California women make 84 cents for every $1 men do, report says

Despite all the recent focus on female empowerment and “leaning in” at work, California women are still paid just 84 cents for every $1 paid to men in the state.

In the Golden State, a woman who works a full-time job earns, on average, $41,956 a year, compared with $50,139 for a man who works full time, according to an analysis from the nonprofit advocacy group the National Partnership for Women & Families. That’s a wage gap of $8,183 per year between the genders.

Collectively, California women lose out on a total of nearly $37.7 billion annually, the report said.

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Minority women struggle even more: Black women in California are paid 63 cents for every dollar paid to white males, while Latinas are paid just 44 cents, the report said.

Debra L. Ness, president of the advocacy group, likened the existing pay gap to “‘Mad Men’-era wage policies.”

“When women and their families lose thousands of dollars in critical income each year, they have significantly less money to spend on food, gas, rent and other basic necessities,” Ness said in a statement.

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That money would make real, consequential impacts on the lives of women in the state, she said. If that gap were eliminated, each California female who worked full-time could afford to pay for an extra 1.1 years of food, pay the mortgage and power bills for an extra four months or buy about 2,100 extra gallons of gas.

“These basic necessities would be especially important for the 29% of California’s women-headed households currently living below the poverty line,” the report said.

California, it turns out, is actually ahead of the national average. Nationwide, women who work full time get paid only 77 cents for every dollar paid to their male counterparts. The divide between men and women -- which is closing at a rate of less than half a cent per year since 1963 -- will not be closed for another 50 years, the report said.

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