Where Do Young Women Earn More than Men? NewsWire

NewsWire: 4/29/22

• In 22 U.S. cities, young women are earning as much as or more than their male counterparts. This includes several of the country’s biggest cities as well as smaller cities in red states. (Pew Research Center)
• NH: In most U.S. cities, women’s median annual earnings continue to be lower than men’s. But according to a recent Pew analysis, the gender wage gap is narrowing among young workers, with women under 30 now earning as much or more than their male counterparts in 22 out of 250 metro areas.
• What’s going on here?
• We can think of this as the convergence of two forces: life-cycle trends and historical trends. First, relative to men at the same age, young women have always earned more than older women: In 2020, 25- to 34-year-old women earned 93% of what men earned, compared to 84% among all women. Forty years ago, both numbers were lower, but the age gap was just about as large. Why the gap? When they are young, women are likely to have as much occupational experience as men--mostly because they are still single and childless. This changes as women grow older.
• Second, over time, the entire earnings curve for young women has been shifting upwards relative to men.

• The big drivers here are rising educational attainment relative to men and women remaining single and childless for longer. (See "For Millennial Women, a Mixed Progress Report.") Another driver of unequal wages that probably has not changed over time is the effect of gender on career selection. As much as they ever did, women still tend to gravitate to professions that pay less (see “Why Are Occupations Still Segregated by Gender?”).
• All of the trends pushing up the relative earnings of young women are especially likely to be present in upscale urban areas. The top 10 areas where young women are making the most relative to men include New York (where young women working full-time earn 102% of what young men earn), Washington, D.C. (102%), and Los Angeles (100%). These areas attract highly educated young women who are more likely to stay unmarried or childless for longer.

• Yet what’s striking about this list is that it also includes smaller red-zone cities with a very different kind of profile. The metro area where young women are making the most relative to men (120%) is Wenatchee, Washington, whose population is under 35K and whose median household income is around $57K. Second at 114% is Morgantown, West Virginia, whose median household income is $42K. Both belong to counties that voted for Trump in 2020. Compared to their counterparts in big cities, women in these areas may be less educated and more likely to be married. But in lower-income regions, they have an even larger educational advantage over the young men who live nearby. (See “Are Young Men Giving Up on College?”)