Female workers in the New Orleans-Metairie metro area ages 16 and up earned 78% as much as their male counterparts in 2019, according to the latest gender wage gap study released June 2 by the Pew Research Center.
Women in the metro area average an annual salary of $39,900, compared to male workers who average $50,900, the study said.
That percentage ranks the New Orleans area No. 169 among the 250 metro areas studied by Pew Research Center, and it is lower than the national average of 82%.
The Houma-Thibodaux region had the lowest percentage in the nation at 58%. Additional Louisiana metro area rankings include Monroe at 69% (No. 241) and Baton Rouge at 67% (No. 245). Napa, California, had the highest percentage gender wage gap at 98%.
Pew also ran the numbers for specific age ranges in the New Orleans-Metairie metro area:
- Women ages 16-29 earned 88% as much as males, while the national average was 93%.
- Women ages 30-49 earned 77% as much as men, while the national average was 82%.
- Women 50 and older earned 71% as much as men, while the national average was 76%.
The Pew Research Center published an online pay gap calculator for 250 metropolitan cities by analyzing median annual earnings of full-time, year-round workers, generated from a combination of sources including the University of Minnesota’s Integrated Public Use Microdata Series, Current Population Survey, the U.S. Census Bureau and the U.S. Office of Management and Budget, among others. The study looked at factors including educational attainment, occupational differences, work experience, and ongoing wage disparity.
“Even though women have increased their presence in higher-paying jobs traditionally dominated by men, such as professional and managerial positions, women as a whole continue to be overrepresented in lower-paying occupations relative to their share of the workforce,” says the Pew study. “Men in the United States have long earned more than women, on average, but this gender wage gap has slowly narrowed over time. This interactive empowers readers to investigate the size of the gap in metropolitan areas and how it’s changed since 2000.”
New Orleans is doing better than what the Pew stats reflected in 2000 when female workers made up 71% of their male counterparts.