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Gender Pay Gap

This indicator reports the ratio of women’s median earnings to men’s median earnings for all full-time, year-round workers, presented as “cents on the dollar.” Data are acquired from the 2019-2023 American Community Survey and are used in the 2025 County Health Rankings.

Source

Source Description

The American Community Survey (ACS) is a nationwide survey designed to provide communities with reliable and timely social, economic, housing, and demographic data every year. The ACS has an annual sample size of about 3.5 million addresses, with survey information collected nearly every day of the year. Data are pooled across a calendar year to produce estimates for that year. As a result, ACS estimates reflect data that have been collected over a period of time rather than for a single point in time as in the decennial census, which is conducted every 10 years and provides population counts as of April 1. The Census Bureau combines 5 consecutive years of ACS data to produce estimates for geographic areas with fewer than 65,000 residents. These 5-year estimates represent data collected over a period of 60 months. Because the ACS is based on a sample, rather than all housing units and people, ACS estimates have a degree of uncertainty associated with them, called sampling error. In general, the larger the sample, the smaller the level of sampling error. Data users should be careful in drawing conclusions about small differences between two ACS estimates because they may not be statistically different.

Citation: U.S. Census Bureau: UNDERSTANDING AND USING AMERICAN COMMUNITY SURVEY DATA: WHAT ALL DATA USERS NEED TO KNOW (2018).

For more information about this source, including data collection methodology and definitions, refer to the American Community Survey data user’s website.

Methodology

Gender pay gap data was acquired from the University of Wisconsin’s County Health Rankings (CHR). This measure represents women’s median earnings in cents compared to every dollar (100 cents) of men’s median earnings, or “cents on the dollar”. CHR uses 2019-2023 ACS five-year average data for this indicator. For more information, please review the information here.

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