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
