Today is Equal Pay Day 2026, a stark reminder that the gender wage gap continues to deprive working women of economic security. At the current pace, women working full time won’t see equal pay until 2088.

Care responsibilities are a major driver of this gap:

  • Between January and August 2025, over 455,000 women left the U.S. workforce, and 42% cited caregiving, including the cost and logistics of child care, as the main reason.¹ 
  • Women are far more likely than men to pause or reduce work to care for children, aging parents, or family members. These interruptions have long-term consequences: missed promotions, lower wages upon return, reduced retirement savings, and diminished lifetime earnings.
  • The wage gap persists: in 2024, women earned 81 cents for every dollar earned by men, while Black women earned 65 cents and Latinas 58 cents for every dollar paid to white men.² Disabled women were paid 50 cents for every dollar that a working nondisabled man is paid.³

Did you know that one of the most effective solutions for closing the gap would be enacting policies that strengthen the care economy? Passing national paid family and medical leave and securing public investments in child care and home care would reduce the financial penalties women sustain from doing the majority of caregiving. 

At the same time, proposed cuts to care programs would only exacerbate these challenges. Reducing access to affordable child care, home and community based services, or paid leave protections would push even more women out of the workforce and deepen long-term wage inequality. Equal pay becomes even harder to achieve when women are forced to choose between earning a paycheck and caring for their families.

Lack of access to affordable care is at the heart of these disparities. Women are forced to make impossible choices between earning a paycheck and providing care, which drives workforce exits and compounds the gender wage gap. Investing in national paid family and medical leave, along with public investments in child care and home care, is essential to keeping women in the workforce and closing the wage gap once and for all.

 

Sources:

1 https://www.catalyst.org/about/newsroom/2026/caregiving-pressures-women-workforce

2 https://nwlc.org/press-release/breaking-wage-gap-data-widens-for-second-consecutive-year-first-time-since-1960

3 https://nationalpartnership.org/report/disabled-women-wage-gap/