Girls Will Never Have Funds? For the 2nd Year in a Row, Equal Pay Day Got Pushed Back!

Ladies, there’s no time like the present to demand the guys at your job buy you a coffee, lunch, or hand you their bonuses, but there’s really no time like today, because it’s Equal Pay Day—marking the exact date millions of women in the U.S. officially break even with how much men make. 

March 26 marks this year’s Equal Pay Day, or the ever-changing calendar date assigned by the National Committee on Pay Equity, based on data collected by the Census Bureau. And while 19th-century suffragettes may be happy to learn we’re a full 16 days ahead of where we were in 1996 (the first Equal Pay Day fell on April 11), women working full-time, year-round have regressed from 2025, when Equal Pay Day was March 25. In 2024, it was March 12. Sigh. At least the Barbies have made progress. 

“Women are falling further behind,” Sarah Javaid, a senior research analyst at the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC), told Jezebel, while emphasizing how the current gap isn’t because women are making less—it’s because women’s wages are staying stagnant while men’s incomes are going up. Patriarchy always finds a way. 

In September, new census data warned us that the wage gap was still getting worse. As USA Today reported at the time, “for every dollar a man makes in America, a woman made 84 cents in 2022, 83 cents in 2023 and 81 cents in 2024.”

And while Thursday marks the “all” women’s Equal Pay Day, the date moves back even further for marginalized groups, as tracked by the American Association of University Women: LGBTQIA+ Equal Pay Day is June 17; Black Women Equal Pay Day is July 21; and—wait for it—Mom’s Equal Pay Day is August 6. And it doesn’t even end there. Native Women’s Equal Pay Day is November 19, miles closer to the start of 2027 than any other. “That discrimination then follows a woman from job to job, if her pay is set on her salary history, pay range transparency,” Javaid says. 

Equal Pay Days are based on previous census data, so March 26 is based on 2024 numbers, when Biden was still president. We won’t know what the Trump administration’s impact will be on the wage gap until 2027—but Javaid isn’t optimistic, given this administration’s relentless anti-women politics and rollback of reproductive rights. “When we talk about the wage gap, we also have to talk about—broadly—sexism, racism,” explains Javaid. “When we talk about all the things that go into the wage gap, that’s where [for example] reproductive health policies can come in: having access to affordable abortion, having health insurance coverage, and access to affordable birth control and contraception, these are really important things for women to be able to enter and stay in the workforce.”

Welp. In that case, Equal Pay Day might not even happen in 2027. 

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