Recently, the National Women’s Law Center presented a new study done on the state of gender Pay gap in the United States across different sectors. The study based on a review of data of over 500000 employees in 50 states showed that women still receive 82% of the wages paid to men for similar work.

The research also reveals that the wage gap is worse for women of colour since black women get only 63 cents and Latin women 55 cents for every dollar earned by the white, non-Hispanic men. The report also reveal that the gender pay gap increases over the course of women’s working lives with the difference being most pronounced at senior management and leadership levels.

Scholars revealed various factors that help susta in the pl gap such as occupational separation and discrimination besides, women get stuck more into home- care giving duties than males. The research also noted that the overall pay in the sectors where women have historically worked is lower than in sectors that men prefer, for example, education, health, technology and the financial sector.

The report’ lead author Dr. Emily Chen confirmed that there is still a long way to go but the only solution is to require system change. These results leave no doubt that even today’s generation has a long way to go before women receive fair treatment in terms of wages, as she said: It is therefore important for policymakers, employers and society at large to set measures to ensure eradication of these differences.

This study has prompted several leading women’s organizations to demand that the government take the following measures: increasing the oversight of existing equal pay regulations; enact requirements for pay disclosure; and expanding the effort to alleviate the problem of sexual categories segmentation through education and training programs.

The release if this study is timely considering the fact that is falls on Equal Pay Day – a day that symbolises how far into the year women have to work hard to earn what their male counterparts earned in the previous year. Activists believe that this new data will reignite push for non-discrimination in terms of remunerations for women in the work place and economic empowerment for women in the labor market.