According to a study by the National Partnership for Women and Families, North Carolina’s pay gap amounts to $6,376 annually, compared to the national $10,762.
Women in North Carolina lose an average of $9 billion per year, or a year’s worth of food for their families per woman, the study also found.
Minority women fare worse, with black women earning 64 cents and Latinas 48 cents to every white man’s dollar in North Carolina.
“You sometimes have that double whammy of having a racist environment as well as a sexist environment, so that’s part of our problem,” said Marena Groll, member of the Durham chapter of the National Organization for Women.
She said the results show North Carolina is struggling to adjust to this century.
“It is costly to our state to try and not do the morally correct thing, but it’s also costly to our state to not have these valuable workers in the system being paid fairly,” Groll said.
She said the reason the pay gap is still significant is because a great deal of the nation’s culture is “systematically sexist.”
At UNC, reviews of faculty salaries have been conducted to ascertain any gender wage inequalities, said Clare Counihan, program coordinator for faculty and staff at the Carolina Women’s Center, in an email. The Faculty Salary Equity report found in 2002 and 2012 that female faculty did have lower salaries in Academic Affairs, the School of Medicine and other health affairs, she said.