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The Disparity of Wages for Men and Women

Keith Greiner

August 9, 2020

The disparity between average wages for men vs. women is well known. This is a summary of income by age and sex as measured by the American Community Survey for 2011 – 2015. Equality of income is an essential characteristic of democracy, and yet the United States has yet to achieve such equality. The charts that are shown, below, provide a snippet of information on the status of income inequality by sex.

There are six charts that describe the inequality of income as of the 2011 – 2015 American Community Survey. The data include self-reported incomes from 1.5 million individuals from a dataset with 3.1 million records. The survey had a 48.1% response rate for income in the WAGP variable.

Graph 1 shows the discrepancy by age.

Graph 1 shows that the largest discrepancy occurs during the primary earning years. With the exception of age 17, averages for males are always greater than averages for females. When we look at the average for females as a percentage of the average for males, a different pattern emerges. Graph 2 shows the distribution of those percentages. Here, we see that the percentage of female averages declines as age increases. The exceptions and anomalies in the older ages are related to sample size. In the 17 age group slightly over 14,000 people responded, so the anomaly at that age needs to be compared to future American Community Survey data.

Although the pattern is consistent with other analyses, the high percentages among the younger respondents can make us hopeful that one day there will be a more appropriate relationship between men’s and women’s wages.

Graph 2 is the distribution of percent female to male

The average of a number typically implies that it is a center point among the values being averaged. That’s not the case with income. Typically, income has a large number of low-income individuals, with a small number of high-income individuals. An analysis of the individual ages from American Community Survey suggests that is true for each age group. Although there are too many to present distributions for each age in this essay, I have presented graphs of distributions for persons age 30, 60, and 90 to demonstrate the consistency of the distributions

First is the distribution for people age 30.

Next is the distribution for people age 60

Next is the distribution for people age 90. Here there is one income group, $90,000 where the female percentage exceeds the male percentage. Both sexes have one respondent in that category, and the difference is simply in the number of total people in the sample.

And finally, the distribution for all respondents is in Graph 5. However, in Graph 5, we see the percentage distribution by income for total men vs. total women who reported an income of $1. Here, we see that 65.3% of the women earn less than $50,000 vs. 49.8% for men.

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