Today is Equal Pay Day. If you haven’t heard of this day before, we don’t blame you — it’s not one to be celebrated, nor is it one to look forward to.
Equal Pay Day highlights how many more days women have to work in order to earn the same amount of money that their male colleagues earned in one calendar year. Equal Pay Day, the holiday, uses the aggregate of all women’s salaries. That means that, on average, women usually have to work until around April 2nd to make the same salary that men made in the previous year.
In a recent Care.com study, data analysts discovered that there are different Equal Pay Days for each profession. Using 2015 income data from the U.S. Census Bureau, Care.com analysts compared the average salaries of men and women with the same occupation, and calculated the number of additional days a woman would’ve had to work into 2016 to earn the same salary that her male counterpart earned in one calendar year.
What We Found
Overall, we discovered that women across these 525 professions had to work an average of 66 extra days in order to earn the same salary as their male counterparts did the year before. We also discovered that, on average, women made 20 percent less than men.
Insane, right?
But that’s only part of the story. If you really want to see just how wide the wage gap can be between men and women, you’ll have to look at each industry individually.
To help illustrate this point, we turned to everyone’s favorite actress and human rights advocate, Meryl Streep. We looked at nine of her most famous movies and found her characters’ occupations within the Census Bureau data. Then, we identified the salary that each character would make in her occupation, along with the number of extra days she’d have to work in order to earn the same salary as a male colleague in that field.
Take a look:
And this is only the beginning.
We also pulled out data for the 20 most common occupations in the U.S., based on their overall number of employees. Take a look at this breakdown:
| Occupational Category | Men’s Median Earnings | Women’s Median Earnings | Percentage of Women in Occupation | Percentage of Men in Occupation | Number of Additional Work Days for Women | How Much More Men Make Per Year for the Same Job | Women’s Earnings as a Percentage of Men’s Earnings |
| Marketing and sales managers | $95,761 | $65,921 | 43% | 57% | 118 | 45% | 69% |
| Financial managers | $97,095 | $60,996 | 52% | 48% | 154 | 59% | 63% |
| Accountants and auditors | $74,290 | $55,355 | 60% | 40% | 89 | 34% | 75% |
| Software developers, applications and systems software | $100,697 | $86,856 | 19% | 81% | 41 | 16% | 86% |
| Lawyers | $130,914 | $101,441 | 35% | 65% | 76 | 29% | 78% |
| Secondary school teachers | $55,088 | $50,921 | 57% | 43% | 21 | 8% | 92% |
| Public relations specialists | $69,604 | $59,513 | 62% | 38% | 44 | 17% | 86% |
| Physicians and surgeons | $221,528 | $150,975 | 33% | 67% | 122 | 47% | 68% |
| Registered nurses | $68,759 | $62,268 | 88% | 12% | 27 | 10% | 91% |
| Police and sheriff patrol officers | $64,391 | $55,331 | 14% | 86% | 43 | 16% | 86% |
| Chefs and head cooks | $31,069 | $26,279 | 19% | 81% | 47 | 18% | 85% |
| Food preparation workers | $20,744 | $18,987 | 52% | 49% | 24 | 9% | 92% |
| Waiters and waitresses | $24,557 | $20,670 | 63% | 37% | 49 | 19% | 84% |
| First-line supervisors of landscaping, lawn service, and groundskeeping workers | $40,361 | $31,262 | 6% | 94% | 76 | 29% | 78% |
| Retail salespersons | $37,411 | $26,380 | 39% | 61% | 109 | 42% | 71% |
| Real estate brokers and sales agents | $61,821 | $49,861 | 50% | 50% | 62 | 24% | 81% |
| Customer service representatives | $36,064 | $31,577 | 65% | 35% | 37 | 14% | 88% |
| Secretaries and administrative assistants | $41,054 | $36,513 | 95% | 5% | 32 | 12% | 89% |
| Construction laborers | $31,636 | $30,276 | 2% | 98% | 12 | 4% | 96% |
| Driver/sales workers and truck drivers | $42,127 | $30,962 | 5% | 96% | 94 | 36% | 74% |
Gender Pay Gap Statistics — The Bad News
Intrigued? Here are a few more of the eye-popping statistics we found regarding the gender wage gap.
According to the data, female financial managers would’ve had to work an extra 154 days to catch up to their male coworkers’ salaries. That translated into men making 59% more than their female colleagues.
The total days needed to hit Equal Pay Day was especially high for well-paying jobs like physicians, judges, and CEOs. Male doctors earn an average of $222,000 per year compared to $151,000 for female doctors. That means 122 extra days of seeing patients to make up the difference. Female judges earned an average of $72,000, which was 59% of male judges’ salaries ($122,000 on average). Female judges would’ve had to work an extra 180 days to make up the difference. For the few women who have broken the glass ceiling, they’re rewarded with 99 extra days in the office to earn the same as their male CEO counterparts.
Gender Pay Gap Statistics — The Good News
Take heart: the gender pay gap wasn’t large for all of the industries we looked at. In fact, there were some professions in which women had to spend less time working towards pay parity or even made more than men!
Female architects earn 5 percent more than male architects on average, bringing in $132,000 per year. Now, if only they could find a way to remove the glass ceilings from their clients’ companies.Women who work as news reporters can expect to earn the same as their male counterparts on average, one of the few occupations with gender parity. Female special education teachers also earn nearly as much as men in the profession, and only need to work an extra 6 days to reach equal pay.
There was even some good news regarding women in male-dominated professions.
Let’s look at the construction and extraction industries, where men hold 97 percent of the jobs. Despite the heavy male influence in these occupations, women who work in construction took less time (12 days) to reach their Equal Pay Day. Female carpenters, on average, earned $31,376 in 2015, which was just 87 percent of male carpenters’ salaries (an average of $35,923).
Methodology
For this study, Care.com used 2015 income data from the U.S. Census Bureau to compare the average salaries of men and women in the same occupation. Since men earn more money than women for the same job on average, Care.com analysts calculated the number of additional days a woman would have to work to earn the salary that her male counterpart earned in one year.
