Women Earn Far Less Than Men Despite Educational Achievements
This article originally appeared in Fortuna. If you’d like to subscribe to the free Fortuna eNewsletter to gain early access to articles such as this, sign up here.
As Avestix subscribers know, one goal driving Avestix Fortuna is to deliver exclusive investment knowledge, intelligence, and insights to women who want to manage their financial futures fully. However, to fully benefit from recommendations about finances, investments, wealth, or philanthropy, women need to operate on a level playing field. Unfortunately, as recent studies confirm, women in the U.S. continue to lag behind men when it comes to earning a living.
This point was made clear last March 12 when The U.S. Department of Labor, published an article reminding readers that, on average, women working full-time jobs earn about 84 percent of what their male counterparts earn.
[Read how gender bias impacts artificial intelligence.]
It was no accident the Labor Department picked March 12 to share its findings. That date is also known as Equal Pay Day, which marks just how far into a new year a woman must work to earn what a man — doing the same job — would have earned as of December 31 of the previous year. And it wasn’t just the Labor Department that selected March to call out the gender wage in the U.S.
That same month, the Economic Policy Institute (EPI) published an article that revealed women were paid approximately 22 percent less than men in 2023. And, as the EPI notes, 2023 was by no means an exception to the rule. “There has been little progress in narrowing this gender wage gap over the past three decades,” EPI researchers say. “While the pay gap declined between 1979 and 1994 — due to men’s stagnant wages, not a tremendous increase in women’s wages — it has remained mostly flat since then.”
Incomes for Women Lag Despite Educational Achievements
More troubling still, this income disparity has continued even though U.S. women have made significant educational strides in the last 50 years.
“Among workers, women are more likely to graduate from college than men and are more likely to receive a graduate degree than men. Even so, women are paid less than men at every education level,” according to the EPI.
EPI data shows that:
Among high-school-educated workers, women earn 21 percent less than men
Women who have earned a college degree earn about 27 percent less than their male counterparts
Women with advanced degrees earn 25 percent less than men with equivalent degrees
“What’s very stark from the data is that women with advanced degrees are paid less per hour, on average, than men with college degrees,” says the EPI. “Men with a college degree only are paid $50.37 per hour on average compared with $48.21 for women with an advanced degree.” However, as frustrating as these findings may be, 2023 also produced some good news, at least for those women who launched startups.
According to PitchBook’s recent “All In: Female Founders in the VC Ecosystem ” report, 2023 was a record year for female founders in the U.S. seeking venture capital (VC) investments. Women founders and co-founders secured nearly 28 percent of 2023’s VC money. As PitchBook notes, this accomplishment is all that more noteworthy given the fact that market volatility significantly reduced the amount of VC funding that was on the table. "Female founders have shown tremendous resilience amid market turbulence,” according to Annemarie Donegan, senior analyst for PitchBook.
Are you interested in supporting women-owned businesses? Avestix’s Fortuna Fund invests nearly exclusively in women-owned startups — especially those operating at the forefront of emerging technologies. Find out how Fortuna helps female founders.
