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77 cents on the dollar. It’s a statistic that most of us have heard by now, maybe from a speech by President Obama, or from a news source or an advocacy group. We’re usually told it in this way: that for every dollar an average man earns, an average woman only earns 77 cents. And it’s true – reports like this one from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show us that median earnings for women are lower than those for men, across the entire economy. The 77 percent corresponds to full-time workers, who make up about three quarters of American women workers (more than 85 percent of male workers are full-time). One more thing: that 77 percent figure is a 2009 measurement – today’s wage gap is 81 percent, which is a little better, but not very different.

So why is there such a large gap, anyway? To start, let’s look at a few sets of statistics. The first is the earnings gap itself, over the past 30 years. Take a look at this chart, from the BLS report:

The trend is generally upward from year to year, from only 62 cents on the dollar in 1979 to the current 81. In 1979, there was another gap between men and women: the percentage of the population with college degrees. Interestingly, the degree gap and the wage gap in 1979 were nearly identical, with less than a percentage point between them. Today, though, the degree gap is a tiny 2 percent, while the wage gap has only half closed. A graph comparing the two measures yields an interesting picture:

The wage gap and the degree gap closed at about the same pace through the 1980s, but the wage gap peaked in 1993 at 77 percent, not returning to that level until 2002 – when it dipped yet again. What’s happening here? Let’s look at the picture another way, by graphing men’s and women’s earnings (in 2012 dollars) separately, with a 5-year moving average.

From 1979 to 2012, men’s wages haven’t changed a lot – but that isn’t to say they didn’t move around in between the two endpoint years. Women’s wages, on the other hand, look a lot like the wage gap graph: steadily rising, but not always at the same rate. In fact, the moving averages show two plateaus, in the mid-1990s and in the mid-2000s. These correspond to two dips in men’s wages – and they also appear at the tail end of economic recessions (a lagging indicator), the first in the early 1990s and the second after the famous dot-com bubble.

These facts tell us an important story: that the work to close the wage gap, a decades-long effort, has made strong progress – but that progress is fragile, offset by economic downturns and other outside factors. That’s why we need to keep fighting to make and keep workplaces equal and open to all, through measures like access to childcare and parental or family leave time. That’s why at Able we support our clients, especially those women who are raising families alone, with the supportive services they need to secure quality jobs, and why we advocate for each of our clients as they navigate the job search and the first days on the job – we believe in working to end issues such as the pay gap, and we do our part to make that vision a reality.