US gender pay gap closing

The gender pay gap in the US has never been narrower. Women still earn less on average than men, but at 83.8 per cent of the median male weekly wage last year, that was 5.4 per cent up on the year before. It’s hard not to be more astonished by the size of the gap in 2022 than its thinness in 2023, but at least whatever’s holding women back in general isn’t holding Black women back as much. Their median weekly earnings are 94 per cent of Black men’s. The gap widens higher up the income scale: according to the latest release from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, the highest-earning 10 per cent of female workers with advanced degrees earned only 74 per cent ($3,443 a week) as much as their male counterparts ($4,623). Oh dear. What’s spun as progress really isn’t. In May 1943, the Conservative MP Irene Ward announced with satisfaction to the UK’s House of Commons that the gender pay gap for ferry pilots in the UK’s Air Transport Auxiliary was precisely zero. It stayed that way for the rest of the war.