Tuesday is Equal Pay Day, a day dedicated to raising awareness of the gender pay gap—and its date is no accident. April 4, 2017 symbolizes how far into the next year women must work to earn what men earned in just the year before, according to the National Committee on Equal Pay. (Basically, men could sit on their butts for the first quarter of 2017 and will still earn at least as much as you by the end of the year.)
According to data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics last year, women who worked full-time in wage and salaried jobs in 2015 had a median weekly salary of $726, or $37,752 per year. Men, on the other hand, had a median weekly salary of $895 or $46,540 annually —so overall, we’re earning just 81 percent of what men do. In cold, hard cash, that’s a difference of $8,788 we’re missing out on every single year.