Wednesday, November 30, 2011

The annual gender wage gap data drop

Every year the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases data on the gender wage gap.  This year the data are broken down by state.  As reported by Jim Gallagher in the Post-Dispatch,
(t)he wage gap between men and women yawns wider in Missouri and Illinois than elsewhere, according to new data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
The average full-time woman worker in Missouri made just 75 percent of the average man's earnings in 2010. Women in Illinois did a little better at 78 percent. The national average is 81 percent.

Gallagher is too smart to fall into the trap of saying that this gap shows how much discrimination there is against women. I wrote about this a while back when the gap was bigger. The explanations remain the same, although the numbers differ a little.