PAY GAPS OFTEN spawn a muddle of cause-and-effect arguments. Are employers deliberately and  actively discriminating? Do the differences in pay boil down to individual choices to stay home or work? Should women and people of color just be negotiating more aggressively? Is talking with co-workers about salary gauche or an essential part of improving a bargaining position? 

Beneath it all, the gender and racial wage gaps yawn wide.

The Biden administration, on Equal Pay Day this year, estimated that women workers are still paid only 84 cents for every dollar paid to men, on average. And in more than 90 percent of occupations, women earn less than men, which the president noted is a product of both systemic barriers and the gendered weight of caregiving responsibilities falling mostly on women.

“I think people have always thought of the wage gap as equal pay for equal work,” Kim Borman, executive director of the Boston Women’s Workforce Council, said on The Codcast. “But there’s more to the wage gap than that, and people have started to realize that over the years.”

The federal Equal Pay Act was signed into law in 1963, prohibiting wage disparity by sex. Fifteen years ago, the first piece of legislation signed by President Barack Obama was the Lilly Ledbetter Fair Pay Act, which restored protections against pay discrimination stripped away by the Supreme Court’s 2007 decision in Ledbetter v. Goodyear Tire & Rubber Co. 

Borman’s group looks at the “unadjusted” wage gap – that is, a gap which doesn’t account for differences in factors like education. Based on Boston Women’s Workforce Council’s annual payroll data analysis, the unadjusted gender wage gap in Boston is roughly 21 cents, which improved by about 30 percent between 2021 and 2023. 

Borman points to a dynamic in workplaces that gets a bit more complicated than two people making different amounts for the same job, with one demographic climbing into higher pay brackets while another is stuck behind. 

“You start to see that it’s because women don’t have higher salaries, and why don’t they have higher salaries? Because they’re not being promoted,” Borman said. “And that’s really tough to get at. Like, what’s going on there that you may be paying all of your people the same wage at lower level positions, but if men are being promoted at a much higher rate, they’re getting senior salaries much more. And that’s really what has become sort of the nuance in the wage gap over the last couple years.”

Borman is quick to note that while the gender pay gap in Boston is shrinking, the racial wage gap actually increased by about 12 percent during the pandemic. Women in higher paid positions ticked up by a few percent, but pandemic-era dynamics did not improve the overall pay rates for people of color.

“We saw this overrepresentation of people of color in two industries in particular,” she said. In “labor and operatives” jobs, she said, workers need almost no training to start, but there is also little opportunity for promotion. “And so you’re never gonna get out of the salary range that you’re in if you’re in those jobs,” Borman said. “So we think that’s what we really saw happen over the last couple years.” 

The rise of remote and hybrid work – some two decades after then-Gov. Jane Swift was lambasted for conducting state business through speakerphone from her bed after giving birth – has offered women in primary caretaker roles the chance to participate in some previously inaccessible programs. 

A Mass General Brigham international hospital tour program saw a 30 percent increase in women participants after going online, Borman said, and 10 percent of those participants were then promoted.

“Sure, there still will always be a place for people to go in person, but if you can’t, should it deny you from this opportunity to be advanced?” Borman asked. “Those are some of the kind of ideas that came out of the pandemic that I think are working and will continue and hopefully help marginalized groups become more promoted more easily.”

In an effort to address pay disparities across gendered and racial lines, the state Legislature and the governor green-lit a new wage transparency law last month. The Frances Perkins Workplace Equity Act requires employers with more than 25 workers to post pay ranges on all job postings. Employers with 100 or more workers must now file annual employment data reports with the state providing information on employee demographics and salaries. 

Other states with wage transparency laws have seen employers try to wiggle around the requirements by posting large salary ranges or offering perks outside of traditional wage frameworks that wouldn’t be captured by the data.

“I think it is a great first step and it is wonderful for the state,” Borman said, though she cautioned that detailed data on wages by gender and race will not be available for most filers until the federal government changes its requirements for Equal Employment Opportunity filings, because the new law collects the types of wage data already required by the federal government. 

The workforce council is able to dive into more informative payroll data provided to them directly from employers, but they are geographically limited for now.

“One of the next steps for us is to probably look statewide and get employers all over the state,” Borman said of the council’s goals. “Right now we have a lot of the big employers, but we tell them just to give us Boston [area data]. But perhaps we’ll go further than that. And this will also be good for employers because it’ll get them ready for when the federal government really does start to mandate [reporting] the compensation.”