Key Points

• Four in 10 self-identified women workers in the U.S., and half of all female workers of color, currently make less than $15 per hour, according to a new report by Oxfam.
• “The jobs that women hold, and especially women of color hold, in this country are overwhelmingly very low-wage jobs,” a labor history professor says.
• “Fifteen dollars an hour isn’t even close to what is a livable wage these days,” she adds.

The gender wage gap has long been a problem: In 2020, women’s median hourly earnings were 84% of men’s, according to the Pew Research Center, meaning the gap was 16%. The persistence of the gender wage gap is, in part, because many women earn especially low wages.

Four in 10 self-identified women workers in the U.S. currently make less than $15 per hour, according to a new report by Oxfam. Half of women of color make less than $15 per hour.

“Fifteen dollars an hour isn’t even close to what is a livable wage these days,” says Ileen DeVault, professor of labor history at Cornell University.

Indeed, in 2019, the living wage for a family of four was $16.54 per hour, according to calculations by MIT. That’s before taxes and before inflation rates spiked this year, bringing the cost of food up 8.8% year-over-year and the cost of energy including gas and electricity up 32%, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.

That so many women make such low wages is “disgusting,” says Erica Smiley, executive director of workers’ rights organization Jobs With Justice...

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