginia. The other worst states in the study are Utah, Louisiana, North Dakota, and Wyoming. The study is billed as the first ever to project when the wage gap will close for every state in the nation.

“When we looked back at how the states measured up in the past, we found that, despite progress in many parts of the country, women’s status on employment and earnings either worsened or stalled in nearly half of the states in the last decade,” said Heidi Hartmann, the institute’s president. “When half the country is not seeing any gains in women’s employment and earnings, it is a concerning prospect for the nation’s economy as a whole.”

The report shows that a typical working woman in the United States loses more than $530,000 over her lifetime because of the gender wage gap. The losses are greater for women with higher levels of education.

Nationally, a woman working full time year round with a bachelor’s degree earns wages comparable to a man with an associate degree, the report said, and a woman with a graduate degree earns less than men with bachelor’s degrees.

This story was originally published March 12, 2015 at 11:37 AM with the headline "Study mapping women’s pay gap puts Kansas and Missouri behind the curve."