Staggering gap

Gender pay deficit especially hits black women: study

PAY THE lady.

Highly educated women — especially women of color — earn far less than white men, sometimes more than 60% less, according to a city controller’s study.

The report released Tuesday — Equal Pay Day — showed that in careers where men traditionally dominate, such as financial management, the pay difference between white men and women is the greatest.

On average, white men who are financial managers make $224,842, while black women doing the same job are paid an average of $88,055 a year, the study found.

“The wage gaps this report reveals, particularly for women of color, are downright despicable, and they should serve as a clarion call for action,” Controller Scott Stringer said.

The findings coincide with data also released Tuesday from the Brookings Institution’s Hamilton Project that showed women overall now earn roughly 85% of what men pull in.

According to Stringer’s study, the wage gap for women who are software developers is less stark than for those in financial management. White women make 80% of what white men earn. Hispanic and Asian women take home about 70% of a white man’s salary. But there weren’t enough black women working as software developers in the study to draw any conclusions about pay.

In lower-paying, female-dominated fields, the gap was still smaller. For white and Asian female nurses, the trend goes the other way, barely, Stringer’s study found. They earn 8 cents and 4 cents, respectively, more per dollar than their white male counterparts.

Black female secretaries are the closest in earnings to white male secretaries, making only 2 cents less per dollar on average.

“Women power New York City, but pay equity remains a far too distant promise and pay discrimination continues to be all too real,” Stringer said.In the Brookings report, researchers found the difference between median hourly wages of men and women fell from about $9 per hour in 1979 to $3 per hour in 2016.