How the Gender Pay Gap Works

don't think so. Well. Equal pay Day may have come and gone by now, but it was April twelve, two thousand sixteen, that's right. And do you remember when we did our this Day in History weirdo series or video series that was pretty great? It was a little odd. It was Lynch I in I was, but one of the one of the ones that we did was on um uh Lily Ladbetter. Yeah, and I think it was

on Equal pay Day. I think I remember it. Um. But Equal pay Day, for those of you not in the know, is a day in the United States UM where working women who work full time, year round would have to work until to get the equal amount of pay that their male counterparts got for the year before. Right, So it is two thousand sixteen. So take our pay for two thousand fifteen, and we'll don't take our pay. We want to keep that. But take a man's pay, a real man's pay from a woman in the same

position would have to work. I mean it changes every year, right, the date, Uh, if the amount of pay changes, are the paid disparity changes, right, But the significance of that date would be like a woman has to work until April whatever to the following year to make as much as the man made in the previous year. Right. I think I just basically said the same thing you said, just in a weird way. And this is this is

nothing new. Actually, this idea that there is a disparity, a pay gap, if you will, between men and women in the United States, and actually it's around the world, um. And the idea behind it is that women's work is just inherently less valued than men's work. Um. And there's a lot of debate over this. Barack Obama in the State of the Union address in I don't remember the year, said it might have been his last one where he said, um, women make of what men make, and that's not okay.

We need to do something about that. Kind of sounded like Obama, thanks man, thanks look at you like I looked up for a minute. I was like, your President Obama in the room. You really did look up. You guys couldn't see it, but Chuck really did look up. That was good. Uh. This Uh, the National Committee on Pay Equity is who um, who began holding equal pay day right in but UM apparently was it in a nineteen fifty is when they started kind of gathering data

on this. Yeah. I think the Bureau of Labor Statistics really started looking at it hard in the fifties. But the paid disparity goes back way further than that, basically to the beginning of the country. Yeah, so when people started working and earning money, and when women were even allowed to work. We need to do an episode just on wage labor in the origin of it, the history of it. Yeah, it's super fascinating interesting. So go back in time, some things used to be a lot worse.

Believe it or not. UM. Women earned thirty cents on the dollar in the early at the dawn of America, UM, when we were farming mainly UM. During the Industrial Revolution, things got a little bit better about fifty UM up to UM. But here's the distressing thing. Um, in nineteen sixty three, Congress pass the Equal Pay Act, and since then it was about six for a little while, but in the eighties they climbed up to and then thirty

years later it's only climbed up four percent. It's basically stagnated. It's very much leveled off. And the sad thing is is what you're seeing then is as men's wages grow, women's wages aren't growing. Then, Um, it's a it's and it's a big deal. It's a big problem because, um, women are losing out on a tremendous amount of money over their lifetimes. Um, just for what seems to be

gender discrimination. And I want to say now before anybody just loses their mind, there are a lot of theories behind this, and gender discrimination is one of them, but none of them are actually proven necessarily. No, And like most things, I think it's probably a combination of many, many things, most likely. But as I was saying, whatever

the cause, women are losing out on a lot of money. So, for examp, will check in two thousand eleven, five year old woman earned about five grand less per year than her male counterpart. And this is just woman who worked full time, year round, man who worked full time, year round, age five and in five grand, you're like, yeah, that's that's a lot. You can see a lot of movies

with five grand. But when you add it up over the woman's career and by the time she makes us the sixty five, she will have lost out on four hundred and thirty thousand dollars in wages compared to her male counterpart. Yeah. That if if that remains consistent throughout her career, that's a lot of dough. That's a lot of movies. Uh. And this is uh, these are white women. It gets much worse if you go across the races. Um, an African American woman, the figure dips to sixty percent

sixty point five. Hispanic females even worse. Uh. And by the way, we can say male and female because we're talking about studies here. Yeah, layoff, um fifty four percent fifty four point six for Hispanic women, and only Asian women did better than white women, uh, with eighty three point five percent of what their white male counterparts made. Yeah. And I openingly, if you look at the earners in the United States, white men are not the top Asian

men are actually the top earners. They earn on average in two thousand, fourteen hundred and thirteen point five percent more than white men. Uh huh. Interesting. Um, And there's I want to say something to also the equal pay day where a woman would have to work too to make the way. Just that's a white woman would have

to work to April twelve. If you are an African American woman, you would have to work until June to make the what the average or the median pay of a white man for the year before Latino woman all the way into October. Yeah, so it's like it almost I mean it's almost like twice as long. Alright. So

here is um, here's how it's determined. And this is one of the one the problems with trying to get behind the reasons because it's one thing to to talk about this stuff, but what unless you can make change and help this out, then it's just talking about it, like to make a difference, you need to really understand

the underlying problems. Oh yeah, yeah yeah. But I think step one is what's being done now and has been done since shining a spotlight on absolutely and I think step one is being undertaken still that we're trying to understand it. But yeah, it's definitely it's definitely not settled. Like, here's the problem, right, So one of the problems and trying to is data and getting really good data. Um. The way they get the pay gap figure is they take all the women working full time, year round, find

their median salary. It's not an average median is in the middle, um. And then they take that same calculation for men and they say, well, subtract us too, and this is the wage gap. Okay, so that's actually the the earnings ratio. Right, So when you see something, uh, women make sevent of what men make, it's very frequently in this article does it all over the place, it's called the wage gap. That's not the wage gap. That's the earnings ratio. The wage gap would be yeah, yeah,

you know what I mean. But it's it's confusing, like because if you think about you're like, wow, the wage cap is sev the wage gap is. The earnings ratio is seventy. But people tend to use that bigger number because it's more eye popping when you're a media mogul, right, you know what I mean? Absolutely, uh So a lot of people will say that that just that calculation is too broad to draw a conclusion, and it probably is.

You need better data for sure. Um. And this article even points out that, you know, you can't take that one statistic and and say this is all you need to know about pay inequality. Like, I don't think anyone's saying that, no, well, dummies. So but the one thing that does so unfortunately is it gives critics a chance to holes in it and dismiss it outright. Um, you know, yeah, because they're saying, okay, let's let's take a step back here.

You're taking the median salary for all of the men who worked in the United States full time, and then you're taking the median salary for all the women who worked full time in the United States throughout the entirety of two thousand and that's comparing apples to oranges, they say. And one, there's a number of reasons why they say

you're actually comparing apples oranges. There's a lot of different um jobs that are being done, there's a lot of varying educational backgrounds, there's a lot of different experience backgrounds, and you just can't compare the two. So let's not talk about this again. Okay, right now? What this the follow up should be. So let's drill down further and get better data and talk about it even in a more detailed way, which some people are doing, which we'll

get to. Um. This was fascinating to me about job clustering or occupational clustering. I know about job clustering. Uh, of all working women are employed in just twenty fields. Uh,

it's crazy. It is crazy. Um. If you look at men um, about thirty to thirty work in the top twenty occupations for males, which are you know, we're talking a lot of times managerial and supervisional roles, but also roles that are more physically demanding two and may pay more yeah, or more dangerous sometimes, Like they make the point that you'll probably find a man uh working as like a long haul trucker, although we've heard from quite a few women who who are doing it. Large March.

Have you not seen Big Adventure? Have you seen the new one yet? Not yet? Is it good? I haven't seen it yet. I can't wait. I'm kind of afraid to. I did see Stitches the Clown though, and it's got like a one star rating and usually on Netflix that means like stay away for real, but for you it means dig in. Well I read I read about it online too. It may be kind of interested. I don't think I know what that is. It's an Irish black

comedy horror movie. Um, about a clown that was murdered that comes back from the dead to take his revenge in the most gruesome and gory ways. Problem Taylor made for Josh Clark. But it's it's hilarious too, Like it's meant to be tongue in cheek to check that out. Um, we're talking about how, uh some women are in the trucking industry. That's right, but the cluster of occupations for women, um, generally speaking pay less than the cluster of occupations uh

that men prefer. Yeah, here's the thing. When you take a woman in the trucking industry salary and compared to a man in the trucking industry salary, it's it's still going to be less. And then conversely, when you look at a man who who has entered a female dominated field, say like nursing, they're still gonna probably make more than their female counterparts. Yeah, elementary school cheach as human resources administrators. The pay gap is only one per cent um, but

it's still there. No, exactly, it's still there. Like literally, if they compared same experience, same uh, same job, working the same amount of hours, almost always across the board, men will still make more. Even like you said, if it's nursing, which historically people might think is a job that more women prefer. Uh. What you're talking about the chuck is called occupational gender segregation, and that in and

of itself is a big problem here. It's saying, um, but we here in the United States really tend to value the work that women do less than the work that men do. Just by saying these jobs that are traditionally women women staffed are um just traditionally paid less. That whole field is yeah, and it's and it's not like the nineteen thirties and forties and fifties where it's like you just go be a secretary now and we'll take care of the business. But there's still it's still

there to a certain degree. I mean, there are more women who work as secretaries and men um But I just want to get back to that stat real quick. When we were talking about the even when you compared apples to apples, men still made more. I mean it's it's like, you know, two to um five and thirty four occupations tracked by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, and seven out of the five thirty four paid women more than men. Yeah, seven seven, Uh, and apparently the most lucrative.

If you're a woman, you want to make more than a man, Uh, you should be a respiratory therapist, because their salaries are six point four percent higher than men's in their field. Should we take a break, yes, all right, we'll be back with more staggering stats. So chuck, you said, um, if you compare apples apples, it's a few percent. The beer of Labor statistics. Um, they like to throw a little wrench in the works. They surveyed like five hundred

and thirty four occupations, you said, um. And when they do their statistics, they use weekly salaries rather than um annual salaries, and they actually come up with a less pay less of a pay gap. But one of the things the internet has given us, one of the great things, is crowdsourcing. And um, there are a lot of companies that crewe data as almost like a byproduct or maybe the real under the table product of what they're doing.

One of those companies is glass Door, where you can go look for job listings but also rate your employer, rate the company, and it's basically the masses UM reviewing employers. You know, it's a pretty cool idea. UM and glass Door did a study in two sixteens, just came out this month as a matter of fact, and they surveyed five hundred and five thousand employee The last few of

labor statistics thing I saw was like fifty people. This is like half a million employees and their salary reports and found that if you compared women who are equally qualified in the same position at the same company as a man, uh, they still made on average five percent less and in among computer scientists, which I guess as developers and stuff. Um, the pay gap was the worst for a woman in the same position equally qualified at the same company as a man. And this is like

brand new data that just came out. Well. One of the reasons they say, um, this is ongoing is that, uh, maybe women don't know that they're not making as much as their male counterparts because we still are in a I guess society, or at least a work environment most times where you're not only not encouraged to talk about

your pay, but some companies like prohibited. Yeah, you can't talk about your pay your fellow employees, right, And I mean, I guess, as draconian as it is, you can kind of understand where the company is coming from because they want to get away paying their workforce as little as possible, so they don't want their workforce comparing salaries and realizing

that people are being paid substantially different stuff. Right. Still, it's mean to to say, like, no, you can't talk about your salary that we pay you to this other person. Be quiet, you know. And there's been a lot of reform that we'll talk about it as far as that's concerned. But that's a big thing is there appears to be among a lot of women this idea and I'm sure a lot of men too don't realize this as well, that there there is a gender paid disparity. And part

of the reason why is because of a lack of transparency. Yeah. Um, last year, um, last May, those woman named Lauren voss Winkle got on Twitter and said, here's a new hashtag, um talk pay t a l k P A y and said eat out your job titles, how experienced you are, where you've been in life, and what your salary is. Uh. And then at talk pay ann came out, which is

a probably smarter way. It's it's anonymous UM and about Well, there were a lot of tweets, but most of them were, of course, people just you know, complaining, and I'm sure there were plenty of rolls too, but just you know, complaining about the situation, which is fine. But about actually tweeted their actual salary. UH. And a lot of people say, this is kind of one of the first steps is at least getting the information out there. UH. So a woman might say, wait a minute, you make four thousand

dollars more than me for no reason at all. And there are websites to um where you can compare things. There's one called uh pay scale and one called comparably. It's a little awkward title. It's beautiful. It makes sense. I believe you mentioned some of the things that are doing. Uh, the the government is doing um. President Obama signed an executive order in two thousand fourteen, so that's when, as

you stay the union address must have come UM. He barred federal contractors from punishing an employee for comparing their salary, and a memorandum on those same contractors to submit data compensation data if there was any to see if there was any wage discrimination going on. Right, So, if you worked at a company that was a government contractor and you're a woman who suddenly got an unexpected raise and pay, you may have had something to do with that maybe.

So UM. California actually also is leaning the way on this. They uh, what is his name, Jerry Brown, the governor the second time around UM he signed into law this this UM Act that prevents companies from punishing employees for talking about their pay, their salaries UM. And it mandates at first man dated same pay for the same work, which is actually the language in UM the Civil Rights Act.

Title seven of the Civil Rights Act says you have to pay people the same pay for the same work, regardless of their UM gender, of their UM race, of their religion, any of that. They still have to get the same pay. Uh. And women are protected by that as well. But you know that was nineteen sixty three, I think. And the specificity of the language same work for same pay is it's it's so specific that it's just easy to get around you just say, well, it's

not the same work. I'm not going to give these people the same title or whatever. Um with the California legislation kind of opened that and said you have the same pay for the substantially same work, you know. Yeah, and the Equal Pay Act of nineteen sixty three specifically says employers may not pay unequal way just to men and women who perform job that requires substantially equal skill, effort and responsibility, and that are performed under similar working

to conditions within the same establishment. And then it goes down to break down what is defined as skill effort, responsibilities, working conditions, and establishment. So it definitely gets like way more specific, which is good. And apparently the reason why California is leading the way on this is because Silicon Valley is one of the worst defenders out of all of them. That's where that's California, that's sure. They also

signed a fifteen dollar minimum wage into law recently too. Yeah, should we talk more about Lily lead Better, Yeah, because I mean, if you want to talk uh wage equality law, you've got to talk Lily lad Better. So she worked for good Year Tire and over the years, I think she worked there for nineteen years. She was given low rankings and annual performance in salary reviews pretty consistently in

low raises compared to her fellow ployees. So she sued them, and a jury initially said you win three point five million dollars and then a district year was like, what, we can't afford that, Uh, goodyear, I'm sorry. UM. District judge later said, let's reduce that from three point five million to three hundred and sixty thousand, and good year was like still, well they did because they appealed UM. Basically what they did was they cited a title a

Title seven provision. They said any discrimination complaint needs to be made within a hundred eighty days of the of the bad deed, basically of the conduct of yes of you. They give you your first paycheck and it's discriminatory pay then you have a hundred and eighty days. So this lady worked for eighteen and a half years longer then she could have submitted a Title seven complaint, which is

b s that's right. And they basically eventually said, well, what you can do is you can only sue for the last days worth of discriminatory conduct and then it went to the Supreme Court of the United States and she lost by five four vote. Uh, basically holding to that claim that it was time sensitive. Yeah, it's just I mean the idea that, like you get your first paycheck and you just immediately go, well, this is discriminatory.

Even that stick. Right. This woman worked for nineteen years without realizing it, and the reason why she finally did come to understand it was because a coworker passed her an anonymous note um telling her so at a retirement Basically, so she had been played for a sap basically by good year as far as the lower courts are concerned, for nineteen years. But because nineteen years earlier, in nineteen seventy nine, she didn't immediately recognize that she was getting

less pay. So, like you have to basically be inspector Cluseau the first time you get paid to to get a successful Title seven complaint cleared by the court. It's just ridiculous. Uh. In descent, I love reading the Supreme Court, like when they actually, you know, write why they find

it in favor or not. It's really interesting stuff. Uh. Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg in her descent called it out of tune with the realities of wage discrimination and quote a cramped interpretation of Title seven incompatible with the statutes broad remedial purpose end quote. So basically, like the whole purpose of this, like, you're just shirking the whole purpose of the strant to begin with. Yeah, the purpose isn't to protect corporations from lawsuits. It's so that you keep

employees from getting screwed over by their employers. So again Obama came in with another thing signed into law of the Lily Ledbetter Act, which said, we'll stick to the hundred and eighty days thing. But that's from the last discriminatory paycheck. So she could have found out at her retirement, um, gotten her last paycheck and had six months to sue for the whole shebang, her whole career basically, and probably would have one had that law been an effect at

the time. All right, well, let's take another break and um we'll talk a little bit more about this right after this. All right, So, uh, what are the reasons behind this? They're myriad, They're myriad, They're myriad, and um, the thing is, critics of the gender pay gap say this is not a discrimination, like employers are not saying like you're a woman, I'm gonna just you know, treat you poorly compared to your male counterparts. That doesn't happen.

It may happen, but it's not happening on a systemic scale. But if you look at the explanations for this, and economists have investigated this and thought long and hard about it and argued over it and really drilled down into it rather than stop talking about it, right, um, it would be what's still going on is still ultimately gender discrimination. It's just not this nefarious handlebar mustache version of it that people look for because everyone wants a smoking gun

or a gotcha moment, you know what I mean. But when you look at the explanations and the reasons behind purportedly the gender discrimination gap or the gender pay gap, it is still discrimination based on gender most likely and race too. Like we we shouldn't. We don't mean to undermine that or diminish that at all, Like it's even worse based on race. You know. Um, there was a Freakonomics podcast episode. Mr Dubner did a great episode in January of this year, um that I listened to and

he got um and you know, fre economics. It seems like they kind of get to the real reasons behind things. This was called the True Story of the Gender Pay Gap UH, and he sat down with a few people. One of them was Claudia Golden. She's a econ professor

at Harvard. So the long and short of it is, after reading UH and listening to this, was that Claudia Golden and others economists have tried to compare apples to apples more and found that there are many, many reasons why there is a pay gap um, but they can't prove that discrimination is the leading cause, and they think that it's probably one of the minor causes. Well, yeah,

it's most likely not a major cause at all. Like when you look at that that mind boggling gap ratio um, when you start comparing apples to apples, most of it vanishes, but there is a mysterious three four five that can't be accounted for by things like experience or educational background or what have you. Well, yeah, and that's three. I mean that's too much, you know, any percent is too much. Like if there is, if if there is gender discrimination,

going zero exactly, Thank you, you just said it so succinctly. Um. So, one of the theories that people say, um, is that men are better at bargaining for their salary and asking for raises and getting tough in that room and demanding the raise and valuing their work more. In valuing their work. Um. And there may be some truth to that. But um. This economist from Harvard says, well, if that were true, then you would be able to look at men and women right out of college with the same degree getting

the same job. The men should be making more money. And she said when you look at that, they actually make almost the same thing. Right. The gender pay gap is less earlier on in the career. Right. But even if there is that small bit right there at the beginning, if you start out lower, your raises over time and your promotions over time are gonna be lower. Two. And that can actually accrue and make the gap wider by the end of the career, which is what you see, right. Yeah,

And what she contends. And this other woman and Marie Slaughter who is a public policy scholar who wrote a book called Unfinished Business, and Mr Dubner sat down with her too, and they kind of peg it down to it seems like two things. Um. And Mary Slaughter calls one of them the care penalty. Um. And it's not just having a baby and staying home with a baby. It's women are more likely to care for their parents

when they get old. Um. Of a sibling that needs help, like you know, they they have cancer and they need to come live with you. And I need to take time on work to care for my brother's sister, and especially children when when you have kids. Um, there is most assuredly a care penalty because they found that men

sometimes work even harder after they have a baby. Right, they're staying away from home, maybe staying away from home, or maybe it hits them like I need to work harder to make more money now, whereas women falls to more like you know, I want to care for this child. So, UM, I'm gonna select a job that will pay less because it's either part time or it offers more flexibility. Um. And then I saw another interview with um Golden right

is their name? Um, and she pointed out that, uh, if women are if women are more likely to get a job that's closer to home that's more fulfilling, say than um, something a man is looking for, then there's going to be more competition for those jobs, which is going to drive wages down just from supply and demand theory. Yeah, she calls it temporal flexibility women. Men tend to favor income growth way more than women do, whereas women tend

to favorite temporal flexibility more. I want to be near the house so I'm not stuck in my car, so I can be around my family more, so I can be you know, a better member, a better family member basically overall, which is you know, it seems like men don't care as much about that, right and and I mean the most overt example of this is childcare, where especially in the US, um you're lucky to get X number of days off as a father, as a as a woman, you're you're you get a guaranteed three months off,

twelve weeks off by federal law. Men there's no guarantee whatsoever, so you may get zero off. And that reflects this again, this gender bias, if not outright gender discrimination, that does tend to set some women back because even if they're just out for three months or something, they're they're missing

out of the flow of their career. And there you couldn't go on work trip, so we're gonna send uh, you know exactly, So they're missing out on future promotions, future raises UM and future experience and all of those things count for future um income wages. Yeah, and I want to rephrase what I just said that men don't

care as much about being a good family member. What I meant to say is men might have a different outlook on what is being a better family member, and in that case, it's going out and working harder to make more money. Oh yeah, does that make sense? Sure? Because I get roughed up for being too hard on white men, right, I do. We get emails all the time, Chuck, why do you hate white men? I don't know. I don't hate what I'm I am a white man, and it's not self loathing. No. I love myself and I

love you, thanks man. Uh. And it's just kind of warm in here. So temporal flexibility is one of the big things. And um and actually Golden says that if women were allowed to work flexible hours of their choosing, then the she believes that the the gender pay gap might actually vanish right well, and um a Marie Slaughter said, if you if you take the other big one is the care penalty. If you take that off the table

and you don't have any caregiving obligations at all. Uh, it climbs to about but there's still that five right, you know, Like, where is that coming from? I think

that's it. I think it's got to be discrimination. I can't remember her name, but I was reading an interview in the Atlantic with a Cornell economist who studies this, and she was saying, um, that if you look at Europe, there they're much more um even they're equal with their um their paternity leaving their maternity to leave actually and um, I don't know that it's it's old enough to have

like had a demonstrable effect. But um, I wonder if if having something like that here in the US, where I don't remember the country she cited some skin and even country obviously. UM. But the the men are given like a family is given an a lotted amount of paternity or maternity time, and X amount of it has to be paternity, and the dad can either use it or not, but the mom can't take that on. So it's kind of like you're gonna spend some time with

your kids or not. But to you, um, and so there's a lot more guys taking that than there was before, and so there's a lot more equality and caregiving. Which if it's gonna be, you know which ways America is gonna go. Is it gonna be women need to spend less time at home and get into the workforce more or men need to spend more time at home caring for the kids and make the whole thing more of an equal thing, you know, and then maybe that will erase some of the pay gap for sure. They m

in the same fre Economics episode. They kind of close with asking Ms Golden what her like, what kind of legislation would like, how can you fix this? Like more laws, more laws, And she had a pretty good idea. She was like, you need to start at like the school level, because you send your kids off to school, and what happens is they get out at two or three o'clock and unless you have you know, I want your kid to be a latch key kid, someone's gonna need to

be home with them. Uh. And then there are a lot of times out, like for a couple of months during the summer, so someone needs to be there. Then, so she argues for lengthenings, extending school days in school, the school year such that it doesn't require that one of the family members to have to like take off work or take a part time job, yeah, instead of a full time job. Well, I remember when I was a little kid, my mom was home and until I

entered I guess kindergarten. Yeah, my mom quit teaching to raise all three of her kids up until I was like fifteen, and then she went back to work as a and then so I mean, how much further back can her in their careers where our moms staying home hugely, You should not be penalized for raising two stellar sons. Yeah, and I have to say in a stellar daughter, Um,

it's kind of personal. But like my parents got divorced, and so divorce proceedings can get ugly, and a woman in a divorce court says, well, I took off uh like eighteen years to raise my children, and now I'm going back to school at a much lower wage than I would have because like that needs to be valued. And uh, it's tough, man, you know it is. It is tough. Like we said, if there's any percentage it's

based on gender discrimination or race discrimination, that's too much. Agreed. Uh, Yeah, I don't know what to do what the answer is. And I guess the reason why we can't say here's the answer because we don't fully understand which of these factors it is or what combination. You know, yet, we should just go sit down with all our fellow podcasts are and talk about what we all make right. We should um, there's something else I know as to chuck

um if we keep going at the same rate. So there's actually a huge jump from nineteen eight and nine of the pay gap that had been there before vanished, And it was because women that had entered the workforce starting in the sixties gained the kind of experience to where like their wages were reflecting those of men. That was that's one theory behind it. But then after that

it's stagnated. It's been stagnant pretty much the last decade or so UM and apparently at the pace that it's going now is when um parody for white women will be reached. It's very frequently called like women won't reach gender or gender parody until that's white women. If you are African American, it would be sometime towards the end of the next next century for an African American woman to reach parody with white men, and around the world

this is an issue as well. Apparently women around the world make on average half of what men do around the world half half Eddie, Yeah, half, and so the average woman in the world by three um would eat would reach pay parody. Uh. Well, I have one final stat here, just depending on what state you live in, it's gonna make a big difference. Washington, d C leads the way as far as the smallest gender pay gap. Um, they're earnings ratio. Women are at of men. Okay, Georgia.

Our own state of Georgia is on the list, and if you are a woman living in Louisiana, you have the distinction of living in the worst state in the United States at the scant earnings ratio. Wow, pretty low SOT pay gap there. Uh and huge thanks to uh for I was able to lean on that fre Economics episode so heavily. To Stephen Dubna, that was a really good episode. Yeah, that was nice of him to send you a gold thumb drive with it. That was very nice, guys, Stubbs. Yeah.

Uh Well, if you want to learn more about this kind of stuff, you know, gender pay gaps and pay disparity and wages, that kind of thing that tickles economists fancies. You can type those words into the search bar at how staff works dot com. Since I said search parts time for listener. Now, I think it was a little clumsy in that one, So apologies to people what I just felt that was a little clumsy in that if

that's how I felt in the Tornadoes episode. Really, there was a lot of points I wanted to get across the right way, and that's usually when I find myself saying things exactly the wrong way. Well, you corrected yourself on that one thing, right, Well I tried. Um, all right, I'm gonna call this, uh nostalgia immediate nostalgia. Oh yeah, from Jason Tardy. O. Wait, hey, guys, I was recently listening to The Nostalgia Show while going on a trail run. I didn't get a chance to finish it, and later

I went to listen to the podcast again. I started over from the beginning and I skipped ahead to find where I left off, and I was hit with instant nostalgia of that trail run. Certain phrases I heard you say during my run, We're tied with images of the beautiful trail every time I skipped ahead, I saw a different image and could remember exactly where I was when I had previously heard you say that phrase had brought up warm feelings of happiness of the trail while listening

to you, guys, I don't know if that's nostalgia. Thanks for everything you do. I wish you all the best. You've been a great distraction while training for my marathon, driving long hours on the road as a performance artist, in keeping me sane during the craziness of having my wife go through breast cancer while still keeping the house clean with two kids. So, Jason Tardy of Auburn, Maine, hats off to you, sir, and best of luck to your wife and good luck hearing for those kids. Yeah,

best wishes, guys. Yeah, we will instantly nostalgize you whenever you want nice. If you want to get in touch with us, like Jason did, you can tweet to us at s Y s K podcast. You can join us on Facebook dot com, slash stuff you Should Know. You can send us an email to stuff Podcasts at how Stuff Works dot com and has always joined us at home on the web Stuff you Should Know dot com for more on this and thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works? Dot com