‘We just keep being the worst’: Utah again listed last for gender pay gap
SALT LAKE CITY (ABC4) — Dead last, again. Another new study lists Utah as the worst state in the nation when it comes to the gender wage gap.
A MarketWatch study published earlier this month dug through recent U.S. Census data and found that women in the Beehive State earn 73.1% of what men make on average.
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Kolene Anderson, the associate director for the Utah Women and Leadership Project, said the finding is legitimate and rhymes with similar studies from her organization and other publications.
“We just keep being the worst in the nation,” Anderson said. “The number is not moving.”
Utah has held this bottom-of-the-pack position for years in several annual reports. Meanwhile, the national pay equity gap, according to MarketWatch, has women earning about 82% of what men make — a figure that’s roughly 10% narrower than Utah’s wage gap.
“We’ve got a long way to go to be at the national average for the gender wage gap, yet that shouldn’t be our end goal,” Anderson said.
Why is Utah last?
Hailey Neff, a member of the MarketWatch research team, said that her organization’s study doesn’t give a precise reason as to why Utah is in last place.
Even so, she suggested that it could perhaps be linked to the influence of the Utah-based Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which has traditionally encouraged women to stay home and care for children.
“Even if you really aren’t super religious or you are not Mormon in Utah, all of those cultural things are still around you and it permeates the expectations for women,” she said.
Parenthood can have a big impact on wages for mothers and fathers, but men tend to stay in the workforce and see increasingly higher earnings, the MarketWatch study noted.
In Utah, state data show that mothers participate in the workforce at rates between 52% and 75%, depending on the ages of their children. Meanwhile, men hold a labor force participation rate of about 77%.
According to the Utah Women and Leadership Project, Utah women have high rates of workforce participation up until age 25, but then they fall below the national average until they reach their 50s.
Anderson agreed that cultural issues play a role in the wage gap, but she noted that the issue is complex and involves various factors, such as the state’s low rates of high educational attainment, the sky-high cost of child care, and a lack of state legislation designed to boost pay equity.
“All of these things are intertwined and contribute to the gender wage gap,” she said.
A closer look at the findings
The MarketWatch study said that the gender pay gap is most pronounced at the lower end of the educational attainment scale, with women without a high school diploma making far less than their male counterparts.
However, for women with a graduate or professional degree, the pay gap narrows, especially in fields related to the media, liberal arts, healthcare, or social services. Large pay gaps persist in traditionally male-dominated fields, such as law, sales and transportation.
But the gender wage gap affects different women in different ways. According to a Pew Research study, Black women and Hispanic women earn 70% and 65%, respectively, of what the average white American man makes.
Looking forward
The MarketWatch study highlights that the national gender pay gap has narrowed in recent decades, shrinking by nearly 40% between 1960 and 2022.
This has happened as more women are participating in the workforce, achieving advanced degrees and working for businesses that actively encourage them to apply for higher-paying positions.
Signs that Utah is working to narrow the gap include Gov. Spencer Cox’s returnship initiative, which aims to provide meaningful professional opportunities to workers re-entering the workforce. Many of these workers are women.
Still, Anderson said that many employers in Utah don’t acknowledge all the work women do during their years at home and don’t pay them accordingly for their experience once they return to the workplace.
As for the Utah legislature, Anderson said that many people in positions of power either don’t think the gender wage gap is a real problem or are reluctant to address it.
“We’re slow on that, to be willing to talk about it,” she said.
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