Global Policy Forum

Women still earn less than men for doing the same work around the United States, although the wage gap ranges from 27 cents on the dollar in Wyoming to 14 cents in the nation's capital, a report showed Wednesday. On average, women now earn 74 cents for each dollar men make, up from 60 cents two decades ago.

The nonprofit Institute for Women's Policy Research issued a report on the status of women across the United States, concluding that most states got "Cs" on the report card which it has put out every second year since 1996. "American women are on a slow and uneven road to equality," said Dr. Heidi Hartmann, who heads the nonpartisan research group, which also measured women's status in terms of poverty, health care, political representation and educational level.

Nowhere in the United States do women get equal pay with men, according to the report. The wage gap varies greatly across the country, it said. Women make 84 cents for every dollar men earn in Hawaii, and 80 cents in Maryland. At the other end of the scale, women in Louisiana and Utah get 65 cents, an increase of just five cents from the national average 20 years ago.

The report noted that the narrowing of the wage gap in recent years reflected a rise in women's earnings as well as a decline in men's real earnings. In only nine states did the wage gap between women and men narrow because the growth in women's earnings outpaced the growth in men's real earnings. The highest annual earnings for working women over $30,000 were reported in the District, Connecticut, Alaska and Maryland, while women's earnings were lowest in West Virginia and North Dakota coming in under $20,000.

STATE-TO-STATE DIFFERENCES

Hartmann said the gaping differences from state to state underscored the importance of public policy. "Sometimes you can walk across a state line to go from good to bad. New Jersey ranks among the top four states in protecting reproductive rights; drive across the bridge and you're in Pennsylvania, one of the 11 worst states. And women's median income plunges when you step across the state line from Maryland to West Virginia," she said.

The report noted that women remained "vastly underrepresented in the political system in every state." Three additional women senators and two new female governors were elected this month, but still, only 12 percent of the U.S. Senate, 5 of 50 governors, and about 22 percent of state legislators are women. In three states -- California, Kansas and Maine -- women have been elected to both Senate seats, but six states have never sent even one woman to Congress: Alaska, Delaware, Iowa, Mississippi, New Hampshire and Vermont, the report noted. "Women are making progress toward political equality, but at the current rate of change it will take over a century to complete their journey," said Dr. Amy Caiazza, the report's editor.

Women's health also varied greatly from state to state, the report found, noting that lung cancer affected women three times as much in Nevada as in its neighboring state of Utah, which has the lowest U.S. lung cancer death rate. Women also still had high rates of poverty -- 50 percent higher than men's -- and the hardest hit women were single mothers, Hartmann said. "More than four out of 10 single-mother families are struggling to survive below the poverty line. These women have largely been left out of the economic boom," she said.

Poverty among women varies greatly among the states, with poverty rates highest in New Mexico, the District of Columbia, Mississippi, Louisiana, West Virginia, Arkansas and New York. Poverty was lowest in Wisconsin, Maryland, Utah, Alaska, New Hampshire, Connecticut, Indiana, Delaware and Minnesota.

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