Michigan women who work full-time only earned 79-percent as much as men in 2024. When accounting for all employees, women made 71 cents for every dollar men made.
That’s among the findings in a new Women in the Michigan Workforce report from the state that showed Michigan’s gender pay gap widened slightly as men’s wages grew faster than women’s. In 2023, the difference for full time employees was 82 cents per dollar.
Stephanie Beckhorn directs the Office of Employment & Training for the Michigan Department of Labor and Economic Opportunity. She pointed to state programs trying to narrow the gap, like partnerships for healthcare worker training, and efforts to make childcare cheaper.
“We know one of the biggest barriers for working parents is the cost of childcare, resulting in some parents leaving the workforce. That is why we advocate for barrier removal support to help women enter and keep employment,” she said in a written statement.
The report found women have made up considerable ground in industries where they used to be under-represented. Since 1980, women went from making up fewer than half to more than half of workers in business operations, finance, and legal professions.
Still, areas where women are overrepresented, like healthcare support, tend to be lower paid. Beckhorn said the numbers demonstrate the importance of getting more women into professional trades as well.
“[T]here is still persistent underrepresentation of women in trades-related fields. Women make up less than a quarter of employment in Construction and Transportation and material moving. These are professions whose wages are significantly higher than the state’s median wage,” she said.
Likewise, equal pay advocates are looking at the report as a chance for Michigan to take meaningful steps to close the gender gap.
Sarah Javaid is a senior research analyst with the National Women’s Law Center. She said reasons for the difference stretch beyond what’s happening between employers and their employees.
“The bigger picture is that women are being impacted by caregiving duties, they're impacted by state policies; unpaid leave, paid sick time. They're impacted by what education and training they can receive, and they're also impacted even way earlier than they enter the workforce,” Javaid said.
She said Michigan’s policies to support access to reproductive health care have gone a long way to close that gap. But there’s still more work to do.
Numbers from the National Women’s Law Center show New York, Vermont, and Maryland have among the narrowest gender pay gaps in the country.
Another step to fix the problem, Javaid suggested, could be stopping employers from asking for a person’s wage history.
“A salary history ban prevents the discrimination from following women from job to job when we base their current salaries on their past salaries. And that is particularly helpful too for women of color who tend to experience far more discrimination at the intersection of sexism and race,” she said.
In the Michigan Senate, a salary history ban is awaiting a floor vote. A similar bill in the state House of Representatives has been stalled in committee for around a year.
The Michigan report didn’t mention racial and ethnic breakdowns. But research has shown Black and Hispanic women trail far behind their white counterparts when it comes to pay.
Javaid recommended looking at education access and ways to stop discrimination as ways to close the distance.
