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Equal pay may seem a distant dream we won't reach for hundreds of years, but for women just starting out in the workplace, the news is bright in certain parts. A new Pew Research Center analysis, which pored over Census Bureau stats from 2015 to 2019, finds that in 22 metropolitan areas across the US, women ages 16 to 29 working full time claim the same median annual earnings, or more, than men in the same age bracket—including in New York City and the District of Columbia, where paychecks of women from that demographic are 102% that of the guys'. Typically, women that age make 93% of what their male counterparts do—while women across all age groups make 82% of what men make, per the Washington Post.
Stanford sociologist Marianne Cooper tells Axios that the cities where women are doing especially well in terms of wages boast jobs that require higher education—"and women have been earning more college degrees than men for decades," the outlet notes. So can we expect women in those metros to continue to outpace men in their paychecks? It's unclear, Cooper says, explaining that slower promotion rates for women, combined with the fact that their salaries often take a hit when they start having kids, may help erase that edge over the long haul. "Women suffer a penalty when they become a mom," Pew senior researcher Richard Fry concurs, per the Post. Here, the 10 cities where things look especially good right now for younger women's paychecks:
- Wenatchee, Wash.; 120%
- Morgantown, W.Va.; 114%
- Barnstable Town, Mass.; 112%
- Gainesville, Fla.; 110%
- Naples, Fla.; 108%
- San Diego; 105%
- Yuba City, Calif.; 105%
- New York; 102%
- Washington, DC; 102%
- San Angelo, Texas; 102%