August 28 marks Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander (NHPI) Women’s Equal Pay Day in 2024. NHPI women are typically paid 60 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men – one of the largest gender wage gaps in the country. But the economic disparities that NHPI women face due to structural barriers can be masked because the data on these groups is often lumped together with that of Asian Americans.
Here are the four unique ways that NHPI women are held back in this economy, and how much further there is to go until full equality.
1. All women in the United States have faced a gender wage gap since women first entered the paid workforce, and it’s particularly bad for NHPI women.
This gap has always been, and continues to be, worse for many women of color, who face the compounding effects of sexism and racism. NHPI women face one of the starkest wage gaps, and though the gap has narrowed in the past decade, NHPI women are still very far from reaching parity with white, non-Hispanic men – and with women overall.
2. NHPI women still face elevated unemployment levels, even though other groups have returned to pre-pandemic levels.
The economy received a shock to its system when the COVID-19 pandemic began in March 2020, with millions becoming unemployed almost overnight. Since that time, many demographic groups have regained their footing in the labor market, with some groups, such as Black women, reaching record or almost record low unemployment rates in 2023 and 2024. However this trend did not hold true for NHPI women, who saw higher rates of unemployment in 2023 than in 2019. The lack of monthly jobs data for NHPI women means we won’t be able to understand if the picture has gotten better or worse until January 2025, likely compounding the impacts of the wage gap on these groups.
3. The gender wage gap varies substantially for different groups of NHPI women.
The wage gap ranges for NHPI women of different ancestries, from Tongan women who are paid 59 cents, to Fijian women, who are paid 73 cents for every dollar paid to white, non-Hispanic men, again emphasizing the need for more regular data disaggregation. Figures for communities including Marshallese, Chuukese and Palauan women are unavailable due to lack of investment in adequate survey sample sizes.
4. Even in the most common jobs for NHPI women, they suffer large wage gaps.
Wage gaps for NHPI women are larger than for Asian American women when compared to the annual median earning for white, non-Hispanic men; this wage gap can be as high as $47,000 in some occupations and harms the economic security of NHPI women.
It’s beyond time for the end of the wage gap and for NHPI women to get paid. Congress can act to achieve these goals by passing the Paycheck Fairness Act and building on the federal government’s new guidelines for measuring race and ethnicity to collect and disseminate more nuanced and disaggregated data on the NHPI community. We can’t fix what we don’t measure, and NHPI women better data to help uplift their communities.
The author would like to thank Sharita Gruberg, Anushey Ahmed, and Gail Zuagar for their contributions.
