Skip to content

8 thoughts on “Raw data: Men’s and women’s earnings since 1975”

  1. LactatingAlgore

    aileen cannon just did her job.

    i hope she closes the man-woman judge earnings gap, for herself, at least.

    (also, if the attorney general can't appoint a special prosecutor, what does this mean for the status of jimbo comer's request for the tapes captured by korean barry scheck, robert hur?)

  2. Solar

    Now plot the actual median incomes and not just the change rate.

    Women's income has been catching up, but it is still far frome doing so.

    BS graphs like yours here are the same type of nonsense bigots point out when looking at programs that try to help women or minorities, point out that over whatever timeframe they've been getting more help than white men, while being completely oblivious to the fact that despite this improvement, they are still behind.

  3. FrankM

    Are you TRYING to create a misleading plot? Jeez, Kevin, this is exactly the kind of graph that you frequently criticize.

  4. Jimbo

    Hi Kevin. Did you mean Median Income Growth? If so, I'd be interested in the actual relative median income (adjusted for inflation, of course).

  6. HalfAlu

    From 1975 to 2023, real GDP per worker has doubled (FRED only goes up to 2010, estimated for 2011-2023), while wages have gone up 20%. So only a fifth of the gains have gone to workers and the rest has gone to the owners.

    1. SC-Dem

      And the share that goes to wages has been skewed towards the upper tiers of management.
      There's a Time article dated 9/14/2020 based on Rand WE-A516-1 which are concerned with the distribution of personal income over the period from 1975 to 2019. Amongst other things, they looked at the counterfactual that women's income remained at the same miserable percentage of men's income in 1975, but that the distribution of total income by percentile remained the same as it was in 1975. The conclusion was that women would have somewhat larger incomes today if that was the way it had worked out.
      If virtually all the gains in personal income had not accrued to the top 1% since 1975, then there would have been enough income to give the bottom 95% of men about a 50% increase in income over the decades while giving women the 400% increase or so they would have needed to reach parity.
      The bottom 90% of households had around 63 or 64% of personal income in 1970. I think it was about 49% in 2019. That's about $33,000 per household in lost income per year for that group. Time puts the total transfer from the bottom 90% to the top 1% over the period at $50 Trillion.
      By the way, you need to be in the 98th percentile to have broken even either way.

Comments are closed.