With President John F. Kennedy’s 1963 Equal Pay Law, it became illegal for employers to pay women lower rates for performing the same jobs as men. At that time, women earned 59 percent of men’s wages, according to NBC. And while we’ve seen an improvement since then, we haven’t reached parity. It’s generally reported that in the United States, women earn 80 cents for every dollar a man makes.
But the truth is that for many women, this number is far from reality. When you take into account ethnicity and location, you’ll find that for women of color – particularly Latinas, Native Americans, and African Americans – that number is even lower. In some instances, Latinas lag behind every other demographic.
Though Equal Pay Day takes place on April 4 – which represents how much longer women would would have to work to catch up to men’s salary from the previous year – it’s an ongoing conversation we need to have if we’re ever going to reach equality. With that in mind, we dug into the National Women’s Law Center state-by-state map that shows what women earn compared to white men across the United States. We looked at 11 states, 10 of which have the largest populations of Latinos in the United States as well as the state that comes closest to paying Latinas a fair wage. Check out how the gender pay gap affects Latinas in the US:
1
California
2
Texas
3
Florida
4
New York
5
Illinois
6
Arizona
7
New Jersey
New Jersey is the state where Latinas are paid the lowest wage.
8
Colorado
9
New Mexico
10
Georgia
11
Vermont
Vermont is the state that pays Latinas the fairest wage.