Of the 10 U.S. cities with the largest gender pay gaps, Dallas-Fort Worth is home to three of them.
Women in Frisco, Plano and McKinney see the largest earnings disparities, according to a report by ChamberofCommerce.org, a product research company that examined earnings for full-time, year-round workers in the 170 most populated U.S. cities.
In Frisco, women earn 56% of the money men do. It’s the city with the largest gap in the U.S., as the pay disparity stands at $52,216, nearly five times the national average.
Tuesday marks Equal Pay Day, an awareness event coined by the National Committee on Pay Equity in the 1960s to illustrate the gap between men’s and women’s wages. To earn what men did in 2023, women across the country would have to work from January 1, 2023 until March 12, 2024.
The gap between working men and women across the country is about $11,069, with men earning an average of $62,344 while their female counterparts make $51,275.
Women earning full-time salaries in Texas had 83% of the median weekly take-home pay of their male counterparts in 2022, according to a February U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics report.
Texas’ pay gap is on par with national figures of women earning about 84% of men’s salaries across industries, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.
Michael Hirniak, assistant commissioner for regional operations for the BLS, cautioned that the earnings comparison doesn’t control factors that can explain differences, like job skills and responsibilities and work experience.
Siri Chilazi, a researcher at the Women and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, said the two largest drivers of pay gaps are occupational segregation, or when women work in jobs that are systemically lower paid than men, and within occupation segregation, or when women working within the same industry earn less despite performing similar work and have comparable education levels.
“It’s not a coincidence that jobs that tend to be female-dominated are also systematically lower paid than occupations that tend to be male-dominated,” Chilazi said. “It reflects a broader societal devaluation of women and women’s work.”
The positions with the widest gender pay disparities in Frisco are management jobs. From 2021 to 2022, the gender pay gap for management occupations in Frisco rose by over $56,000, according to the report, resulting in a $107,344 earnings difference between men and women.
“Not only do these management positions have the widest pay gap in Frisco, but they also saw the largest year-over-year pay gap increase,” the report stated.
The reality of such a significant pay gap is harmful to women and mothers across Dallas-Fort Worth, said Amanda Posson, a senior policy analyst at Every Texan, a public policy nonprofit. The managerial sector, which Dallas-Fort Worth has dense pockets of, faces a pretty stark pay gap, Posson said.
The gender wage gap has closed more among workers without a four-year college degree than among those with a bachelor’s degree or more education, according to Pew Research Center. The pay gap widens, however, as women age, Posson said.
Women over 34, whether they have children or not, are penalized for motherhood whereas men receive a premium for fatherhood, Posson said.
“This has to do with societal factors and gender discrimination norms that women aren’t going to be as productive in the workplace because they’re parents now,” Posson said.
In industries like community and social services, women across the country earned 97% of men’s salaries. In architecture and engineering, the figure dropped to nearly 88% and in legal occupations the share plummets to 53.5%, according to Census data.
In a city with median earnings of more than $94,000, Frisco saw a dramatic year-over-year pay gap widening of $12,357, according to Census Bureau data analyzed by Chamber of Commerce.
Men earn a median wage of $119,310 in Frisco and women $67,094.
Ranked as the fifth and sixth cities with the largest gender pay gaps, McKinney and Plano have pay inequities at $24,568 and $23,415. In McKinney, women earn $62,079, or 72% of men’s take-home pay. In Plano, women earned $60,190 while men earned $83,605.
Of the 170 cities examined in the study, women earn more than men in only four, including Garland and Brownsville.
Women working full-time year-round earned 80% of men’s earnings a decade ago. It’s improved by just two percentage points in 2024.
Researchers of gender pay inequity point to paid parental leave and pay transparency as steps to help ameliorate the gap.
Giving mothers and fathers equal access to paid leave policies will mitigate some of the harm that mothers face in the workforce around pay inequity, Posson said.
Chilazi encourages companies to collect and analyze data either internally or through a vendor about their employees’ compensation so they know where and how to intervene so workers are paid equitably.
“Often in that data is embedded the answer as to what’s driving your particular gap,” Chilazi said.
Pay transparency puts companies on the line to stand by their missions of doing well by their employees, Posson said.
“When women can see their male counterparts are earning more than they are for similar work and comparable levels of education, they now have the information they need to advocate for themselves,” Posson said.
