The Gender Pay Gap Is Actually Getting Worse for Millennial Women

Women between 25 and 34 years old are slipping when it comes to pay equality with men, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show. In that age group, of mostly millennials, women made just under 89 cents on a man’s dollar in 2016, down from a high of 92 cents in 2011. That means the gender gap in median weekly earnings is the widest in seven years.

Young women’s experience stands in contrast to that of their older counterparts, who are starting from a lower level but continue to creep toward equality. The dip is surprising, given that millennial women are increasingly highly-educated relative to their male peers. Part of the explanation could be that in recent years, a big chunk of gender-wage parity had come because men’s wages weren’t doing well. “Men just had been losing ground, and instead are doing better now,” said Heidi Shierholz, senior economist at the Economic Policy Institute in Washington and a former Labor Department chief economist during Barack Obama’s administration.