The Gender Pay Gap, Starring Meryl Streep’s Most Iconic Roles
Across 525 professions, including 9 portrayed by Streep’s characters,
women earned 20% less than men in 2016, and needed to work an additional
66 days to catch up, according to Care.com’s Think Tank.
WALTHAM, Mass.–(BUSINESS WIRE)–#20percentcounts–There’s a persistent pay gap that exists between working men and women
in our country, and sadly, it doesn’t appear to be going away anytime
soon. Men earn, on average, 20% more than women in the same profession,
which means that women would have to work, on average, an extra 66
business days each year in order to earn what a man in her
position made in 1 year. That’s the concept behind Equal
Pay Day: the date on which working women’s wages catch up to
what men in their profession earned the year prior. This year it falls
on April 4th.
Of course, some professions have a bigger pay gap than others. To best
illustrate this concept, the data scientists at Care.com’s
Think Tank enlisted a little help from everyone’s favorite living
Hollywood legend, Meryl Streep.
Using 9 of Streep’s iconic roles — ranging from chef, to lawyer, to
editor-in-chief — the data scientists at Care.com’s
Think Tank calculated each character’s projected salary, and
found how much less Meryl’s character would be paid than a man in the
same position. They then determined the ‘Equal Pay Day’ for
each character’s profession—i.e., how far into the next year she’d
need to work to earn the same as a man in her field.
Click
here for the complete study, which investigates the gender pay gap
across an additional 516 professions, complete
with an animated video and infographic.
Contacts
Care.com
Media:
Amanda McNamara
amanda.mcnamara@care.com
