A new report shows the pay gap for Black women didn’t shrink this year. It grew. Here’s what’s driving the loss, and what can be done to stop it.

Every year, Black Women’s Equal Pay Day marks how far into the new year a Black woman must work to catch up to what a white man earned the year before. This year, that day fell on July 21. For most people, the date comes and goes. For Black women, it marks another year of stolen wages.

A new report from Equal Rights Advocates and Equal Pay Today puts hard numbers behind that loss. The average Black woman working full time, year-round is paid 65 cents for every dollar paid to a non-Hispanic white man. That is worse than last year, when the gap stood at 66 cents. When part-time and part-year workers are included, the number drops even further, to 63 cents. Over a full career, that gap adds up to more than $1 million in lost wages.

Seher Khawaja has spent her career trying to understand why this keeps happening, and what it will take to change it. She is the Director of Equal Pay Today and the National Economic Justice Director at Equal Rights Advocates. Before joining Equal Rights Advocates, Khawaja led economic justice work at Legal Momentum, where she focused on policy, litigation, and education for women of color, immigrant women, and survivors of gender-based violence. Her work has taken her from New York City to South Africa, including a stint on New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s transition team.

Why the Wage Gap Got Worse This Year

Khawaja says it is hard to point to one single cause for the widening gap. “I think what we are seeing is an abject failure to actually address the systemic root causes of the inequities,” she says. Until the country deals with those root causes, she added, the numbers will keep moving up and down without ever really improving.

She points to something more direct too: a rollback of the very protections that once kept the gap from growing. “We are also seeing a very comprehensive, purposeful assault on Black women’s economic security from the current federal administration,” Khawaja says. “We need to be very honest about what that looks like and what it’s doing.” Federal jobs, many of them held by Black women, have been eliminated. Diversity, equity, and inclusion programs that once opened doors are being banned and targeted. Efforts are underway to weaken disparate impact liability, the legal principle that lets regulators act on policies that harm workers even when the harm was not intentional.

“When I talk about structural inequity, we’re not just talking about the discrimination that’s clearly intentional,” Khawaja explains. Much of the discrimination Black women face was never obvious on its face, she said, but “the ultimate impact is discriminatory. It results in huge disparities.”

Federal agencies built to enforce labor protections are also being hollowed out. Guidance on sexual harassment and affirmative action has been stripped away, and LGBTQ+ workers have come under new scrutiny. Most recently, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission has moved to eliminate the EEO-1, a workforce data collection that has tracked gender, race, and ethnicity in the workplace since 1966.

That data collection may sound like a bureaucratic detail, but Khawaja says it is one of the government’s most important tools. “In order for us to address disparities and eliminate them, we need to be able to identify them,” she said. The EEO-1 shows regulators exactly where Black women are concentrated in lower-paying job categories while white men fill the higher-paying ones in the same workplace. “One of the biggest barriers to economic equality for Black women is job segregation into lower-paid, undervalued industries and positions within workplaces,” Khawaja says. “And so being able to identify that job segregation is essential.”

The Real Reasons Behind the Pay Gap

Many people assume the wage gap comes down to differences in education or experience. The data tells a different story. Black women working full time, year-round earn 65 cents on the dollar compared to white men, and “that figure drops to 63 cents, irrespective of educational attainment,” Khawaja says. “And that’s really important for us to keep in mind.”

One of the biggest drivers, she explains, is occupational segregation. “If you look across our workforces, in every state, Black women and other women of color tend to have been purposefully pushed into lower-wage, undervalued occupations that are essential to our economy.” Care work is her clearest example: caring for children, the elderly, and people with disabilities. “It’s absolutely essential. Our economy can’t thrive without that care work,” she says. “Yet women in those industries are oftentimes not making enough money to make ends meet. So it threatens their economic security; it threatens their ability to thrive.”

Closing that gap means raising wages in those industries and building real pathways for women to move into higher-paid fields, Khawaja says. It also means building what she calls a care economy, one where affordable childcare, paid family leave, and paid time off are standard, not a privilege. “How are people supposed to get by if they get sick and/or their children get sick and they cannot take time off to care for themselves and their families?” she asks.

Pay secrecy compounds all of it. “Pay secrecy has also driven pay inequity,” Khawaja says. “Because employers have been able to hide their pay scales and how they pay their workers, we can’t see where the disparities lie and who’s being impacted, while oftentimes we know they’re there.” That is why she and her colleagues have pushed for pay transparency laws requiring employers to disclose salary ranges in job postings and to current employees.

Salary history bans matter too. When a new employer bases an offer on a candidate’s prior salary, past discrimination gets locked in for years to come. “If you’re making that decision, you’re perpetuating the discrimination every time you set salary going forward,” Khawaja says.

Sexual harassment is another factor that rarely makes it into wage gap conversations, but Khawaja says it should. Black women face high rates of harassment at work, and the toll it takes, she said, “impacts every aspect of their lives.”

What a Million Dollars in Lost Wages Really Means

The report’s most striking figure may be this one: over the course of a career, the wage gap costs the average Black woman more than $1 million. Khawaja does not soften what that number represents.

“It’s really important for us to recognize that it’s not an exaggeration to say that Black women are the backbone of our economy,” she says. “They are carrying out critical, essential work that is driving and fueling our economy. At the same time, the way our economy is structured, it’s exploiting the labor of Black women by devaluing it. And this is ultimately a form of wage theft. Black women are being robbed of their wages.”

The damage does not stop with one paycheck or one career. “That loss of one million dollars over the course of a lifetime has generational impacts,” Khawaja says. “It keeps going to the next generation, as the children growing up in those families do not have access to the same opportunities, the same wealth, the same savings as their counterparts, and that’s really unjust.” Black women have built approximately 90 percent less wealth than white men, she said, a gap that reflects decades of underpayment compounding over time. “You think about that, it’s egregious.”

Even so, Khawaja is careful to point to what that resilience has meant. “It’s incredible what Black women and other women of color do with all the barriers they face,” she says. “It’s truly a testament to how incredible they are that they are able to survive and to keep going, because there are substantial barriers that make it very hard to do.”

Where the Wage Gap Goes From Here

Khawaja is direct about what continued inaction will mean. “I think we’re going to see increased disparities, increased inequity,” she says. “It’s worth noting that the pay gap for Black women is tightly tied to increased poverty rates for Black women.” She frames this as more than a fairness issue. It is an economic one.

“Women are known to put their income back into the economy to cover basic necessities and to spend on necessities and goods and services,” Khawaja says. “When we uplift women, when we increase their spending power and their economic security, it drives economic growth.” The reverse is true as well, she warned: continued inequity “won’t just harm our workforce; it’s going to be harming our economy as well.”

Asked what would make the biggest difference over the next decade, Khawaja names three priorities. First, addressing occupational segregation: “We need to be increasing wages in industries where Black women are overrepresented and creating pathways for them to enter higher-paid industries.” Second, investing in a real care economy, “so that all workers, not just workers that work for certain employers, have access to the supports they need to work and raise a child. That cost should not fall predominantly on women; it should not fall predominantly on women of color, which it is right now.” Third, restoring and strengthening enforcement. “We have this very powerful slate of anti-discrimination protections on the books… but in order for them to work, those laws have to be enforced. We need to make sure we’re defending our civil rights infrastructure.”

None of these fixes require waiting on Congress. Employers can raise wages, offer paid leave, and commit to pay transparency on their own timeline. “Those are all actions that employers can take on their own. They don’t have to wait for there to be legislation in place that mandates it,” Khawaja says  . “The goal is to raise the bar, not lower it.” Every employer that builds these protections into their business raises the standard for what workers should expect everywhere else.

The wage gap did not appear overnight, and it will not close overnight either. But Khawaja’s work makes one thing clear: the tools to close it already exist. What is missing is the will to use them.