The 10 Jobs With The Biggest Gender Wage Gap

Today is Equal Pay Day, the day of the year when the typical female worker finally catches up to the wages the average male worker made last year. Women make 77 cents for every dollar earned by men, and though that gap has shrunk since President John F. Kennedy signed the Equal Pay Act in 1963, progress has stalled in recent years even among efforts to keep closing it.

Women across industries are paid less than men who do the same work, but in some industries, the gap is particularly large. As the chart from Sarah Jane Glynn at the Center for American Progress shows, women in financial industries, marketing, and education administration face pay gaps even larger than the national average. These are the 10 jobs with the biggest gender wage gaps:

As Glynn notes, women earn more than men in just seven of the 534 occupations listed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and those seven jobs account for just three percent of the female workforce. The gender wage gap costs the average woman more than $430,000 over her working career, enough money to feed a family of four for 37 years.

The persistence of the pay gap — at its current rate of closure, it won’t close fully for 45 years — has sparked calls for the Paycheck Fairness Act, which would strengthen anti-discrimination laws and levy heavy fines on employers who don’t pay women equal wages. The Act received a vote in the Senate last year but was filibustered by Republicans.