The wage gap for women under age 32 has shrunk to just 7 percent — compared to 16 percent for women of all ages — yet millennial women remain “as pessimistic as their mothers and grandmothers regarding gender equality,” according to new Pew Research. That’s probably because, despite millennial women’s superior educations (relative to their mothers and their male counterparts), they are looking down the barrel at the exact same family-work obstacles as their grandmothers, dressed up in new exhortations to work harder and marry smarter. As a result, the gap is expected to widen back up as women enter their mid-thirties, when they “take time off or reduce their hours to start families,” the AP reports, and the years of “gender stereotyping, discrimination, weaker professional networks and … hesitancy to aggressively push for raises and promotions” catch up to them. Pessimistic? Possibly. I am eager to be proven wrong.
