Experts say the gender pay gap may never go away

The pay gap has barely narrowed over the past two decades. A new paper indicates that’s not likely to change anytime soon.

Over the past two decades, there has been halting progress on narrowing the gender pay gap: As of 2024, women still make about 84 cents for every dollar that men earn, a marginal change from the 80 cents to the dollar that women earned back in 2002. Even as women have made inroads in corporate America and across sectors that were historically dominated by men, pay equity has remained stubbornly out of reach.