It is a well-known fact that women are the most educated workers in California and the rest of the United States. Many women go through extreme lengths to acquire several degrees or to move up the educational ladder to see a corresponding effect on their career and their pay checks.
Unfortunately, one CNBC article published in 2019 showed that while women are getting more degrees than men at every level, this does not reflect in their salaries. In fact, when both women and men have bachelor’s degrees, the woman still earns only 74 cents for every dollar the man makes. When neither party have a degree, the woman makes 78 cents for every dollar the man makes.
The argument for why women often lag behind men in earning potential is that women tend to steer clear of STEM and finances, where earning potential is highest. However, the study showed that even for women surgeons and physicians, the wage gap between what they received versus men were wide. Other careers with the biggest gaps included real estate brokers, lawyers, finance managers, financial analysts and operations managers. Even so, the general recommendation is that more women need to move into STEM and finance to help level the playing field.
A December 2018 article published by CNN tells a similar story from a slightly different angle. They showed that the higher-paying the jobs were, the wider the pay gap for women. The professionals they identified as having wider pay gaps included CEOs, doctors and lawyers. Financial advisers also fared especially bad, earning only 44 cents for every dollar their male colleagues did.
This, too, discredits the argument that women are losing out on earning potential primarily because they are not pursuing higher-paying jobs. Instead, one of the biggest driving factors is that women are less likely than men to negotiate more aggressively for a higher salary.