The 10 Best-Paying Cities for Women
April 9 is Equal Pay Day, a holiday established in 1996 to highlight the earnings discrepancy between men and women in the United States. Across the country, women in full-time jobs make just 78.8 percent of what men in comparable positions make; Equal Pay Day marks how far into this year a woman would have to work to earn as much as a man did in 2012.
Don't look for the the wage gap to get smaller anytime soon. A new report from the Institute for Women's Policy Research predicts that it will take another 44 years, until 2057, for women's pay to equal that of men.
The wage gap is larger or smaller depending on where you are in the country. Women in the Provo-Orem, Utah, metro area make just 61.6 percent of what men make; in Los Angeles, by contrast, they take home 91.4 percent of the pay of their male peers.
That women's salaries are more in line with men's in some areas doesn't necessarily mean that women in those areas are doing well relative to women elsewhere. In eight of the 10 metros where wages are most equal, women's income lags the national median of $37,199. That's because many of those areas, like El Paso, Texas, have a higher concentration of low-wage jobs, which tend to pay women and men more equitably. "A low wage gap can just mean shared misery," noted Ariane Hegewisch, a study director for the institute.
Click through the gallery to see the cities with the smallest wage gap between men and women.
See also: The 10 Worst-Paying Cities for Women
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Methodology: 24/7 Wall St. identified the metropolitan areas that have the smallest pay disparity between men and women by comparing the median earnings for the past 12 months of both men and women working full-time, year-round in the country's 100 largest metropolitan statistical areas. We also reviewed employment composition in different sectors and the wages for both men and women in each. All data was from the U.S. Census Bureau for 2011, the most recent period available.
