File this under good news/bad news.
The gap between what moms and dads in Maine are paid is slightly smaller than all but one state and Washington D.C., according to a new report from the National Women’s Law Center.
In other words, moms in Maine who work full time are better off, but only somewhat, than their counterparts in most other states.
Mothers here make 80 cents on the dollar, compared with fathers. The median annual wage for a Maine mother is $38,000, whereas that figure is $47,000 for fathers, according to the report.
Vermont moms earn 82 cents on the dollar, compared with men. And Washington D.C. moms earn 90 cents, the study found.
On average, women nationally earn 78 cents for each dollar men get, according to the Department of Labor. But for working mothers, that gap is more like 30 percent, or 70 cents on the dollar.
“Stereotypes about mothers and fathers contribute to this disparity: one study found that mothers are recommended for significantly lower starting salaries, perceived as less competent, and less likely to be recommended for hire than non-mothers whereas fathers are actually recommended for significantly higher pay and were perceived as more committed to their jobs than non-fathers,” according to the report.
So yeah, this report is good in some ways — but there’s still a gap for Maine women.
As BDN’s economics reporter Darren Fishell has pointed out, most top earners in the state are men.
“If a person makes more than $100,000 in Maine, there’s a 76.6 percent chance that person is male,” he wrote last month.
And the NWLC released another report last month estimating that 70 percent of Maine’s minimum wage earners are women.
It is worth noting that in the U.S., the pay gap has traditionally been much narrower for younger women, according to the Pew Research Center, which found that women aged 25 to 34 earned 93 cents for every dollar men did in 2012.
And women also earn less because they are more likely than men to interrupt their careers to have children or take care of aging parents, Pew said.
According to the 2013 survey, 39 percent of women who worked said they’d taken a good deal of time off or worked fewer hours to take care of a kid or other relative. Only 24 percent of men said the same.
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