Women Now Make 78% As Much As Men - And That's The Smallest The Pay Gap Has Ever Been
The Census Bureau reports that in 2013, women earned a little more than $0.78 for every dollar earned by men, up ever so slightly from $0.77 in 2012.
To determine this ratio, the Census Bureau looked at the median income of male and female full-time workers over the age of 15.
Despite being the slimmest wage gap on record, the Census Bureau called the 2013 ratio "not statistically different" from the prior year.
Nonetheless, the New York Times' Claire Cain Miller writes that "the news is better than it might seem" because the results are skewed toward a larger pay gap by the outsized presence of the baby boomer generation in the data.
This is because the pay gap is thought to increase as people age and because women of younger generations are likely to be better educated than those of older generations.
At the Wall Street Journal, Eric Morath notes that 2013 was the first time the gender pay gap went down by more than a penny since the recession started in 2007.
While the gender pay ratio has increased greatly since 1960, when women made a $0.61 for every dollar men made, it has since 2001 vacillated between $0.76 and its 2013 high of $0.78.