Women and the Wage Gap

* The Institute for Women’s Policy Research noted that the penalty for taking time out of the labor force for women is hefty and getting worse. Women who took just one year off had earnings 39% lower than women who worked all 15 years between 2001 and 2015.

* Women take at least a year off of work at almost twice the rate of men, often to perform caring duties. And polling of individuals backs that up. About 4 in 10 reported to Pew Research in 2013 that they had taken a “significant amount of time” off or needed to reduce their work hours to perform caring duties.

* About a quarter of the women polled said they needed to quit at some point to take care of family responsibilities. In contrast, only 24% of men in the same poll said they’d taken time off to care for a child or another family member.