Long Island's gender wage gap largest in New York, state data shows

Women working on Long Island face the biggest gender wage gap of any region in the state, making a median wage that’s just 80.2% of what their male counterparts earn, state Labor Department data shows. 

No one knows the reasons for sure, but labor experts said wage gaps between women and men tend to be bigger in higher-paying job categories, possibly accounting for some of the regional differences.

More broadly, there are many reasons the overall gender wage gap persists — and that gap has serious implications for local working families and women’s lifetime earnings, said Shital Patel, labor market economist with the Labor Department’s Hicksville office.

One big factor “is the motherhood penalty, where women generally exit the labor force for some amount of time when they have children,” said Patel, who published an article on women in Long Island’s workforce in the state Labor Department newsletter in May.

It is often during this window that women miss some prime working years, when they normally would be moving up the ladder of their careers, Patel said.

“That lack of pay and job mobility, it compounds over time. Women are losing money from that,” she said. “Later, when you’re factoring in pensions or Social Security, the lower your wages are, the less money you get then, too.”

Jodi Ann Donato, president of the Suffolk County Women’s Bar Association, said women in the legal field long have faced pay inequity.

“It’s an issue in all fields, and it’s an issue in the legal field,” Donato said. “If you look at the big firms, there are not as many female equity partners and the pay gap in large firms is pretty significant.”

Women in legal occupations who live in Suffolk County, for example, see median earnings of only 48.3% of their male peers, while women in the legal field in Nassau made 67.2% of what men made, according to 2021 state data.

A major limiting factor for women in the field has been the impact of starting a family, with many having to make the choice between advancement or having children, Donato said. 

“A lot of women to this day, if they want to become an equity partner, if they go off on the ‘mommy track,’ they’re not becoming a partner,” Donato said. “It’s getting better, but it’s still an issue.”

Donato, who runs her own firm, said going into business for herself allowed her to raise her children without sacrificing career momentum. 

Women of color face biggest gaps

Nationally, women earn an average of 83.7% of their male counterparts' wages, according to data published by the federal Department of Labor in March.

While gaps exist for women across the board, women of color see even larger disparities in pay. Black women in New York earn a median wage that is 67.8% of their white, male counterparts, while Hispanic women make 57.1%, according to 2021 data analyzed by the state Labor Department and published this past spring.

For Jessica Rivera, a corporate leadership coach and consultant with a background in sales and finance, often being the only woman of color in a room made her feel like she needed to work harder than her male colleagues. 

“I always felt I had to overachieve,” said Rivera, who now runs JR Coaching out of her home office in New Hyde Park, but started her career in sales and automotive financing. It was in that male-dominated environment that Rivera said she experienced instances of bias over her gender and status as a young mom. 

Women in sales and related occupations in Nassau made 74.4% of the median wages men made, while women in Suffolk made 67.7%, state data shows. 

Rivera said she often felt she had to avoid mentioning being a mom for fear that it would be perceived as a liability or limitation. On one occasion, she recalled superiors questioning whether she'd be able to take on a role that would require travel because of her young children.

She recalls a female executive at her workplace who never discussed her newborn child “because she didn’t want them to think that she couldn’t do her job well," Rivera said. “I was only about work because I didn’t feel like I could be my real self at work."

One of the events that pushed her to start her own business was being passed over for a promotion a month after her boss had said she was at the top of the compensation level for the position she held and that "we're going to have to get you a promotion." She said the promotion was given to a male counterpart without any communication from her boss, despite her boss' compliments on her sales record.

"They didn’t even give me consideration," she said. 

Gender bias plays a role

Julia Bear, a professor of organizational behavior at Stony Brook University’s College of Business, said the careers women choose also factor into the gap.

“Women are more likely to be employed in things like health care and education,” said Bear, who studies the role of gender in personal salary negotiations. “Industry and occupation tends to explain quite a bit,” with women's desire for scheduling flexibility often factoring into those choices. 

But even when accounting for that, Bear said gaps are evident in high-paying career positions.

“A lot of that does boil down to bias and discrimination,” Bear said. “To what extent is that on an explicit or implicit level, I don’t know. Women are less likely to be offered promotions … often based on stereotypes and assumptions — assumptions managers make about women’s career trajectory.”

Ray Ann Havasy, founder and president of the Center for Science Teaching & Learning in Rockville Centre, said gender bias in the sciences long has been a problem for women entering the field.

“Even to this day the science world is run by men,” said Havasy, who holds master's degrees in both biology and education and a doctorate in science education. “We’re seeing more women in STEM, but I’m not convinced there’s pay equity.”

Havasy recounted that earlier in her career she faced instances of blatant sexism from men in her field.

In one instance, Havasy said while interviewing for a lab position on Long Island years ago, the male interviewer matter-of-factly told her that he wasn’t willing to pay her as much as a man in the same position because, “You’re going to leave us in the lurch to have kids anyway.” 

While the culture of science occupations has evolved over time with the growing presence of women, she said change has been slow to achieve, pointing to the dearth of female CEOs at top research companies.

“I’ve run into situations where it’s been fairly obvious that we’re not always welcome in the science community,” Havasy said.

In financial occupations, where women in Nassau make median wages that are 69.8% of what men make — 78.7% for women in Suffolk — there’s been an established history of gender bias, said Donna LaScala, an independent financial adviser in Holbrook.

“Things have gotten better,” said LaScala, president of the Long Island chapter of the Financial Planning Association and chair of the chapter’s women in finance group. “But the progress for women to be taken seriously in this industry has not moved fast enough.”

Similarly to other professions, LaScala said leaving the workforce, even briefly, to start a family has ramifications in the competitive finance world. 

LaScala said going into business for herself gave her the freedom to raise her two now-adult daughters while advancing her career, something she said would have been more difficult if she had continued working for a Wall Street firm. 

“When I stopped working for someone else I was able to make my own schedule, I was able to have meetings at 7 a.m., and work at night,” she said. “I wasn’t pigeonholed into the 9-to-5, which can be very challenging.”

Higher pay brings wider gaps

While it's not exactly clear what created Long Island's state-leading wage gap, experts said certain features of the region likely contribute, such as higher median wages and a higher proportion of college-educated residents.

“Across states and across countries, the gender gap research shows that for lower wage work, there is just far less variability” in pay rates, said Gregory DeFreitas, senior labor economics professor at Hofstra University and director of the Center for Labor and Democracy. That’s because all workers at minimum wage, or in jobs that pay close to that minimum level, tend to earn the same wages, he said. 

New York City statistics offer an example. When looking at all five boroughs together, the city had one of the smallest wage gaps in the state, with women making a median of 89.6% of men's wages. 

But DeFreitas noted that Manhattan had a wage gap of 81.3%, similar to Long Island’s gap. In contrast, in Queens and the Bronx, where median wages are lower, the gender gap almost disappears, with women earning 97.4% and 98.9% of men’s wages, respectively. 

"Typically, gender inequality rises with higher-level occupations,” DeFreitas said.