When, during her acceptance speech for the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress, Patricia Arquette said, “It’s our [women’s] time to have wage equality, once and for all and equal rights for women in the United States of America,” the crowd went wild. Then the controversy kicked in, as people dissected her language for nuance, the way they might parse the State of the Union. But, here are some facts: The median earnings of women still trail those of men, according to the most recent data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Overall, women earn 82.1% of what men do, and the pay gap widens as women get older and enter the child-bearing years. While young women aged 16 to 24 earn 92% of men that age, women aged 25 to 54 earn just 81% of their male counterparts. Women’s wages, however, have shown some improvement. At every level of education, the boost to women’s weekly earnings has significantly outpaced those of men. And overall, the gender pay gap has been narrowing. In 1979, women made less than 65 percent of what men did, but as you can see from this graph, women are catching up, albeit slowly. Still, there remains a significant gender pay gap, and some fields have bigger gaps than others. Fortune examined data from the BLS Current Population Survey and compared median weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers by occupation and gender, excluding occupations that lacked gender-specific data, and sorted to find the specific job types in which the gender pay gap was largest. These are the 20 with the biggest gaps. Interestingly, half of them are white-collar jobs, including the one with the biggest pay gap. What’s the cause? Countless studies have been devoted to parsing the data. A variety of explanations have been posited, ranging from the choices that women make — to work fewer hours, choose lower-paying professions — to women’s negotiating skills to employers’ tendency to “disproportionately reward” long hours in offices, which tends to penalize women with care-giving responsibilities. While the debate is likely to rage on, it’s clear that gender-based pay gaps exist in most occupations. Here are the 20 jobs that have the biggest gender wage gaps. Personal Financial Advisors Wage gap: 61.3% Women’s median weekly earnings: $1,004 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,637 Physicians and surgeons Wage gap: 62.2% Women’s median weekly earnings: $1,246 Men’s median weekly earnings: $2,002 Securities, commodities, and financial service sales agents Wage gap: 65.1% Women’s median weekly earnings: $883 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,356 Financial managers Wage gap: 67.4% Women’s median weekly earnings: $1,127 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,671 First-line supervisors of housekeeping and janitorial workers Wage gap: 69.4% Women’s median weekly earnings: $500 Men’s median weekly earnings: $720 Sales and related workers, all other Wage gap: 70% Women’s median weekly earnings: $664 Men’s median weekly earnings: $949 First-line supervisors of production and operating workers Wage gap: 70.0% Women’s median weekly earnings: $659 Men’s median weekly earnings: $942 Retail salespersons Wage gap: 70.3% Women’s median weekly earnings: $491 Men’s median weekly earnings: $698 Other teachers and instructors Wage gap: 70.5% Women’s median weekly earnings: $772 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,096 Inspectors, testers, sorters, samplers, and weighers Wage gap: 70.5% Women’s median weekly earnings: $578 Men’s median weekly earnings: $820 Marketing and sales managers Wage gap: 70.8% Women’s median weekly earnings: $1,150 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,624 Human resource managers Wage gap: 71.2% Women’s median weekly earnings: $1,300 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,827 Police and sheriff’s patrol officers Wage gap: 71.2% Women’s median weekly earnings: $743 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,043 Production, planning, and expediting clerks Wage gap: 72.1% Women’s median weekly earnings: $738 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,024 Bartenders Wage gap: 72.4% Women’s median weekly earnings: $459 Men’s median weekly earnings: $634 Human resources workers Wage gap: 72.6% Women’s median weekly earnings: $912 Men’s median weekly earnings: $1,257 Recreation and fitness workers Wage gap: 72.8% Women’s median weekly earnings: $521 Men’s median weekly earnings: $716 Production workers, all other Wage gap: 72.8% Women’s median weekly earnings: $492 Men’s median weekly earnings: $676 Real estate brokers and sales agents Wage gap: 73.3% Women’s median weekly earnings: $726 Men’s median weekly earnings: $991 Source
