Where do women outearn men?

Written by Technically Media CEO Chris Wink, Technical.ly’s Culture Builder newsletter features tips on growing powerful teams and dynamic workplaces. Below is the latest edition we published. Sign up to get the next one.

Young women in Washington DC on average outearn men. In Baltimore and Philadelphia, that total is up to 95% and rising.

All told, in 16 of 250 US metro areas, women under the age of 30 earn the same amount as or more than their male counterparts, according to a recent Pew Research Center analysis of Census Bureau data. Those metros account for nearly one in five working women in the country. Here’s Pew’s data.

The success for women in those cities to combat a persistent gender wage gap fits several themes. For one, the US Northeast as a whole has seen progress for women earners, outpacing other regions in the country. The average gap remains largest in the Midwest, according to a new analysis from Pew. In Milwaukee the number is 89%, and in Pittsburgh it is just 83%.

Nationally, women earn 82 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, up from 57 cents in 1973. This new analysis points to uneven progress.

Those Northeast cities, DC in particular, have gobs of women in professional jobs — especially those who are climbing early. Women are better represented in fields that are full of high-income earners, like tech and others. (Find Technical.ly’s series “Who Makes $200K” for more.) Women have outpaced men in earning college degrees, and it seems that educational attainment is contributing to this progress for young women. That’s the good news.

Since at least the 1980s, one of the critical components of workplace discrimination has been the gender wage gap. Beyond its social justice importance, the wage gap suggests the American economy is missing out on a crucial labor force. Explanations for the gap have ranged widely. The most worrying was outright discrimination. As labor law and social norms have advanced in the last 50 years, other more insidious obstacles remain, like network effect.

More recently, Harvard University labor economist Claudia Goldin introduced in a new book the concept of “greedy jobs,” to refer to the trend that highly compensated jobs correlate with ones that require lots of hours. That wasn’t always the case: In the 1980s, the highest-earning American men worked fewer hours than lower earners; by 2005, the opposite was true. Since women disproportionately lead childcare and other household work, this has proved a stumbling block for progress. Today, one in five fathers work at least 50 hours a week but just 6% of mothers do, according to a study that blames this for a chunk of the persistent gender wage gap.

Remote work, flexible tech jobs and modernizing concepts of entrepreneurship may all be tools for continuing progress. The success of young women in high-performing economic regions is a welcome sign. Parenthood may remain a lingering obstacle, so employers would be wise to consider how to become more welcoming for mothers in particular.