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Industry groups around the country marked Equal Pay Day on Tuesday to call attention to the gap between women’s earnings and men’s earnings, particularly in the banking and real estate fields.
Equal Pay Day represents how far into 2019 U.S. women must work to earn what men earned in the previous year. As the pay gap has slowly shrunk, the date has been moved up from April 19 to April 2 in recent years.
A 2015 study by the Commercial Real Estate Women (CREW) Network found that in America, women experience a 23.3 percent gap between their pay and those of male colleagues doing comparable work. The gap starts growing at mid-career and widens to 29.8 percent at the executive level, the report found. By area of the industry, that broke down to a 18.4 percent gender pay gap among asset managers, a 33.8 percent gap among brokers, a 25.9 percent gap among developers and a 16.7 percent gap in real estate finance, all in favor of men.
A 2018 update to the study noted that among the causes identified by recent study are: being passed over for promotions, fear of discrimination for negotiating early- and mid-career salary offers, working less or taking time off from work to raise children, a lack of transparency on compensation and the compounded effect of many causes over a woman’s career putting them at a lower starting place for executive salary negotiations.
“There are nuances, gray areas and many other aspects that determine pay. For example, education level and experience are two key factors that impact salary scale,” CREW CEO Wendy Mann wrote in a statement on the organization’s website. “However, when you have a man and a woman who are equally qualified individuals with the same years of experience doing the exact same job, it seems to be a no brainer that they should be earning the same amount.”
The most recent data from the U.S. Census Bureau showed American women in construction experienced a relatively small gender pay gap in median earnings – 7.8 percent as of 2009. The same data show women in financial services experienced a much larger gap of 29.5 percent. Investment firm Arjuna Capital released a study on Monday grading large corporations on gender pay gap issues, including salary transparency. Citigroup received an A, Bank of New York Mellon JP Morgan and Wells Fargo received Bs, Bank of America received a C, and Goldman Sachs, Citizens Financial Group and Hartford Financial Services received Fs.
