Gender Pay Ratio — Women's Median Weekly Earnings as % of Men's

## What this measures

The median usual weekly earnings of full-time wage and salary workers who are women, divided by the median for male full-time workers, times 100. Quarterly. Computed as LES1252882700Q ÷ LES1252881800Q × 100, both in current dollars and seasonally adjusted.

## Why it matters

It is the standard raw measure of the earnings gap, built from the medians BLS publishes. Its trend shows whether typical full-time pay for one group is converging with or diverging from the other.

## How to read it

100 means the two medians are equal; below 100 means the first group's median is lower. The ratio moves slowly, so compare it with the same quarter a year earlier and read multi-year trends; single-quarter moves are often sampling noise.

## What it does not say

It is an unadjusted ratio of medians. It does not compare people in the same job, and it does not control for occupation, industry, hours beyond 35, education, age, experience or region, so on its own it is not a measure of unequal pay for equal work. It covers full-time wage and salary workers only. It differs from the Census ratio, which uses annual earnings of people who worked full-time all year.

## Source

Computed by Palanor from U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics Current Population Survey series LES1252882700Q and LES1252881800Q, retrieved through FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis. Public domain (US government work); cite the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Recomputed monthly by the fred-composites job, which rewrites the full history so BLS revisions carry through.