Philadelphia’s gender pay gap is closing, but for women of color, the finish line keeps moving further away.
A new report from the Forum of Executive Women, shared first with Axios Philadelphia’s Isaac Avilucea, found that women across the city earned about 88.8 cents for every dollar men earned in 2024, up from 85.5 cents in 2015.
It’s real progress. It’s also where the good news ends.
Beneath that citywide average sits a far more uneven picture.
White women earned 94 cents on the dollar compared with white men. Black women earned 64 cents. Latina women earned just 57.
Nationally, the pay gap costs women roughly $500,000 in lost earnings over a career, about $1.7 trillion every year.
For Black women, the lifetime toll climbs to $885,000. For Latina women, it reaches $1.2 million.
The report calls it the “Philadelphia Paradox”: women remain concentrated in lower-paying fields like health care and education while staying underrepresented in higher-paying sectors such as finance and utilities.
And education alone doesn’t close the gap.
Among workers with advanced degrees, women still earned only 91 cents on the dollar, a divide the report found is actually widening.
The fixes, advocates argue, aren’t complicated.
Structured pay ranges, regular promotion cycles, and salary history bans can all chip away at the disparity.
“It doesn’t require extraordinary action. It can just be small acts of intentional leadership,” said Forum of Executive Women president and CEO Meghan Pierce. “Sponsoring women, advocating for women when they’re not in the room, recommending them for promotions.”
Axios Philadelphia breaks down exactly which sectors are driving the divide, why the gap widens for the region’s most educated women, and the specific leadership habits advocates say could finally close it.
_______
