By Nathalia Teixeira / Broadcast version by Nadia Ramlagan reporting for the Kent State-Ohio News Connection Collaboration.

In Ohio, women earn on average 79 cents for every dollar a man earns, according to 2019 U.S. Census Bureau data analyzed by the National Women's Law Center.

Nationally, in 2002, women working full and part-time earned 80% of what men earned. By 2022, that had risen to just 82%, according to the Pew Research Center.

"One of the biggest reasons we haven't seen it reverse is because a lot of the reasons it exists in the first place are structural," said Sheri Jones, past president of the National Association of Women's Business Owners-Columbus.

Women are generally responsible for childcare, eldercare and home activities, experts said. They also face discrimination at work, and due to these structural factors, they tend to work in lower-paid fields that reduce their earnings for their entire life.

"Historically - especially in American culture, but in most cultures - people have been taught that women have qualities that are weaker, that they're less successful, that they're less focused. All of that is entirely untrue," said Kelley Griesmer, president and CEO of the Women's Fund of Central Ohio. "And the biases are the same on the reverse. Men are expected to be very confident, very successful."

Women are often expected to be good mothers and care for their homes, even when working in a full or part-time job.

"Women are still the ones managing the mental load at home, putting all that cognitive effort into managing the household," said Susan Fisk, associate professor of sociology at Kent State University. "They're still doing more housework."

Some women leave their jobs to focus on home and family duties, Jones said.

"Women, traditionally, it's so stressful to try to manage all these things that in a lot of cases they just give up and it's not worth it," Jones said. "Until we're willing to look at the structure and how we ask women to work, they may continue to choose to leave the workforce instead of work."

Fisk explained two sources of the gender wage gap. One is horizontal gender segregation, in which women are more likely to work in jobs that pay less, such as daycare. The second contributor is vertical gender segregation, in which the further you climb up an organization's ladder, the fewer women you see.

"People are just sort of less comfortable when that behavior [leadership] comes from women," Fisk said.

Joining the professional environment can be overwhelming for women as they face many challenges other than wages, such as discrimination, stereotypes and social stigmas.

"Women face negative stereotypes about their competence," Fisk said. "This can make it harder for women to succeed in these fields and cause them to experience bias in hiring, promotion and their day-to-day work."

Griesmer also mentioned that there are reports that show if you have two resumes that look the same with the same qualifications, but you put a woman's name at the top of the resume instead of a man's, research shows that the people who blindly review those resumes tend to think the man is more qualified than the woman.

Women come to the workforce more highly educated, Jones said. By not paying women the same as men, we're losing out on more diverse and interesting ideas and more innovation, she said.

"The patriarchal narrative continues because very often - for white men, all men but especially white men - it's very hard for them to admit that although they are decent people, they are still not treating women fairly," Griesmer said. "They want to believe that they've already mastered that."

The gender pay gap leads to the gender wealth gap. Griesmer and Jones pointed out that when a woman is underpaid in a previous job and a new job is offered to her, she may earn more, but a man who started out earning more may experience a bigger bump in pay.

"It just kind of haunts you the rest of your career," Griesmer said.

Women of color were among the groups that most suffered from the economic consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic, whereas before the pandemic the Women's Fund of Central Ohio wealth gap showed that women of color own $0.02 for every dollar that a single man owns.

"The sad news is that the pandemic likely caused women to lose almost a generation of advances because so many of the programs that support women, the support structures for women, were removed or couldn't be given because of the way the world interacted during the pandemic," Griesmer said. "That's why a lot of people now refer to the pandemic as a she-cession, because women were so disproportionately impacted."

This collaboration is produced in association with Media in the Public Interest and funded in part by the George Gund Foundation.


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Wildland firefighting is a tough job and the industry has long struggled with worker retention. Training boot camps have helped bring new firefighters, especially women, into the fold in recent years, but federal cuts could threaten progress.

About 84% of federal wildland firefighters are men, according to the U.S. Government Accountability Office. Boot camps targeting women have been popular. Montana saw its first just last year.

Riva Duncan, vice president of the group Grassroots Wildland Firefighters, worked in fire for more than three decades and said the boot camps offered a "safe environment" to raise concerns.

"Beyond the actual required training, just having discussions about, 'Well, how do you address hygiene? What do I do if I feel like I'm being treated unfairly?' And those kinds of questions that don't get covered in a classroom setting," Duncan explained.

Since the boot camps are designed to increase workforce diversity, future programs have been cut under the Trump administration's DEI rollbacks. Following the firing and then rehiring of 6,000 U.S. Department of Agriculture employees since February, including some with firefighting duties, the Interior Department announced permanent pay raises for wildland firefighters in the new federal appropriations budget.

The U.S. Forest Service has seen a 45% attrition rate of wildland firefights over the last three years. Duncan argued the DEI cuts will not help.

"We need people who want to do this work. We need the kind of people that value working on the public lands and serving the American taxpayers," Duncan emphasized. "This has detrimental effects to the overall recruitment and retention strategy to try and get firefighters into these jobs."

Fourteen different scheduled women's boot camps have been canceled. According to the USDA, about 65,000 wildfires burned nearly 9 million acres across the U.S. in 2024.


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March is Women's History Month and an Arkansas native has made history by being honored with a $1 coin from the U.S. Mint.

The late Raye Montague was an engineer with the U.S. Navy and created the first computer-generated rough draft of a U.S. naval ship in 1971. Because of her work, ships could be designed in 18 hours instead of two years.

David Montague, associate vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of Arkansas at Little Rock and Raye's son, said his family worked closely with the mint to create the coin's design.

"It was her with her hand over her heart, which is patriotic, and then looking over the ship that she designed, the Oliver Hazard Perry," Montague explained. "That struck me immediately. And then the background, underneath the ship is the sea, and then that is actually a computer grid."

He recalled when he was a child, he collected coins with his mother, so it is fitting she would receive the honor. She died in 2018.

Last year, the federal building where she worked, in Bethesda, Maryland, was renamed the Raye Montague Center for Maritime Technology. Her son pointed out although his mother faced obstacles, she created time to help others.

"She saw it as the natural course of her professional opportunities," Montague observed. "If she was able to gain opportunities to do things and grow as a human being, she wanted to make sure that she opened doors for other people and was trying to make the world a better place."

The coin was released earlier this year and Montague noted it is already being used to continue his mother's legacy. The currency was shared with kids in an Arkansas youth group.

"They used the coin to say you all are Arkansas youth and this person was an Arkansas youth, and look, they're on a dollar coin," Montague added. "If she can do great things, as long as you work hard and you push for opportunities, then you have options as well."


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Women in rural areas struggle more with menopause than their urban counterparts, according to a study from the University of Washington.

Rural women reported more symptoms like joint pain and mood swings in one of the first studies to look at menopausal rural-urban discrepancies.

Dr. Susan Reed, program director at the University of Washington Women's Reproductive Health Research Center and an author of the report, said she's not surprised by the results. She stressed the study is a signal medical providers need to do better for the rural population.

"If people transition through this period in a healthy fashion, they live longer," Reed outlined. "They have fewer cardiovascular problems and perhaps better brain aging."

Reed noted other studies have shown women in rural areas are struggling with higher mortality rates and other health issues like higher suicide rates and obesity. She added there is decreased access in rural places because of the long distances people often have to travel to receive care.

"People providing menopause health care in rural areas, many of them are really passionate and do a good job," Reed observed. "There just aren't enough of them."

Reed emphasized there are other factors contributing to poor menopausal care, not just for women in rural areas but urban and suburban areas too. She argued hormonal therapy is a safe and effective treatment and there should be a higher prevalence of its use.

"The challenges there are due to misinformation on the internet, fear of patients," Reed explained. "And then providers not being skilled enough to help people understand risks and benefits of menopausal hormone therapy."


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