Study: Albany women’s wages go far

Critics say report doesn’t capture the whole picture

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[The Albany area] hits that combination of a lot of women ... making substantial livings while at the same time having a relatively low cost of living in the area.” Kali Mcfadden, senior analyst at Magnify Money

Women’s wages go furthest in Hartford, Connecticut, when compared to the wages of women living in the 100 largest metropolitan areas in the country. Runners up are Poughkeepsie and Albany, according to a new study from Magnify Money, a branch of Lending Tree, which provides research and tools for personal finance.

Women in Albany on average make about $54,600 per year. These earnings cover 176 percent of living costs, the study found. That’s about the same amount women make on average in New York City and almost $7,000 less than women make on average in Boston, both major metropolitan areas where the cost of living is much higher than the Albany area.

Mcallen, Texas and Miami and Orlando in Florida rank as the worst metro areas for women’s wages, the study found.

“[The Albany area] hits that combination of a lot of women ... making substantial livings while at the same time having a relatively low cost of living in the area,” said Kali Mcfadden, the senior analyst at Magnify Money.

One idea of why this may be true is because in the Capital Region many women are employed by the state, work in health care or in education, which are all industries that tend to have labor unions that can bargain for higher wages and better benefit packages than non-union jobs, said Eliot Cresswell, a policy analyst at the Workforce Development Institute.

“Government, health care and education are dominant sectors, and these occupations haven’t been historically dominated necessarily by men, so there is a little more space for women in those roles,” Cresswell said. “Still, the men out-earn women in most of those sectors.”

Similarly, Mcfadden noted that there are many professional and well-educated women work

ing in government in the Albany area.

The study’s research pulled data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s median earnings for fulltime workers and data from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Living Wage calculator to determine where women’s paychecks went the furthest.

The Workforce Development Institute did a similar analysis for the Albany-schenectadytroy metropolitan area and found that only for some women working in certain areas with certain jobs did their wages stretch as far as Magnify Money’s study claims.

In particular, education level makes a big difference. For women and men who don’t have a high school diploma, all but one industry sector— utilities— do not pay enough to make a living wage in Albany.

“Anybody with less than a high school degree is going to struggle to compete on wages (compared to) folks with an associate degree, bachelor’s degree and beyond, no matter what your gender,” Cresswell said.

Women are more likely to work part time, especially this year, given the pressures of the pandemic, said Mcfadden from Magnify Money.

The study is specific to women who work full time, so was not able to capture the experiences of all women.

Wednesday is Equal Pay Day. This date marks how far into the new year women have to work to earn what men earned the previous year. Last year, Equal Pay Day fell on March 31, meaning the pay gap is decreasing, though there is still a far way to go.

This year, after the pandemic crippled industries where women make up the majority of its employees and schools and day care centers closed, meaning women were disproportionately burdened by child care responsibilities, shrinking the pay gap seems more important than in years past.

“Only time will tell if [the pandemic] really exacerbates the pay gap in the data. We will have to take a step back and look at this years down the line,” said Sarah Foster, an analyst at Bankrate, a personal finance website.

“We’ve seen a lot of the data get skewed as far as wage gains,” Foster said. “The monthly employment report of the Labor Department last year showed that wages were increasing at a really fast clip, but that was just because a lot of these lower wage employees had lost their jobs.”

The same illusion could happen with women’s wages, Foster said, which will be important to keep in mind when documenting the pay gap.

K&A Engineering Consulting, a utilities consulting firm in White Plains, took a proactive approach this year by examining 30 positions in their company to see if men and women in the same roles were being paid equally. They found 26 of their positions paying equally. For the four positions that didn’t, the company made adjustments to reduce the gaps for the women in those roles.

“It is important to us at K&A to ensure our employees are happy and treated fairly,” said Purna Kharel, K&A Engineering Consulting P.C. president and CEO, in a statement. “We are proud to have made these adjustments to create greater gender equity in our workforce, and we will continue to assess our company to make sure all our practices set our employees up for success.”