Seattle’s still-widening pay gap between working women and men is the largest in any American big city, but it isn’t the broadest in Washington state.
Men earn $25,000 more than their women counterparts, according to a Seattle Times analysis of recently released census data on the annual median pay for full-time workers.
As the world marks International Women’s Day on Friday, Seattle women working full time earn on average about 78 cents for every dollar paid to men — a decline from 80 cents to the dollar a decade ago.
Much of that disparity can be laid at the feet of the city’s high-paying tech industry, in which major players have been frequently accused of sexism in hiring and promotion and where men remain overrepresented in the most lucrative positions. As of 2020, the median annual income for a Seattle woman in a computer and mathematical occupation was about $103,000, while men in the same industry earned $133,000.
Corporate pledges and a purported emphasis on diversity, equity and inclusion, or DEI, haven’t closed the gap, said Trish Millines Dziko, co-founder and executive director of Technology Access Foundation, a not-for-profit agency working to raise the representation of underserved communities in the tech sector.
“It’s clear that companies don’t really value women, even though most of them profess to via their DEI work and annual celebration of Women’s History Month,” Millines Dziko said.
In recent years, state lawmakers have pushed a bevy of reforms meant to address the pay gap, sexism in hiring and advancement, and barriers facing women looking to break into better-paying industries dominated by men. Discrimination persists.
“You know, we can explain away a lot and there’s a lot we cannot explain away — and that is discrimination,” said state Rep. Tana Senn, D-Mercer Island, prime sponsor of Washington’s Equal Pay Opportunity Act in 2018, which prohibits employers from discriminating in compensation and career advancement opportunities against similarly employed employees.
“As much progress as we have made in equity and equality and awareness of inequalities, there are still places where you will still find bias and therefore unequal pay.”
Over a decade to 2022, Seattle’s gap has nearly doubled, accelerating in the last five years, even as wages overall increased.
As median wages for women grew 44% in this period, men’s wages grew 46% and the gap expanded by more than 50% — more than double the rate of increase during the preceding five years.
The data echoes findings the state Employment Security Department released last August that showed wage gaps between women and men, and workers of different races in Washington, are widening as wages increase to keep pace with inflation.
Washington cities worse than Seattle
Still, the gender pay gap in Seattle is smaller than those in several other cities in Washington. A look at cities within the state with a population of over 20,000 shows the gap is larger in the Seattle area suburban cities of Sammamish, Mercer Island, Bainbridge Island, Redmond, Bellevue, Issaquah, Edmonds and others.
The pay gap is smaller in cities south of Seattle like Burien, Federal Way, Tacoma and Lakewood, and in Eastern Washington like Spokane and Pullman. The pay gap shrunk in Lacey and Tumwater, both in Thurston County, and in Pullman and Spokane between 2017 and 2022.
The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the chronic lack of child care services to help women, who accounted for 82% of child care-related work absences in November 2022, stay in the workforce, and remains a critical component in persistent wage gaps.
“We have a child care crisis,” Senn said. It is too expensive and too hard to find child care in the state, and many women refrain from leveling up in their careers.
“Mothers stay in the job that works for their family, that has flexibility, so when comparing full-time working men and women, you have to understand there was probably a gap in their employment history due to child rearing,” she said.
The bigger gap in wages based on gender could be connected to the fact that many Seattle-area families choose to settle outside the city limits to raise children.
“There are some family, lifestyle choices people make that are different in the suburbs than in the city, which again, relates to children and child care and women stepping away from the workforce for a while, impairing their growth,” Senn said.
The “tech bro” clout
Much of the disparity in wages has to do with the tech industry’s overwhelming influence on the local economy.
“We have such a concentration of technology jobs, which still has a tech bro makeup in terms of the heavy concentration of men in those fields with the most highly paid positions,” said Senn.
That influence may have even thwarted the progress Tacoma had made in closing the wage gap over the decade to 2022. From 2013 to 2017, the city recorded an 11% decline in the gender wage gap, which dropped to less than 1% from 2017 to 2022.
Across the U.S., computer and mathematical jobs stood out as one of the top 10 occupations with the largest gender pay disparities, according to census data. Legal occupations ranked first with a gap of nearly $70,000 between the median pay for men and women. Other sectors with large pay inequities include health care, management, sales, finance, transportation and construction.
“We really need to ask ourselves and reexamine what we value in our society,” Senn said. “Is working in the tech sector so significantly more important than being a teacher to justify the pay differential?”
Last week, the state Legislature passed an amendment to the Equal Pay and Opportunities Act, to expand protections for workers against discrimination on the basis of gender, age, race, immigration status, sexual orientation and disability.
“You can’t separate those aspects so recognizing that there is another layer that requires as much if not more attention will be helpful in some regards,” Senn said.
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