Today is Equal Pay Day, an observance during Women’s History Month that highlights salary discrepancies based on gender and other demographics. Researchers with the Cornell Industrial and Labor Relations Co-Lab in Buffalo used the opportunity to present their findings from a focus group study of women in Erie County.
Across industry and across education levels, women earn about $2.74 less per hour on average than male counterparts locally. The study finds the gap actually widens for those with more advanced degrees.
It’s something that ILR Buffalo Co-Lab Director Cathy Creighton said women in the groups knew, but often don’t have the space to talk about.
“We're also just told to, like, put your head down and grind it out and get through it. And that you better pull yourself up by your bootstraps, those kinds of things we're told over and over," said Creighton. "So when women can come together and say, ‘Hey, I'm not alone in this. There's other people experiencing exactly these kinds of situations,’ that's really empowering for women.”
While pay transparency laws and corporate accountability are key tools in bridging the gender pay gap, Creighton said so are things like expanded childcare.
“It's very, very difficult to even get to work without having adequate childcare," said Creighton. "How do you get to work? How do you stay at work? How do you do your job in a way that's not distracting you from doing your job when you have inadequate child care? It's not really possible.”
Also coinciding with Equal Pay Day, state Comptroller Tom DiNapoli released a separate report detailing a statewide look at gender discrepancies in pay. It found that women in New York made, on average, only 87 cents for every dollar men make. That makes the state's gap the fourth smallest in the nation.
DiNapoli's report utilized U.S. Census Bureau data from 2023, the most recently available year.
Cornell ILR’s study was funded by a grant from the Erie County Commission on the Status of Women.
