MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
It's 2025, and women still earn less money, dollar for dollar, than men. Why? We had been making progress on the wage gap, but new data shows that over the last two years, the gap has been widening. According to the Census Bureau last year, 2024, women earned around 81 cents for every dollar a man earned. Well, Taylor Telford reports on corporate culture for The Washington Post, and she's been reporting on this. Welcome.
TAYLOR TELFORD: Thanks so much for having me.
KELLY: OK. Flesh out those numbers a little bit more. It sounds like we are seeing - how would you describe it? - a notable shift, but this is not like we're headed back to the 1950s.
TELFORD: Yeah. I think what's interesting about it is kind of the consecutive part. After decades of that gap, you know, kind of steadily getting closer and closer, really it had just kind of plateaued for a while, honestly. We've seen this two-year-in-a-row reversal, and it's the first time since the '60s that that's happened. And so, clearly, there is kind of something in the water that is changing the trend from, you know, what we've been seeing for a really long time now.
KELLY: Well, and what are the theories for what it is? What are the factors driving this?
TELFORD: Basically, even though the pandemic period was a really disruptive period for work in a lot of ways, women actually made a lot of gains because of the kind of advent of flexibility that suddenly made it a lot easier for a lot of people to kind of balance caregiving burdens with work in a way that hadn't really been accessible to as many workers before.
KELLY: Right.
TELFORD: And ever since then, you know, we kind of expected, oh, hopefully, that flexibility will hang around and continue to benefit people. But what we've seen in the last couple of years has really been a big push by a big chunk of employers, and especially big employers, to really get people back in the office more often. And what's kind of unique recently in contributing, in all likelihood, to the wage gap is that it looks like women are about three times as likely as men to leave after RTO mandates are put in place. That's returned to office.
KELLY: So they're affected disproportionately because child care responsibilities still affect women disproportionately. Is that the thinking?
TELFORD: Definitely. Yeah. So it's been referred to often as, like, the motherhood penalty or the child penalty. But what we know from research is that, like, lack of access to child care has long been one of the biggest barriers to women's pay. Because when childcare needs increase, it's usually women that are picking up the slack, and that generally, in turn, takes a toll on their careers.
KELLY: Is there an example? I'm wondering if there's a particular story you've come across while reporting that brings this to life?
TELFORD: Oh, definitely. You know, I spent a lot of time on LinkedIn and TikTok, those kind of places where people congregate to talk about work. And what I just noticed is that it's often women who are posting about the kind of imposition that the kind of return to office is representing on them. And one of the reasons I think that, you know, that wouldn't maybe be as much of a problem in isolation, but it's kind of coinciding with this period where child care is really, really expensive. And so in a lot of cases, in a higher earning couple, those are the folks who can kind of afford to maybe have somebody take a pay cut and step back and say, hey, it's worth it to me to kind of reassess my career and maybe take a role that's going to allow me to work remotely, even if it means, you know, working in an industry I've never been in before or taking a step back.
KELLY: Is there hope, Taylor? Are there any factors pointing to the pay gap narrowing again down the road?
TELFORD: Oh, man. I wish that I could say yes, but I think at the very least, when we look at the picture for 2025, it's almost certainly going to continue to widen. And that's mostly because working mothers with young children have continued to take big steps back, either just exiting the labor force entirely this year or really decreasing their participation.
KELLY: Taylor Telford of The Washington Post, thank you so much.
TELFORD: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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