WASHINGTON—For the second year in a row, the equal pay gap between working men and working women widened in 2025, the National Partnership for Women and Families and the Economic Policy Institute reported.
As a result, March 26, 2026, was Equal Pay Day, the day when the median pay for a working woman for all of 2025 finally matched that of her male counterpart. Controlling for race and ethnicity, the gap was 19%, wider than the 18% figure of 2024.
EPI said the gap widened due to the GOP Donald Trump’s attacks on workers, which hit female workers hard and especially hit female workers of color.
Those attacks included Trump’s mass firings of federal workers, his abolition of diversity, equity, and inclusion programs—and the private sector’s adoption of that dictate, voluntarily or under threat—and his reversal of Biden administration policies raising the wages of child care and home care providers.
Those actions disproportionately hit working women, EPI noted. The gap widened because while the median wage for working men rose 3.7% in 2025, the median wage for working women stayed flat.
A National Partnership chart also listed the pay gap by states and congressional districts, and it showed a further breakdown. In most states, the pay gap is wider in rural areas than in urban ones.
For example, the pay gap in Alabama was 69 cents on the dollar, already huge. It was 77 cents on the dollar in the state’s most urban 7th Congressional District, which includes Montgomery and Birmingham.
And the gap was 77 cents on the dollar in California, but 87 cents in three congressional districts in the Los Angeles area and 91 cents in one San Diego district. Indiana’s statewide pay gap was 73 cents on the dollar, but in the Indianapolis-based 7th District, it was 85 cents.
“Women are paid less than men due to discrimination associated with occupational segregation, devaluation of women’s work, and societal norms, much of which takes root well before women enter the labor market,” EPI analysts reported.
“The wage gap is smallest among lower-wage workers, partly because the minimum wage creates a wage floor. At the 10th percentile, women are paid $1.39 (or 9.1%) less an hour than men, while the wage gap at the middle is $4.12 an hour (or 14.7%). Women at the 90th percentile of their wage distribution are paid $14.05 (or 19.6%) less an hour than men at the 90th percentile of the wage distribution.”
And women cannot educate their way out of the pay gap, due to historic and societal norms, EPI said. They include occupational segregation of women into lower-paying jobs and devaluation of women’s work, both of which have been baked into society for decades.
“States can narrow the gender pay gap with policies that guarantee access to paid family and medical leave, mandate pay transparency, raise the minimum wage, and make it easier for workers to form unions,” EPI said.
But legislation to achieve these goals is marooned in the Republican-led Congress, while the GOP Trump regime has been rolling back equal pay regulations that the predecessor Democratic Obama and Biden administrations enacted, the National Partnership said.
We hope you appreciated this article. At People’s World, we believe news and information should be free and accessible to all, but we need your help. Our journalism is free of corporate influence and paywalls because we are totally reader-supported. Only you, our readers and supporters, make this possible. If you enjoy reading People’s World and the stories we bring you, please support our work by donating or becoming a monthly sustainer today. Thank you!
CONTRIBUTOR
MOST POPULAR TODAY
Trump’s catalog of constitutional crimes: Long and getting longer
The other ‘lizard people’: Why the Epstein files are shattering global theory
As Iran war rages, Netanyahu builds ‘Greater Israel’ from Palestinian and Lebanese land
The Case of the Hollywood 10: Movie moguls launch blacklist in 1947
Sixty monuments under fire: The U.S.-Israeli assault on Iran’s cultural memory