Equal Pay Day 2018: Stunning studies reveal highest paid women face the greatest gender wage gap

Equal Pay Day, which is the day that marks how far into 2018 a woman will have to work to earn what her male colleagues earned in 2017, is on April 10 this year.

The day calls to attention the gender pay gap -- women make about 80 percent of what men in the workforce earn, according to the American Association of University Women. When comparing the income of all women to all men, women earned 78 cents to every dollar men earned, according to a recent report by PayScale.

Full-time, weekly working women earned 81.8 percent of what men earned, according to The Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR).

When women work a male-dominated job

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International Women's Day, on March 8, celebrates women’s achievements in society. With the theme #BeBoldForChange, organizers this year are calling for a more "gender-inclusive" work world. This collection looks at women in male-dominated jobs. Paloma Granero, 38, a skydiving instructor, poses inside the wind tunnel at Windobona indoor skydiving in Madrid, Spain, Feb. 24, 2017. "Men don't have to prove themselves like we do. We are tested every day," Granero said. "The instruction jobs still go mostly to men, whereas the administrative jobs go mostly to women."

Susana Vera/Reuters

However, when controlling for similar jobs, PayScale found that women earn 98 cents for every dollar earned by their male counterparts. PayScale attributes the overall gender pay gap to the opportunities for promotions, or lack thereof, women experience in the workplace.

The IWPR also attributes the gender wage gap to differences in pay between occupations. They point to the fact that only six of the 20 most common occupations overlap for men and women.

While all women are impacted by the gender pay gap, some industries do a better job of closing the gender pay gap.

In the tech industry -- which has been under scrutiny for gender equity issues -- women were paid 99.5 cents for every dollar their male counterparts earned, the smallest pay gap by industry found in the study.

However, when the control for the same title is removed, women earned 84.7 cents compared to men in the tech industry, moving it to the middle of the industries examined.

The same thing happened for women in engineering and science, who earned 99.2 cents per dollar when controlled, but only 83.3 cents per a man’s dollar in the industry overall.

Women in real estate and rental/leasing earned 88.6 cents to a man’s dollar in the industry overall and 97.6 cents to a dollar when controlled by job title.

Women who broke the political glass ceiling

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A list of women that broke through barriers to enter the world of American politics.Kamala Harris has conquered many milestones in her career, including being the first Black woman to be elected district attorney of San Francisco and the first Black and South Asian woman elected California attorney general. When Joe Biden named his former campaign rival then-Senator Kamala Harris as his Democratic vice presidential nominee she became the first Black woman and Indian-American on a major party ticket. Harris became the first female vice president of the United States on Jan. 20, 2020.

Mike Blake/Reuters, FILE

People working as a "personal financial advisor" experienced the largest gender wage pay gap, the IWPR found. In general, the IWPR study found occupations with the highest salaries had the largest gender gaps and the lowest paid occupations had the lowest gaps.