The Pay Gap Stopped Closing
In March 2026 Payscale reported that American women earn 82 cents on the male dollar, one cent worse than 2025. The federal statistics do not agree with Payscale, or with each other, and the penny is the flimsiest number in the story.
By Teona Abuladze · 7 min read
In September 2025 the Census Bureau published Income in the United States: 2024, and inside it was a line that should have stopped the room. The female-to-male earnings ratio for full-time, year-round workers had fallen from 82.7 percent in 2023 to 80.9 percent in 2024. Women’s median earnings were $57,520. Men’s were $71,090.
The Institute for Women’s Policy Research ran the series back and found that a 1.8 percentage-point drop in a single year was the largest since 1966. Ariane Hegewisch and Miranda Peterson wrote it up. The ratio was the worst since 2016.
Census also reported why, arithmetically: men’s median earnings rose 3.7 percent that year. Women’s showed no statistically significant change.
That is the reversal. It happened in 2024, it sits in federal data, and it drew a fraction of the attention a compensation software company got six months later for a much weaker number.
What Payscale counted, and what it did not
On 24 March 2026, Payscale published its annual Gender Pay Gap Report. Women earn $0.82 for every dollar men earn, it said, down from $0.83 in 2025. The press release ran under the headline that the gap “widens.”
Read the methodology. The figure comes from Payscale’s free online salary survey, which anyone can fill in. The 2026 report draws on “more than 130,000” U.S. respondents who answered between January 2024 and January 2026. The 2025 report, which produced the $0.83, drew on “over 369,000” people between January 2024 and January 2025.
So the sample shrank by roughly two-thirds while the collection window doubled. The two windows overlap for a full year. Payscale does not explain the discrepancy anywhere I could find in the report or the press materials.
A one-cent move, in a self-selected online sample that lost two-thirds of its respondents, is not evidence of a reversal. It is noise with a press release attached.
The controlled gap, which compares women and men in the same job at the same employer with the same experience, sat at $0.99. It has sat at $0.99 every year since 2022. It did not move in 2026.
Payscale’s more interesting numbers are the ones nobody quoted. Mothers earn $0.74 for every dollar fathers earn, uncontrolled; women without children earn $0.90 against men without children. Women executives earn $0.69, women over 45 earn $0.71, and women with MBAs earn $0.78, the widest gap of any education category in the data. Those figures describe where women end up, and they hold steady year over year, which is more than the headline penny can claim.
Eighty-two cents, eighty-point-nine percent, eighteen percent
Here is the part that the coverage smoothed over. The federal measures point in different directions right now.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks median usual weekly earnings quarterly. In the second quarter of 2026, women’s median was $1,131, or 82.0 percent of the $1,380 median for men. A year earlier, in the second quarter of 2025, it was $1,078, or 81.1 percent. By that measure the gap narrowed during exactly the period Payscale says it widened.
The Economic Policy Institute measures hourly wages with controls for race, education, age, marital status and state. Katherine deCourcy and Elise Gould found the gap at 18.0 percent in 2024, down from 18.9 percent in 2023 and 20.0 percent in 2022, and called it the lowest it has ever been.
New York State’s Department of Labor, in its 2026 update, reported that women in New York earned 91.4 cents on the dollar in 2024, up sharply from 87.3 cents in 2023, against a national ACS figure of 83.0 cents. Governor Hochul described it as the smallest gap in the nation. Under the department’s own previously published methodology the state ranked third, and the claim reads as an interpretation of state data rather than a settled fact.
These measures are not measuring the same thing. Census counts annual earnings, which absorb hours worked, overtime and weeks employed. BLS weekly earnings strip out most of that. EPI’s hourly figure strips out more and then adjusts for who is working. A gap that widens on annual earnings while narrowing on hourly wages tells you something specific: men moved into more paid hours, faster than women did.
Hegewisch and Peterson make that argument directly. In a tight labor market, men are likelier to hold jobs with heavy overtime and likelier to negotiate larger increases, so their earnings grow faster. The 2024 recovery also restored a mass of lower-paid service jobs held mostly by women, which pulls the female median down.
That is not a happy explanation. It is a real one, and it means the annual-earnings reversal is genuine without implying that employers suddenly started paying women less for the same work.
The 845,000
The stronger 2026 story is not about rates. It is about exits.
The National Women’s Law Center, reading the monthly BLS household survey, counted 165,000 women leaving the labor force in July 2026 alone, and 845,000 women leaving between January and July. Men’s labor force numbers were roughly flat over the same month. In July, leisure and hospitality shed 40,000 jobs overall; women lost 63,000 of them while men gained 23,000.
The federal workforce is the other visible wound. Pew Research Center found it shrank 10.3 percent during 2025, from 2,312,301 employees in December 2024 to 2,074,649 a year later. USAID fell 92.4 percent, the Education Department 42.6 percent.
Who those people were is now harder to establish, because the Office of Personnel Management stopped publishing data on the gender, race, ethnicity and disability status of federal workers. Reporting by The American Prospect in April 2026, drawing on Economic Policy Institute analysis of household survey data, put Black women’s federal job losses at 95,371 for 2025 and Black women’s unemployment at 6.1 percent in March 2026 against 4.3 percent nationally. Those are survey estimates standing in for administrative records that the government no longer releases. Treat them as indicative and say so.
And then August cut the other way. The 4 September 2026 jobs report showed 162,000 payroll additions, with women taking almost all of the net gain, adult women’s unemployment at 3.5 percent against adult men’s 4.0 percent, and participation edging up. Prime-age women’s participation, at 78.2 percent in May 2026, remains above its February 2020 level of 76.9 percent.
Two things are true. Women have been leaving the labor force in large numbers this year, and the most recent month contradicted the trend. Anyone telling you which one wins is guessing.
What actually changed in the law
Executive Order 11246, signed by Lyndon Johnson in 1965, was revoked by Executive Order 14173 on 21 January 2025. On 21 August 2026 the Department of Labor published the final rule rescinding its implementing regulations, effective 26 October 2026. Gone: written affirmative action plans, placement goals, and the workforce utilization analyses that required federal contractors to compare their own pay and staffing against the available labor pool.
That last item mattered more than the goals did. It obliged large employers to look at their own numbers. Nothing in the 2026 data can yet show the effect: the rule has not taken effect, and the obligations lapsed less than two years ago.
Europe went the other way and largely failed to arrive. The EU Pay Transparency Directive had a transposition deadline of 7 June 2026. Italy met it, Malta beat it by two days, Estonia arrived in July. Most member states notified the Commission that they would miss the date.
Denmark, Britain, Colorado
Pay transparency does work. It works in a way its advocates rarely describe out loud.
Denmark’s 2006 law required firms with 35 or more employees to report gender-disaggregated pay statistics. Bennedsen, Simintzi, Tsoutsoura and Wolfenzon, in the Journal of Finance in 2022, compared those firms against firms with 25 to 34 employees. The gap narrowed by about two percentage points, 13 percent of its pre-law size. Female hiring rose 0.8 percentage points off a 5 percent base, and women’s promotion odds improved.
Women’s wages did not rise. Men’s rose more slowly. The firms’ total wage bill fell and so did measured productivity, while profitability held steady.
Britain’s 2017 reporting mandate for employers with 250 or more staff produced the same shape. Blundell, Duchini, Simion and Turrell found the gap fell 19 percent, roughly from 16 to 13 percent. Men’s real pay in covered firms fell 2.9 percent against control firms, largely through bonuses and a 10 percent drop in promotion prospects by 2019. Women’s pay showed no significant effect.
Both flagship transparency laws closed the gap by slowing men down. Neither raised women’s pay.
The American experiment is different in kind. State laws requiring salary ranges in job postings regulate the offer, not the report. Arnold, Quach and Taska found those laws raised the share of postings with pay information by about 30 percentage points, from roughly 35 to 65 percent, pushed posted salaries up 3.6 percent and realized earnings up 1.3 to 1.4 percent, with no drop in job postings. On the gender gap specifically they report nothing, and flag it as future work.
That is the honest state of the evidence. Salary-range laws raise pay. Whether they close gaps is unknown.
The causes, ranked by how much evidence there is
Return-to-office mandates have the best-documented gender effect. Ding, Jin, Ma, Xing and Yang tracked more than three million employees at 54 S&P 500 technology and finance firms that announced mandates between the second quarter of 2022 and the second quarter of 2023. Quarterly turnover rose about 14 percent. For women the increase was 0.127 percentage points; for men, 0.044, and not statistically significant.
Care costs come next. Child Care Aware of America put the national average annual price at $13,184, up more than 20 percent from 2022 to 2025. That is 10 percent of a married couple’s median income and 33 percent of a single parent’s. Jennifer Williams, a school counsellor in Oklahoma, told NPR in August 2026 that she left full-time work after her second son was born because two children in daycare was impossible.
The DEI and transparency rollback is the weakest link in the chain, and it is the one being asserted most confidently. The legal changes are real and dated. The mechanism connecting them to a 2026 earnings figure is not established by anything I can find, and the Danish and British evidence suggests transparency rules take years to register.
On 15 September 2026, the Census Bureau releases income and earnings for 2025. The number to watch is whether 80.9 percent went up, stayed flat, or fell again. If it falls a second time, the reversal is a trend. If it recovers, a large share of this year’s commentary was written about a penny in a shrinking survey.
Teona Abuladze is the founder and editor of Shansi Magazine.
Sources: Payscale, “2026 Gender Pay Gap Report,” March 2026 — https://www.payscale.com/compensation-trends/2026-gender-pay-gap-report; Payscale, “Gender Pay Gap statistics,” 2026 — https://www.payscale.com/featured-content/gender-pay-gap; Payscale press release, “Payscale Report Finds Gender Pay Gap Widens in 2026,” 24 March 2026 — https://www.payscale.com/press-releases/2026-gpgr; Payscale press release, “The Gender Pay Gap Stalls in 2025,” 24 March 2025 — https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2025/03/24/3047897/0/en/The-Gender-Pay-Gap-Stalls-in-2025-Payscale-s-Research-Shows.html; HR Dive, “Gender pay gap grows in 2026, report finds,” March 2026 — https://www.hrdive.com/news/gender-pay-gap-grows-in-2026-equal-pay/815675/; ESG Dive, “Gender pay gap grows in 2026, report finds,” March 2026 — https://www.esgdive.com/news/gender-pay-gap-grows-in-2026-equal-pay/816835/; U.S. Census Bureau, “Income in the United States: 2024,” P60-286, September 2025 — https://www.census.gov/library/publications/2025/demo/p60-286.html; U.S. Census Bureau, “Release Schedule for Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Statistics,” 2026 — https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2026/iphi-acs-media-advisory.html; Institute for Women’s Policy Research, Hegewisch and Peterson, “Gender Wage Gap Worsens for Second Year in a Row,” September 2025 — https://iwpr.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/National-Wage-Gap-Fact-Sheet-2025.pdf; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Usual Weekly Earnings of Wage and Salary Workers, Second Quarter 2026” — https://www.bls.gov/news.release/wkyeng.htm; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Usual Weekly Earnings, Second Quarter 2025,” 22 July 2025 — https://www.bls.gov/news.release/archives/wkyeng_07222025.htm; U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Employment Situation, August 2026,” 4 September 2026 — https://www.bls.gov/news.release/empsit.nr0.htm; Economic Policy Institute, deCourcy and Gould, “Equal Pay Day: Gender pay gap hits historic low in 2024” — https://www.epi.org/blog/gender-pay-gap-2024/; New York State Department of Labor, “2026 Update: The Gender Wage Gap” — https://reports.dol.ny.gov/gwg/2026update/; Hoodline, “Hochul touts New York as pay gap champ, but ranking comes with asterisks,” March 2026 — https://hoodline.com/2026/03/hochul-touts-new-york-as-pay-gap-champ-but-ranking-comes-with-asterisks/; National Women’s Law Center, “July Jobs Report: Women Accounted for 100 Percent of the Labor Force Decline,” 2026 — https://nwlc.org/press-release/july-jobs-report-women-accounted-for-100-percent-of-the-labor-force-decline/; National Women’s Law Center, “May Jobs Report: Over 300K Women Have Left the Workforce in 2026” — https://nwlc.org/press-release/may-jobs-report-over-300k-women-have-left-the-workforce-in-2026/; CNBC, “Jobs report: Women accounted for almost all of August payroll gains,” 4 September 2026 — https://www.cnbc.com/2026/09/04/jobs-report-women-payrolls.html; Pew Research Center, “Federal workforce shrank 10% in Trump’s first year back in office,” 13 March 2026 — https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/03/13/federal-workforce-shrank-10-in-trumps-first-year-back-in-office/; The American Prospect, “Federal Job Cuts Hit Black Women Hard,” 24 April 2026 — https://prospect.org/2026/04/24/federal-job-cuts-hit-black-women-hard-unemployment-is-up/; Federal Register, “Rescission of Executive Order 11246 Implementing Regulations,” final rule, 21 August 2026, 91 FR 54444 — https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2026/08/21/2026-17114/rescission-of-executive-order-11246-implementing-regulations; Pinsent Masons, “EU Pay Transparency Directive: implementation across EU member states,” 2026 — https://www.pinsentmasons.com/out-law/guides/eu-pay-transparency-directive-eu-member-states; Bennedsen, Simintzi, Tsoutsoura and Wolfenzon, “Do Firms Respond to Gender Pay Gap Transparency?”, Journal of Finance, 2022 — https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.13136; CEPR VoxEU, “Pay transparency and its effect on the gender pay gap” — https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/pay-transparency-and-its-effect-gender-pay-gap; Blundell, Duchini, Simion and Turrell, “Pay Transparency and Gender Equality,” American Economic Journal: Economic Policy — https://aeturrell.com/research/articles/blundell-duchini-simion-turrell/Pay_Transparency_and_Gender_Equality.pdf; Arnold, Quach and Taska, “The Impact of Pay Transparency in Job Postings on the Labor Market” — https://darnold199.github.io/pay_transparency_draft.pdf; Ding, Jin, Ma, Xing and Yang, “Return to Office Mandates, Brain Drain and Gender Difference” — https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5031481; NPR, “From Oklahoma to Washington, daycare costs are soaring,” 8 August 2026 — https://www.npr.org/2026/08/08/nx-s1-5893817/childcare-costs-daycare-families-affordability-cost-of-living; Chmura Economics, “What is Happening to Women in the Labor Force?” — https://www.chmura.com/blog/what-is-happening-to-women-in-labor-force
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