[Music] foreign pay gap between full-time working women and their male counterparts is now the smallest on record according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics last quarter women received median weekly earnings of just over one thousand dollars in comparison men's earnings amounted to 1 185 dollars that means full-time female workers are making about 84 percent of what men are making for more on this let's bring in Julia Pollock she's a chief Economist at ZipRecruiter Julia thank you for joining us why has this gender gap become the narrowest on record what's behind all of this so I would point to four long-term trends first women are getting more education and they're having children later and so they're focusing on their careers more second some of the fastest growing occupations right now are majority female occupations like nurse practitioner like pharmacists like health services manager third Norms are changing more fathers are participating in child care and women are increasingly entering male dominated Fields like construction and computer related fields and finally and this is really important jobs are becoming more flexible and remote work expanded five-fold since the pandemic and that is also allowing women to balance family and career to a larger degree and I also wonder with women even being the breadwinner in some of the the households is there more of a necessity to make sure they are getting paid too if they're the ones that are taking care of everyone absolutely women are a rising share of Breadwinners very steadily increasing share uh and so you know that means they're investing more in their education they're putting more time into work and all of those things are narrowing various gaps importantly you know these latest figures show median earnings from April to June of this year uh is it inevitable that they will drop for women during the third quarter which covers July to September as children are let out of schools for the summer time not at all so there's no Trend like that in the data often the gender pay Gap continues to narrow in the fall women are still though making approximately 16 percent less than their male counterparts and we know that that's even less for women of color what needs to be done to narrow the gender pay Gap even further well one thing that'll help is just the passage of time so uh the while while that Gap is 16 cents for workers overall it's only six cents for the youngest workers age 16 to 24. you know the younger generations of women are seeing themselves as Korea women first and uh and they are demanding to be treated equally in the workplace so as older workers with much larger gaps 22 cents retire and and leave the workforce and younger Generations become the majority part of this will take uh care of itself but policy of course could play a huge role uh increased paid family leave and increased subsidies for child care could also make a huge difference how important is speaking up when talking about narrowing this Gap because a lot of times people don't even know that there's such a difference when you hear what your male counterparts are making and you go oh wow you know there's a significant difference here how much of people speaking up and speaking out has contributed to where we are today I'm just thinking about the women's soccer you know and the advancements that they've made but it took years I think the first thing that's important is getting informed uh my favorite study on the gender pay Gap was done by an economist at MIT and she looked at what women were asking to be paid in online platforms for freelance engineers and what she found was that there was a large gap in that ask pay the amount of pay that women were demanding for the same jobs once that platform made a small change and pre-populated the ask box with the pay that employers typically offered to workers for that kind of job women actually raised their bids to the number in that box and the Gap completely vanished so part of the problem is that because often in these male-dominated fields like Tech like law uh women just don't know what the going rate is and because often women are less confident than men if the salary negotiation opens with the question what do you expect to make a women often say well you know might be happy with the say 60 000 a year whereas a man might March right in and say I'd like 120 000 a year please so getting informed first knowing what the pay is in that role is crucial so that you can negotiate and put your best foot forward absolutely the more you know you got to get that dough Julia Pollock and thank you so much thanks drika