Pay Gap Nearly Gone for Millennial Women — But They Don't Know It

By Kate Dries  |  December 11, 2013 | 4:10pm
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A new Pew Research Center study finds that “in spite of the dramatic gains women have made in educational attainment and labor force participation in recent decades, young women view this as a man’s world.” Except for many of them, it’s not.

After surveying thousands of adults and looping in labor market and education data, Pew found that 51% of millennial women and 55% of female boomers believe that it’s easier to be a man than a woman. For boomers that’s certainly true, but many young women seem to have come to that feeling via projection, assuming a future for themselves that has yet to happen. In 2012, hourly wages for millennial women were 93% of what their male peers made. Women of all ages made 84% of what men made.

Pew attributes much of this to educational gains for women but the real caveat in the research comes later:

Yet there is no guarantee that today’s young women will sustain their near parity with men in earnings in the years to come. Recent cohorts of young women have fallen further behind their same-aged male counterparts as they have aged and dealt with the responsibilities of parenthood and family.

They also point out how uncommon it is for women to call out gender biases or prejudices in their own workplaces. It seems as though young women today are all too aware that even though life is good now, the trappings of adulthood will likely weigh them down, a lesson they’ve likely learned from their mothers.

In other news, this study is basically the stuff that every trend piece of the last three years is made of, as just a glance at the first two footnotes of the research will tell you:

Screenshot via Another Film Blog

 
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